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Comment by nathan_compton

19 days ago

Just one more thing you teleologists tell yourselves. I'm alive and successful, I just don't delude myself about the universe giving a shit about it.

It may be that people need to believe nonsense about the cosmos in order to "maximize productivity" but I do not think that is the case.

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nathan_compton

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all2  19 days ago

I see two different assertions

1. The universe doesn't care about you

2. Life has no inherent meaning

Do you mean to conflate these two? Do you find them merely agreeable, or do these propositions depend on each other?

  • nathan_compton  19 days ago

    I think they are both true and closely related. Typically and colloquially, when people talk about meaning they are talking about some state of affairs about what is good or bad with respect to the universe (if the universe includes things like God, a world of forms, ideas of perfection, etc).

    I think its very reasonable to believe that the universe does not have any of those properties and that life is random and has no inherent or universal meaning.

    I guess there could be some kind of subjective meaning but I don't really see the utility of that idea.

    • benlivengood  18 days ago

      In this particular case you would only have to push back the lack of meaning to the ~multiverse or whatever a sequence/family of child universes would be called.

      I don't think Tegmark <IV had any simple parameters for goodness or meaning, and neither does logic or mathematics. We assemble our meanings out of more fundamental relationships but I actually think they concretely exist in a real way as real as the matter in this universe, but more in the way that galaxies and other complex structures exist. Meaning is a property of complex self-reflective systems and so inherent meaning will probably always be tied inexorably to context and environment, or in our case meaning is tied specifically to our human nature.

      E.g. I will find it fascinating if universes do evolve from progenitor universes and therefore the guiding selection pressure is "make more black holes/universes" but that isn't the same thing as the human concept of "good" since our nature isn't aligned with entire (families of) universes.

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