(December 31, 2013 at 5:19 pm)Z-one Wrote: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that what you are talking about is your own desire for meaning in the universe. That you cannot imagine or accept that life and death are meaningless does not change whether or not they are.
The universe does not tell me how to vote (thankfully), and it cannot "convince me never to act". I believe the universe is incapable of caring whether or not I vote or act in any way.
I disagree that life is zero sum. Any individual life, yes, especially if you convince yourself not to act or interact with others. Collectively, life is clearly non-zero sum. It can build upon itself, resulting in culture which transcends every individual life upon which it depends.
Well yes and no. When people care about a purposive universe to attempt to cope with, for instance, meaningless suffering and death, it really means something quite personal to pull the rug out from under them with cosmology or what-have-you. From a completely neutral standpoint, we can have disinterested fact, but we are not neutral in this world. The apparent meaninglessness of existence has always been, well, apparent, but until very recently we have systems of thought we can use to console ourselves. 'Maybe there is a man in the sky because my child died' is not an affront to physics in my book. The question you raise as to the difference between the universe being imagined meaningless or in fact meaningless is concise but, I would argue (on the basis of human sympathy and kindness) unimportant.
I don't really agree with the idea that culture makes our lives non-zero sum. It certainly changes the scope and lasting effects of our lives that they are always linked together, but that does not alter the status of life itself as physically meaningless.
