If people were 100% rational, would the world be better?

[Neo-Scholastic]

@LadyForCamus ...for meaning to exist, I believe, some conscious entity must sustain it, in the same way thay substance sustains form. But that doesnt have to be me and my life can have had meaning even if it ends.

Great post, but I have an alternative idea.  By this idea, nothing can have meaning that isn't, in some form, eternal.  What if consciousness on Earth ends - were the lives that were previously lived without meaning?

The one bit of mysticism that I have allowed myself is to hypothesize that something can only have meaning in "the now".  Yes, something from the past could find meaning "now" as well.

So, for something to have meaning, there must be some moment of time where someone notices meaning.  That moment is transitory, not eternal.

Perhaps because of my physics training, I view time as a mystery.  Time may have a beginning and end, or may cycle endlessly.  Time may be an illusion, and all times "exist".  I don't find meaning in eternity, or an infinite set of eternities.  No-one is going to even know that I lived 200 years from now.

If any meaning exists at all, it is the meaning in a single moment.

I do not consider your post an alternative. Yes, if [when] all life ends in the universe then all proximate and intersubjective meanings end with it. And, as Nietzsche correctly observed, “My today refutes my yesterday.” The significance of things to me can change daily. The once annoying ephemera generated by a beloved friend has, with his passing, has gained sentimental value. Was it not just trash days before? And yet, I cherish these physical reminders of him, as if somehow a bit of him endures and remains present with me to ease my heartbreak.

So, yes, meaning is always in the now because life is always in the present moment. True, few of us will be remembered in 200 years, as you suggest, and IMHO “being remembered”, or any kind of legacy for that matter, is a piss-poor consolation prize anyway. But if you would allow me, I would like to build on your mystical intuition. For any Creator and Sustainer worthy of those titles, all of time is Now. Just because one species of primate in an isolated corner of the universe experiences time as sequentially, doesn’t make the so-called arrow-of-time an essential feature of reality; but rather, one of potentially many ways to experience and interpret reality. But as you also mentioned, no one really knows what the fuck time “is” and as far as I am concerned our experience of it as humans is just a very finely honed heuristic for navigating through a reality whose depth is beyond our ken.

As for reductionism and emergent properties, if in doing natural science, material and efficient causes are isolated and formal or final causes removed from consideration, then of course the connection between mind and matter will be broken. And that’s okay because that approach is phenomenally productive even if at as a logical consequence it excludes from its consideration of reality one of the most essential features of thuman experience: intangibles, such as intentions, functions, and values. Like Nietzsche said, “If you stare too long into the abyss, then it stares back at you.” So I know it may be my own hobby-horse but I truly believe nihilism is the inescapable logical conclusion of any physical reductionist philosophy.

Perhaps reductionism could be favorably paired with a kind of “maximalism.” Man sits at the center of where the infinite meets the infinitesimal. When we look into the infinitesimal, from the reductionist perspective, we see only the “structured nothingness” of indeterminate potential being. But if instead of trying to build our model of reality entirely from the bottom-up what if we include a top-down model of subdividing the Totality.

The tacit assumption of physical reduction is that change is propelled forward from the bottom-up. And that’s just that…an assumption. Since all we see at the very very bottom of reality is indeterminate potential waiting to be actualized, whence comes this “power” in the infinitesimal to propel change? It could just as easily be the case that the Totality draws the infinitesimal unto itself from the top-down.