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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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/...

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.

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