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Ahriman · October 26, 2021 at 9:07 pm

(October 26, 2021 at 8:04 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 4:47 pm)Ahriman Wrote: Just to throw in my two cents when I feel it's appropriate. Same as anybody else.

Why do you think your two cents should matter?

Because I make it matter. I have self-respect. I place a high importance on my opinions and beliefs.

Oldandeasilyconfused · October 26, 2021 at 9:17 pm

(October 26, 2021 at 9:07 pm)Ahriman Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 8:04 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Why do you think your two cents should matter?
Because I make it matter. I have self-respect. I place a high importance on my opinions and beliefs.

I think self respect is worthy of kudos, even if the personal superstition it supports are not.

**LadyForCamus** · October 26, 2021 at 9:59 pm

(October 26, 2021 at 9:07 pm)Ahriman Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 8:04 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Why do you think your two cents should matter?
Because I make it matter. I have self-respect. I place a high importance on my opinions and beliefs.

Why? You never question them, or think deeply about them, as you mentioned earlier. So why hold them in such high regard?

Ahriman · October 26, 2021 at 10:28 pm

(October 26, 2021 at 9:59 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 9:07 pm)Ahriman Wrote: Because I make it matter. I have self-respect. I place a high importance on my opinions and beliefs.

Why? You never question them, or think deeply about them, as you mentioned earlier. So why hold them in such high regard?

Well for one thing, they're the kind of beliefs that not many people have. They're not just some canned shit.

Angrboda · October 26, 2021 at 11:21 pm

(October 26, 2021 at 10:28 pm)Ahriman Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 9:59 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Why? You never question them, or think deeply about them, as you mentioned earlier. So why hold them in such high regard?
Well for one thing, they're the kind of beliefs that not many people have. They're not just some canned shit.

**LadyForCamus** · (This post was last modified: October 27, 2021 at 3:48 pm by LadyForCamus.)

(October 26, 2021 at 7:57 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I don't think it's necessarily nihilistic - more like vague. I can see how "experience itself" may have no meaning. Experience is a thing, a utility, it's circumstantial, and without a referent ..meaningfully empty.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean.

Quote:For most of life there is no such thing as experience. I'm not a professional, obvs, but suicidal ideation or feelings of worthlessness and a lack of meaning tend to be interpreted as signs that a person is having a rough time.

But you agree that experience itself could be rationally considered meaningfully empty, so I don’t think it follows that I, or you, are necessarily having a “rough time.” Perhaps it’s simply that that rationally derived conclusion about experience provides added context to how I’m informing myself with regard to the value of having any experience at all.

Quote:I'm not too concerned with it's acceptability, but I wonder about it's accuracy. Is it really true that you have no meaning and have no way to assign meaning. Is that not something you feel and do? It's one thing to feel and do x and have questions about it, or reservations about it, to wonder about the justifications or epistemic limits of a given notion..... quite another to say that you don't have and can't do x.

I suppose that I know that I do something; laugh with my kids, enjoy a nice glass of wine, go to the beach, spend time with my mom, etc. I’m just not sure that those things are the thing x that I doubt. Does that make sense?

Quote:I'll give you a fun example, and pick a bone with misanthropy at the same time. From the grasses point of view, the plow isn't for humans to grow crops to eat. It's for one draft animal to manage another draft animal to prepare a seedbed for the grass. The tools we have for working the land are all designed to benefit some other species. Their shape and composition are determined by that other species. From the grasses point of view, we're not an unnatural scourge destroying the land, but the most competent natural force for disseminating grass seed. We have a similar relationship with livestock and structures, and at the macroscopic level with all of these variables and complex supply chains. What beavers are to lakes, we are to grassland (and life is to us..we're also a tool in the shape of a niche). Now, we don't think that grass has a point of view, that it experiences, but even so..all of this is going on in mere reality all round it. If people went the way of the dodo it would be unfortunate for the same reasons that the dodo going that way were. To put a fine point on it, we've been neglecting this category of meaning for so long (and so hard) that it's become an existential crisis. Does it mean something that we've shit the bed this hard? If it doesn't..if there's no meaning - no harm no foul. We can continue along as ever until the last one of us chokes on air we can't breathe under a sun we cant stand on a planet we can't even fully express our natural selves on. Where all those threads of relationship have been broken and so, by definition, there can be no meaning to life in and of itself then, even if there was some meaning before.

