Any Nihilists here?

[Belacqua]

I would say self-constructed meaning clearly exists, in the sense people have them (and they could be reduced to brain states).  It clearly makes some people happy.  The sensation of meaningfulness is a pleasant one.

Do they have an objective value?  No.  I don't think so.

Same with morality.  Many people strongly feel murder is wrong.  Society reflects and embeds this feeling, as does our language.  Is it an objective truth?  No, I don't think so.

Same with God.  Some have a direct sensation of His existence and base their lives around that.  Fo I think God objectively exists? I think it highly unlikely, no.

I think there may be cases where constructed meanings become objective. Although I'd be willing to say inter-subjective, rather than objective. 

If meaning is assigned to something by people, then it has that meaning for people. Granted, if all the people die then the meaning goes away. But if a lot of people recognize the meaning, then an assigned meaning is more than merely subjective. 

Maybe the paradigm case is with language. The relation of words to their referents is contingent and traditional. There is no reason why "cat" refers to a cat, other than the fact that somehow people have decided that it does. But for English speakers, "cat" objectively refers to a particular kind of object. 

In daily life, we are likely to register in our perceptions the meaning even more than the sense-input of things we normally encounter. When you leave the house, you don't stop and say, "well, here is a flat hard surface of matte gray, extending in two directions from the door." You just automatically perceive it as the place to walk on (the sidewalk) and you accept its meaning and use. 

I do a thing with students sometimes, where I will have them look at the ceiling and then ask them what color is the chair they're sitting in. Quite a few times, they don't know. When they came into the room they perceived the chair to the extent that they knew what it was for, and they sat down properly, but they didn't notice much more beyond "this is what it's for." 

So I'd say the built human environment is full of objective meaning. Granted, if all the people die then all the meanings go away. (The intelligent cockroaches who evolve a zillion years from now won't care about the stuff we've made.) 

There is a large category of things that are human creations but which have jumped into the realm of objectively-existing concepts or meanings or objects. Traffic signals, for example. Or characters with no physical existence (like Sherlock Holmes) which nonetheless exist mutually among people. Or symphonies, which in the most bloodless non-human, scientific sense are merely aggregates of vibrating air, but for the people who listen have a mutually-understood value or significance. (Full disclosure: here I am talking about what Karl Popper called World 3 objects.) 

So I think only the most extreme nihilist would deny that these widely inter-subjective objects lack real meaning. Although the meaning is certainly created by people and would disappear if there were no more people.