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I always find it very weird when people have debates about whether life is "meaningful" or not. "Meaningfulness" is just a feeling inside a human psyche. If it feels meaningful, then it is meaningful to you. Other people may have different feelings about what is meaningful.

How can a person of type A claim any kind of universal or objective meaningfulness of anything? How would you build a meaningfulness detector or write a meaningfulness algorithm to discern what is meaningful and what is not? What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that exists outside of our own minds and experience?

I spotted the type B person!

It seems so weird to me that so many people confuse someone saying a phenomena is a mental process for saying that phenomena doesn't exist.

I find they often miss the key fact - human brains are made of the same template; we do have universal values and thought processes. Things that are universal to humans are not arbitrary to us (even though they might be in the grander scale).

> we do have universal values and thought processes

If there was universal agreement about what is meaningful, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I think you would be pretty hard-pressed to find very much that is absolutely universal to the human experience.

But even if there are things which are highly prevalent in the human experience, that is not evidence that these feelings are "truth." We have direct evidence that our brains are pre-programmed with tons of cognitive biases and nonsensical beliefs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

It's probably because there are many people who say "this is a mental process" when they really mean "this does not exist".

Also, come to think of it, the proper term for this is "abstract concept" not "mental process".

Classifying my position is not the same as answering it.

Suppose an anti-vaxxer says "there are two types of people: type A who believe vaccination is a personal choice and type B who believe that everyone has a duty to vaccinate when they can."

If you make a case for why people should vaccinate, and the anti-vaxxer says "oh look, I spotted a type B person," that isn't an actual response to the argument.

Classifying my position is not the same as answering it.

Classifying your position shows that there is no point in answering it. In other words, the important thing here is not whether you're being classified, but why and how. You analogy is invalid.

And no, I am not going to directly address your original post either. What is your actual point within the context of this particular newpost anyway? From what I see, you're defending a rather boring dismissal of the original article. A long, though-out, well-written article with tons of interesting observations.

> What is your actual point within the context of this particular newpost anyway?

I was curious whether anyone had compelling reasons for believing in the idea of objective or absolute meaningfulness. What I have learned is that the reasons people have offered are extremely weak, in my opinion.

If you don't know how to count, you learn arithmetic from people who do. Nobody owes you a proof that it "objectively exists". Neither does denying it constitute a valid disproof of every theorem in existence. Such is the nature of abstract concepts.

Nonsense. You teach someone arithmetic by showing them concrete instances where it applies, counting apples or sticks or so on. You demonstrate that the abstract thing exists because there's something the same about putting two apples and two more apples together or putting two stones and two more stones together, and by observing one you can learn something about the other.

"You teach someone arithmetic by showing them concrete instances where it applies [...]"

What do you suppose the article above is doing?

I don't think the article makes any claim to objectivity.

> Nobody owes you a proof that it "objectively exists".

And I don't owe anybody belief in weak arguments.

> Neither does denying it constitute a valid disproof of every theorem in existence.

Thomas Aquinas also offered "proofs" of God's existence that few people outside the Catholic faith take very seriously. For example you can read what Bertrand Russell wrote about him. Other arguments that purport to have "proved" things about religion (and this argument only barely escapes being religious in nature) rarely stand up to rational scrutiny, IMO.

> What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that exists outside of our own minds and experience?

Why would you need or want to?

I exist. My mind exists. My consciousness exists. My experience exists.

I mean that in the perfectly ordinary, uncontroversial sense that we use every day. There is no particular mystery or problem when I say, "My cat exists" or "My socks exist". I can provide evidence for them, in the same way I can provide evidence for my own existence and the existence of my experiences. If you can read and understand this post you have evidence for my existence and the existence of my experience.

Furthermore, because we are beings of a particular kind, the things we find meaningful--like the things we find nutritious--fall into a relatively small number of categories. Particulars won't be the same for everyone, but so what? It would be very strange to say that because I like meat and you like fruit there's no objective or universal standard of nutrition, and anyone can eat anything--rocks, trees, nothing--and get along equally well.

Simply because our nature does not determine what we find meaningful or nutritious does not mean it does not constrain it. This is again a perfectly ordinary phenomenon that for some reason people get all confused about when it applies to the contents of our minds rather than the contents of our stomachs.

Not only that, but in fact the kinds of things that are meaningful and valuable to people are often shared with other people, which then provides us with the additional meaning kick of sharing, which, I am told, is caring.

The question is not whether you experience you exist but what it is that exist.

