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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
If everyone believed as you did, and there was absolute "meaninglessness" in the universe, you and I would not exist. People would not obey laws, would crash cars into each other willy-nilly, resort to much more violence and crime than we see in the world today, etc, etc. Chaos incarnate.
Forget human laws, there would be no laws of nature. No gravity, inertia, laws of physics, etc.
You wouldn't have doctors/firefighters/cops saving lives (to take but one tiny example), even risking their lives to save others. Every day a life is being saved, in one way or another. But ... why bother, right? Life is meaningless. For if you say that the universe is meaningless, you are essentially saying life, any life in this universe is meaningless. You cannot separate the two.
By the very fact that there are laws of nature/physics in place since before we were born, and laws we humans created to better organize/govern our societies, indicates our universe is full of meaning. Great meaning.
What is wrong with the possibility of exploring and discovering even more profound meaning in our lives, and hence, the universe?
If everyone believed as you did, and there was absolute "meaninglessness" in the universe, you and I would not exist. People would not obey laws, would crash cars into each other willy-nilly, resort to much more violence and crime than we see in the world today, etc, etc. Chaos incarnate.
What? That doesn't even make sense.
Here's a more accurate way of putting it. In a universe without meaning, people could write stuff like that and no one would ever correct them.
"Meaning" implies intent, information to be conveyed, and significance. None of those concepts can be separated from the framework of language itself--that's why words and sounds have different meanings when different people from different parts of the planet say them.
Your idea of meaning is more akin to holy writ: all meaning derives from God, and God gives us life, puppies, and unicorns, therefore without it everything falls apart. That's so stupid I can't even believe I need to refute it.
But the world goes on, whether we ascribe meaning to something or not.
Time for God fight, food fights and...can the titty stories be far behind?
The world goes on because enough people (majority) ascribe meaning to it than not.
Your argument does not make the slightest bit of sense ... it has no meaning (pun intended).
The world does in fact go on whether people ascribe meaning to things or not.
Something like 5.6 billion years have passed on this planet, and the vast majority of them did not have people in them to give meaning to things. That does not mean that time did not exist, though.
But go on, feel free to try again. You know you're not making sense.
What?!?
I thought that if a tree fell in the forest and I wasn't there to ascribe meaning to it, that the forest wouldn't exist!!!
Well then, I'm not the Determiner, am I?
... umm, hate to break this to you, but you're contradicting your own definition of meaning, and your entire argument.
Nap time for you I think?
Huh? I am a non-bleiver. I don't at all feel as though I am swimming in the Meaningless Sea. What could it possibly mean this meaninglessness? Is he saying if we are not superstitous our lives are devoid of meaning. Does not compute.
The 'beauty of nature' does not mean there is a god. People helping other people (and even nature!) does not mean there is a god. The vast nature of the cosmos does not mean there is a god.
Nature 'IS.' Calling nature, or being, "god" is semantics. Atheists believe in nature and being, because they actually exist. You want to call it 'god,' that is wordplay, and abandons nearly all tenants of religion as it is believed and practiced. You seek to create 'god' by redefining 'god.'
People helping other people is a group survival skill, handed down since every ethics proclaimed "do unto others ..."
The massive majesty, mystery and, yes, entropy of time and space exist for atheists. Notice the last word - entropy. That is not something 'religions' want to talk about, but it actually points to 'universe' death. It underlies all phyiscal energy. It tells us our future - that is if humans don't destroy the earth on their own.
I just realized, you're talking solely about the world existing ("world goes on") and I'm talking about the world existing with meaning, two different things.
Doesn't matter what the world was like (existing with meaning or without) before humans climbed aboard ... as soon as humans entered the scene, the world became a meaningful existence, because all of our behaviour/actions/laws, rules set up prove that.
The fact that we and the universe itself (by way of everyday observances such as night turning to day, change of seasons, weather patterns, the list goes on) follow some sort of order and organization in our daily lives is the very evidence that meaning (intent, significance, as you yourself have defined meaning to be) is implicit in our actions, and the "actions" of the universe.
Stuart Kauffman sounds a lot like Hans Jonas, who made very similar arguments decades ago in The Gnostic Religion, and then, later, in The Imperative of Responsibility. Both books argue that nature should be taken as sacred.
In the latter book, he has an interesting discussion of "The Possible Uses of Quantum Theory for the Psychophysical Problem". He uses "psychophysical" to refer to the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy and the philosophical problems it raises.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas
The scientific worldview is the polar opposite of the religious worldview (see “The Scientific Worldview: Beyond Newton and Einstein”). Kauffmann's mix and match may be worthy of a Templeton Prize, but not of scientific philosophy. In an infinite universe having an infinite number of causes for any effect, reductionism always is necessary for understanding; so is “expansionism,” its opposite. Newton's reduction of all things to matter in motion is the premier achievement of intellectual thought. It is simple yet profound: Reality consists of things and what things do. As pointed out by your readers, this has been supremely successful in making scientific predictions for centuries. The theoretical error in Newtonian reductionism, however, is its insistence that causality is finite (a la Laplace’s Demon) and could lead to perfect predictions. But as David Bohm showed in his “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics,” there is no single case of a perfect prediction. This is because the universe is infinite microcosmically as well as macrocosmically. All mathematical equations that we use for prediction in science necessarily have a finite number of terms. Predictions can be improved by including additional causal factors via what I call expansionism. But with an infinite number of terms being possible, even an expansion can be nothing more than an approximation of the truth. This is why all measurements of the real world include a plus or minus. There always is an uncertainty that includes the infinite number of relatively insignificant causes that we find impractical to measure. It also is why real relationships are never perfectly linear. In an infinite universe, there is always something else. We don’t need to hypothesize an imaginary friend to fill that gap.
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