(July 25, 2015 at 5:08 pm)Nestor Wrote: Essentially, from an "objective" standpoint, it would seem that no "state of affairs" in the world has any meaning. Consider the happenstance asteroid that collides with the moon; a worm that gets ravished by a bird; the love that a human feels for his or her offspring. We assign meaning, to a higher or lesser degree, to a variety of objects, believing that the very act of valuing something - that is, possessing strong feelings of pleasure towards it that include aims of temporarily "preserving" its illusory equilibrium - confers upon it meaningful attributes, or a quality of meaningfulness. But is this more than a linguistic trick that in actuality serves only to describe the affections, or chemical changes, that such objects cause in our bodies and our brains - to our center of consciousness, that socially and psychologically construed identity - our "selves"? Does such a chemical change, not fundamentally unlike the physical alterations that occur when water is heated to boil or cooled to freeze, justify our rationalization and usage of terms like value and meaning?
Mr. Cup Half Empty!
I prefer to think in the opposite way from the same premise: from an objective standpoint, any "state of affairs" could have meaning because meaning is subjective. To cut a long story short, that gives everything meaning.
Quote:I cannot help but consider that, objectively speaking, we - illusory selves - are but a meaningless "state of affairs," or physical processes, like the asteroid hurling through space, like the worm sacrificing itself for the sustenance of the bird, yet differing in one aspect, its importance not yet properly measured or understood - we are capable of creating the delusion in which "I" have a "meaningful" existence. Is this feature a possible buttress to the seemingly inevitable logical conclusion of physicalism that "'objectively speaking,' no state of affairs possesses 'intrinsic' value or meaning"? For perhaps such powers of creation do reveal physical processes imbued with meaning - even if they are processes that exclusively reveal themselves in the abstract - and it is in the abstract that meaning is not meaningless . . . but what does "existence in the abstract" mean in the context of objectivity?
Since 'meaning' is subjective and dependent on individual/group experience, perception etc., it's almost insultingly condescending yet critically important to state that it's not a physically existent object in its own right: I can't grab a handful of meaning and apply it to another thing in order to imbue meaning in that thing. However that's exactly what the mind does in it's internal model; some meanings become so complicit with their object, to the individual, that they can never be replaced or lost. It's a mental tool, developed over time, that provides us with a model of 'relative importance' to objects. That model can directly influence our survival rates which explains why so many 'meanings' are shared within a cultural memeplex. Philosophically, it's counter-productive to dismiss 'meaning' as meaningless because in reality, it can mean everything, even our very existence!
Sum ergo sum
