Sound and Nihilism

[TheRealJoeFish]

I'm pickin' up what you're layin' down, OP. If one is a materialist - as I am, and as many others on this board are, I believe - or otherwise presupposes materialism, then, in the absence of, as Jormungandr suggests, evidence that we look at the brain and something we know to exist is "not in there," it follows that what you call "meaning" is a physical process. I strongly believe this is the case. I'm not sure I'd call what you're describing "meaning," though; I'd call it "experience," or maybe "sentience" (and, at a higher lever, "sapience"). I would be comfortable describing meaning as a subset of sapience.

But I think the sort of points you're making are valid, and worth discussing. There's, at least from the meaning/sapience perspective, a qualitative difference between a vibration that propagates through the air, weakening in all directions until it is overtaken by background noise, and a vibration that runs into a membrane that converts it into electrical signals that sends more electrical signals shooting in all directions through a two-pound lump of fat and water. If we want to call this difference something like meaning or sapience, well, I think we're doing a pretty reasonable job of defining those words.

Regarding the loss of meaning upon death, well... I think then we're getting into a 3-dimension/4-dimension sort of thing. If meaning is defined as we think it is - that is, a particular physically-explainable quality of our brains - then at a given point in time it either exists or it doesn't exist. I think it's reasonable to say that, when there's literally nothing alive in the universe, then nothing will have "meaning", regardless of how we define that word. But even the death of the universe can't ever rob us of the precious seconds of meaning that exist, at this point in time, thanks to the lump of fat and water within our craniums.