I mean, if humans went extinct, we’d simply be extinct. No one would be left to have an experience or an opinion about it one way or the other. It would just be an inconsequential fact of a universe that does not concern itself with us or anything else. Is that somehow, inherently “bad?” Why? Why is it unfortunate that the dodo went extinct? It certainly is no inconvenience to dodos now. While there may be environmental consequences for species extinction, there is nothing intrinsic about extinction that will bother the individual thing that went extinct. I honestly can’t tell if I’m terribly crazy or terribly wrong, lol.

**The Grand Nudger** · (This post was last modified: October 27, 2021 at 4:38 pm by The Grand Nudger.)

(October 27, 2021 at 3:42 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 7:57 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I don't think it's necessarily nihilistic - more like vague. I can see how "experience itself" may have no meaning. Experience is a thing, a utility, it's circumstantial, and without a referent ..meaningfully empty.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean.

Quote:For most of life there is no such thing as experience. I'm not a professional, obvs, but suicidal ideation or feelings of worthlessness and a lack of meaning tend to be interpreted as signs that a person is having a rough time.

But you agree that experience itself could be rationally considered meaningfully empty, so I don’t think it follows that I, or you, are necessarily having a “rough time.” Perhaps it’s simply that that rationally derived conclusion about experience provides added context to how I’m informing myself with regard to the value of having any experience at all.

Once you add referents, it's very explicitly about something, and wouldn't qualify as meaningless any longer..even if whatever meaning it has doesn't satisfy a category I'm starting to think is going to end up being True Meaning™.

As for whether or not a person is having a rough time..sure, there could be people out there to whom a genuine report of complete meaningless wouldn;t be a rough time...but it doesn;t seem like here are many people like that - and the supposition on the part of therapists that a person expressing suicidal ideations and feelings of meaningless, worthlessness, or perhaps even hopelessness (what is hope without those things?) isn't going to be turned into something irrational on account of one very novel bit of psychology.

Quote:I suppose that I know that I do something; laugh with my kids, enjoy a nice glass of wine, go to the beach, spend time with my mom, etc. I’m just not sure that those things are the thing x that I doubt. Does that make sense?

-and there it is. You recognize that you're doing the thing. It's not that you doubt that thing or doubt that apprehension or in fact have no access to it at all, it's just that all of that meaning (and whatever else we might come up with) isn't True Meaning™...whatever that is.

Maybe it isn't, but the position is no longer that life or experience has no meaning, but that it lacks some other thing, also called meaning. Tell me more about that.

Quote:I mean, if humans went extinct, we’d simply be extinct.

Not simply - alot would happen if we blipped out - things that..from the misanthropes pov..would be good...but does this make sense if there is in fact no meaning?

Quote:No one would be left to have an experience or an opinion about it one way or the other.

-and just like unexperienced or unobserved meaning or events anywhere (for any reason), a bunch of relational things with consequences to a greater whole would still be happening.

Quote:It would just be an inconsequential fact of a universe that does not concern itself with us or anything else. Is that somehow, inherently “bad?” Why? Why is it unfortunate that the dodo went extinct? It certainly is no inconvenience to dodos now. While there may be environmental consequences for species extinction, there is nothing intrinsic about extinction that will bother the individual thing that went extinct. I honestly can’t tell if I’m terribly crazy or terribly wrong, lol.

It would be a very consequential fact for our little rock. Universally meaningful? The most important thing that ever happened anywhere anywhen, no...but still not lacking in meaningful content. So, here again True Meaning™ - a shadowy category of meaning that apparently has no contents but whose emptiness can be used to dismiss catgeories of meaning that do have contents and aren't empty.

