Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?

[The Grand Nudger]

Exactly. How can “I” assign meaning to “me”? That seems…I dunno. Circular?

More an observation than an argument, self designated goals and value are still goals and value, at any rate.  Things have meaning to you, it stands to reason they can have meaning for you, and that you can be one of the things that means something. 

And is the statement, “experience itself has no meaning” necessarily nihilistic? Can it be psychologically acceptable to say: “I have no meaning; I have no way of assigning meaning to myself, but I’d still prefer to continue experiencing…at least for now”? And if, some day, I stop wanting to have experiences, is that necessarily pathological, or “bad for me”?


I’ll duck as you all throw the tomatoes. 🍅😛

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.  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.  

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.  

If you don't have and can't do a thing, then it's not really an issue of arguments or justifications about that things existence.  It wouldn't matter if there were meaning, and meaning all around, if it were truly inaccessible or a completely empty set to you.  Most of life is in the same situation, just without the benefit of any experience or realizations to that effect.  

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.