Sound and Nihilism

[Faith No More]

I think all the philosophical talk of meaning and value is just an evolved way of perceiving things which give us positive neurological feedback. For example, we need to eat food to sustain ourselves as organisms, and our bodies deteriorate without it. Since we are hardwired to survive and fight against this deterioration, we assign a positive value to the act of eating that food. Even the simplest organism would have been affected by such a relationship without even being aware of it, and the food would be valuable to the organism even though it was unable to consciously acknowledge that fact. The physiological feedback the organism received from eating the food creates the value of the act.

Jump to billions of years later where our motivations and needs are much more complex and here we are trying to conceptualize just how the input from our perceptions affects the neurological feedback we receive and we come up with concepts like value and meaning. It seems that one of the evolutionary side-effects of increased intelligence is making simple concepts like how different inputs create positive and negative feedback overly complex. I, for one, see meaning and value as fundamental aspects of evolution thrust upon us in order to perpetuate the self.