So it doesn't help your argument that you can point to a sock and say it exist. What you have to show is that there is only one way to interpret what you see before you can prove that what you see is in fact what you see. Only then is it truly "a thing" regardless of perspective.

In other words. The rock exist in your head as a concept, it's not a concept in nature. A pattern perhaps but not an universal object and the pattern that it is is only one perspective.

I think that truth is getting lost in your abstractions. You are comparing the human feeling of something being "meaningful" to the idea of nutrition, which is a general concept of how the food we ingest affects our overall health.

Nutrition is a complex and multi-dimensional idea. If there is a food that makes most people healthy but kills other people because of an allergy, is that food "nutritious", in a universal sense? And it's tied into another complicated abstraction: the idea of health. If a person is addicted to a drug but functional, is it more "healthy" for them to stay on the drug indefinitely or is it more healthy for them to go through a potentially horrible withdrawal period to get off it?

The abstractions of "nutrition" and "health" are complicated and ultimately based in our experience, just like the idea of "meaningfulness." And while you could make an argument that certain statements would be universally agreed by everyone in all circumstances (like "eating an apple is more nutritious than eating a rock"), that is far from being able to say that the general ideas of nutrition or health are universal or absolute.

> How can a person of type A claim any kind of universal or objective meaningfulness of anything?

For arguments for objective meaningfulness (or good), I'm partial to natural law theory, which is basically that what is good for a human being is what fulfills the nature of a human being. I don't have time to get into details here, but suffice to say that murder, adultery, lying, and stealing do not fulfill the nature of a human being, whereas justice, fortitude, prudence, and temperance are examples of things that do.

I recommend the following for arguments for natural law theory, by philosphers of an Aristotelian/Thomistic bent:

[Book] Aquinas, by Edward Feser. Chapter 5 is on Ethics.

[Article] The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Law, by David Oderberg: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7SKlRTfkUiebnUxMUEtc1B4VTQ/...

That one thing you learned over the years is a false dichotomy. There are no As and Bs. Most people value something. They just value different things than you.

>If people of type A can have a productive conversation about things that type B considers non-existent, which belief system makes more sense?

Type B. Replace "meaningful things in life" with God, fairies, the aether, Pokemon, or any other fiction, and those in type A can still have "productive conversation" about things that do not exist at all.

I love how well these comments here demonstrate the GP's point. I mean, woa life must be dull for you B people! I love having productive conversation about God, fairies, the aether and Pokemon. Warmly recommended!

Preference orderings may be abstract, but they surely exist.

Preference orderings have very little to do with "meaning in life" or "meaningful things in life".

"Meaning in life" is a vague, ill-defined phrase whose referent is not a real thing.

There is nothing inherently meaningful about anything, you can choose what is meaningful to you, but that meaning isn't automatically universal to everyone else.

> This is the type that lectures everyone on how subjective and relative everything is, like it's some kind of revolutionary idea we have not heard before.

I thought what romaniv wrote was interesting, but now it's just illustrative. ;)

He also states:

>There are other people, type B, who believe there are no meaningful things in life.

Which isn't what I am saying. There are many meaningful things in my life. I'm not saying that meaning doesn't exist, I am saying that meaning is personal and that there is no universal meaning.

If you by type B means something akin to Nihilist or Relativist then I think you are missing the point many of them are trying to make. Otherwise there is people of type C.

It's not that everything is the same But that you can't claim something to be objectively better just because you think it's subjectively better. That does not mean type B do not believe there are somethings that are better, just that they are subjective.

Or put another way. You cannot not have values.

Needing to pee means you will prioritize something over others. And so type B people have plenty of meaning in life they can even discuss why they think a is better than b but they don't take whatever claim to be conclusive.

Most conversations fall down to people stating what they believe. Your post reads like it's deliberately obfuscated, to insinuate an insult in a way that won't get you modded down; if you're sincere then please say what you mean more clearly.

There are people of type A who believe that there are some things so meaningless that it is impossible to find any meaning in them. And yes, they also think there are meaningful things out there too.

There are other people, type B, who believe meaning is something personal and different for everyone. Of course, this means that the meaning will not seek you out, but that you have to seek it out yourself. And that can be hard for some.

But that's not it. What I really learned is that /u/romaniv doesn't even want to talk to you if you disagree with him, because he's heard it all before.

Neal Stephenson goes into this a great deal in Anathem. it's worth a read.

Both. Both make perfect sense to the people within each system.