Whether or not a thing has meaning doesn't hinge on whether or not you or I care about it. We're definitely good at not giving a shit about things that mean something..and we don't even have to be extinct to claim that attribute (though it may very well end up being why we go extinct). I doubt that you'e crazy or wrong, just that you haven't found whatever satisfies you as True Meaning. Maybe the world doesn't have any of it. I say the same thing to people who insist on god-meaning. This is an extreme example (and not necessarily representative of whatever category of meaning you mean to describe)..but consider a person who grew up dreaming of being very important. Unfortunately (we're the omnipresent narrator of this little play), he's going to be a janitor. Now, maybe he's a janitor at nasa, or some medical research facilty, and his own tiny part keeping the facility squared away moves along some immense discovery or life saving medicine. Was there meaning and satisfaction to be had here....? Sure, and maybe somebody else would have seen it - but not our new imaginary friend. He was angling for Very Important Meaning. Never got that, specifically. I'm not sure that he can rationally claim, then, that life has no meaning, on account of that. He may have even missed out on his own Very Important Meaning just one building down.

I mean, I gave examples of what drives me..but I assume that other things drive other people..and that a person can very much not be into whatever drives me. Not being into what drives me doesn't make those things less or not meaningful, just as my not being into any number of other things doesn;t have the power to strip them of whatever meaning might be found. Ditto, too, with all of the universe.

Similarly, what makes it bad for dodos to have gone extinct is going to vary depending on the interest of the people you ask. I'm sure we can come up with all sorts of reasons why we try to avoid extinctions. All of those justifications hold for human animals if they hold for the others.

I don't think that people appreciate what it means to suggest that life has no meaning, logically. It's a very strong claim..that literally everyone everywhere and at all times is wrong with regards to any potential claim of meaning. God meaning? Maybe not. True meaning? Maybe not. Universal meaning, absolute meaning, important meaning, observed meaning.....I could go on forever. I liken it to saying that we doubt the existence of ice cream because we don't believe in one flavor. IMO, it would be more accurate to just say that we don't like some flavor (or whatever flavors are available to us) or we wish that some particular flavor that isn't available to us, was. All of that is possible in a world full of meaning, too.

TLDR
In sum..perhaps...you have your laughs with your kids, enjoy a nice glass of wine, go to the beach, spend time with your mother - all of this is likely to strike you as meaningful and its unclear why it wouldn't qualify as such, but there's something else you want, something else you seek, some other thing that would need to be in play before you felt that life had True Meaning. Any ideas on what it is, even a hint?

For all the shit I give god botherers, they usually have something in mind. Ala.."yeah sure life is full of this and that - but if no one punishes the wicked who got away then what was it all for?". That's an ask. I'm guessing yours might have more down to earth aims, lol. In the end it may be the case that life doesn't have whatever it is - there's no one torturing the dead, for example.

Pat Mustard · October 27, 2021 at 6:09 pm

(October 23, 2021 at 10:34 pm)snowtracks Wrote: Without the resurrection+, life doesn't have any meaning. Atheists are content with death having the final say. However, everyone is resurrected, adjust to it.

------------------------------
+ What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. 1 Cor 15:32

Are you that devoid of intelligence, imagination and morality that you can't give your own life meaning?

I pity you, you're nothing but an empty vessel moaning in the wind.

Spongebob · October 27, 2021 at 9:29 pm

There appears to be at least two different conversations going on this thread. One posits that there can be no meaning without resurrection. Why? How does resurrection give meaning to our lives on earth?

In the other, @The Grand Nudger seems to acknowledge that theists have some idea in mind when they talk about meaning. I tend to agree that they do but I don't really hear them expressing it so well. Is this a failing of communication or an inability of them to understand their own idea? It seems that if you can't come to a solid understanding of what an idea is and communicate it, then I can't agree there's much to communicate in the first place. I think theists want there to be meaning that's god-driven, but because there's no satisfactory answer to that, they try their best to manufacture one and it falls on its face.

**LadyForCamus** · October 27, 2021 at 9:31 pm

(October 26, 2021 at 10:28 pm)Ahriman Wrote:
(October 26, 2021 at 9:59 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Why? You never question them, or think deeply about them, as you mentioned earlier. So why hold them in such high regard?
Well for one thing, they're the kind of beliefs that not many people have. They're not just some canned shit.

The number of people who believe or don’t believe a proposition has no bearing on its truth. That’s a logical fallacy.

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