The Meaninglessness of Meaning

[Pyrrho]

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?

I think the answer to that question depends on the context or frame of reference.  From the standpoint of the universe, it is, in a manner of speaking, nothing.  At least, there is no value to it; it is just that there are things that do value things.  From my point of view, things have value, which is just another way of saying that I care about things.  I have an emotional response to things.  That I value something is more about me, not about the thing that is valued.  From an evolutionary standpoint, it is necessary that there be some motivating aspect to animals in order for the species to continue.  Otherwise, they would do nothing and just die.  Emotion is a motivating force.  Valuing things is necessary for you to do anything.  If you did not care about anything, you would not bother doing anything, and would just lie there and die.  This caring about things, this valuing of things, is pretty much automatic, and is a very basic part of you, not something that requires great concentration or thinking about things.  This is instinctual rather than intellectual.

This idea of a difference in perspective is somewhat illustrated in your post 4 with Hayakawa's levels 1 (atoms and such) and 2 (things as they normally appear).  When milking the cow, one does not require any understanding of level 1, just level 2.  Indeed, the description of milking the cow at level 1 is likely to be very complex, if it is in any kind of detail of what is going on.

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,

A standard example is a clock telling time.  The parts of a clock thrown on a workbench do not tell time, but when the parts are properly arranged, then the clock tells time.  I would not call that a miracle.  Notice, though, that the totality of the clock is still just physical.

The same is true of a person.  When the parts are not arranged properly, the person does not have the motivating feelings that would be present if they were properly arranged.  ("Properly," in this context, merely means that the parts are arranged such that they work that way, not that there is some design to it.)  An extreme sort of example of this is what happens when one chops off a person's head.  They lose all feeling rather quickly.  Likewise, if you chop off an important bit of the clock, it no longer tells time.

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.

It is good that you added another post, or I would not have understood your meaning.  Your next post:

I should say that the tension I feel between the alternatives of physicalism and idealism is like the choice of a red or blue pill. The red pill destroys myself but preserves the world; the blue pill preserves myself but destroys the world.

I posted about the alternatives of idealism and physicalism in another thread a while back, and will just provide a link rather than repost it here, as it is rather long:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-33518-po...#pid960350


If you like that, you might, though, find my entire exchange with Alex K interesting, starting here:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-33518-po...#pid958852

One of the things I really like about Uncle K is that he seems to have a very good understanding of the difference between physics and metaphysics.  Scientists who don't understand the difference often end up with bad metaphysics, though philosophers who don't understand the difference often end up with an even worse mess.


Feel free to quote anything I say in that thread and respond to it in this thread, if you wish (if you do, please keep a link to the original post, so that I can see the context of the comments you quote).