[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Are you saying though that he's talking conditionally... ie 'counterfactually'; if if the world was different than it is, ie not social... not populated, then it would be meaningless? I would indeed really like to read this to see what sort of picture he paints, to see if I'd agree with his overall conclusion, in that situation. But as a (perhaps) roughly similar concept, I've often thought if you had say your visual field but no perception of meaning or beauty or anything, then no matter what maelstrom of inputs were presented to your senses, your experience would be meaningless. And indeed AFAIK in Buddhism one form of advanced meditation aims to get to a roughly similar state where objects are not even identified, ie to be able to recognise your visual field as shapes and colours etc rather than identified objects for instance, but don't quote me on that, that's just something I vaguely remember, and I don't know how plausible it is in practice.

There's a little game I play with my students sometimes. I have them all look up at the ceiling, and then ask them what color are the chairs they're sitting in. A lot of times they can't remember. 

Clearly, when they came in the room they didn't fall on the floor. But they also didn't register the full sense-input of the chair. They saw the meaning of the chair and that was enough. I suspect that's how we see the world most times. 

I'm sure you're right that Buddhism addresses this, but I'm not sure how...

He may be more or less forgiving of your sitting on the fence for so long

The name "Belacqua" is from a character in The Divine Comedy, who was so lazy that he waited until the last minute to make up his mind. I use it to tease myself.