The Meaninglessness of Meaning

[Mudhammam]

and also, does the possibility of such "valuers" existing in any physical sense dissolve  alongside the illusion of the "self"? If not, what's the justification? And if the illusion is good enough for us (er... seemingly impossible to avoid, not only in language, but in  any subjective - and hence, objective - construct of the world) to maintain such common usage of selves and values, why not other metaphysical concepts, like free will, and even gods?

Starting with the first sentence there, what the hell do you mean?

Look, I value things.  Which is another way of saying, I care about things.  Or to say the same thing in other words, I have feelings.  That, however, is as nothing to the universe.  I am going to die, just like everyone else.  What I value makes no difference for the universe.  My valuing something tells you about me.  It tells you nothing about anything else.  Except insofar as learning about me tells you about other things similar to me.

When we say that humans value things, that tells us about humans generally, not about the universe as a whole or anything else.


For the "self," as usual, I refer you to David Hume.  I am a bundle of perceptions.  I do not perceive my self as a separate thing.  And when we look at Alzheimer's patients, and at senile people, and brain damaged people, all of the modern science seems to support Hume's contention, that you are not some magical thing, but can lose a part of you without losing all of you.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is what do our concepts of value, i.e. meaningfulness, really mean? According to my understanding of a worldview that takes everything to be ultimately reducible to the physical (a term that is difficult enough to define), we have to basically say that a process of events that are objectively meaningless involve structures through which experiences (or call them emergent properties, though l'm inclined to agree with Sam Harris that "this seems merely a placeholder for a miracle") occur, within the abstraction of individuality, of a world that feels and appears largely non-physical; by this I include thoughts and memories, but also the sense of freedom to shape my future and to assign value however I choose, and of course, to immerse my nervous system in a state that some have described as transcendental . . .

I'm having trouble synthesizing this - the state of affairs we actually experience - with physicalism, is all.