There are lofty philosophical concepts we are tossing around here so I do feel it necessary to reiterate these are just my opinions. While I do hold these views strongly that probably has more to do with me being opinionated than necessarily being correct. Neeel has a good point regarding the nature of meaning being highly subjective.

Therefore when someone says that I am wrong about the significance of my life I assume they are either

a) actually reporting something about a property in his mind when observing my life

b) telling me I am misreporting my own state of mind.

Without being too condescending and arrogant I actually am proposing option b. This is more of a philosophical conclusion based on a macro view of time and the universe. That one lives for a period of time, experiences life and ascribes meaning to certain elements of life is irrelevant if that person will later cease to exist and cease to remember. As RLK has stated it would be the same as If that person never existed. If your argument above is solely to prove the subjective nature of “meaning” then I concede “meaning” is subjective. I maintain however that any meaning we find in an atheistic universe is contrived and petty IMO.

2) Does sexiness exist in an atheistic universe?

Yes, but why does it matter?

I think we are getting close to the point where we agree to disagree.

The reason I don’t think there is meaning NOW is precisely because we all agree (?) there is no meaning LATER.

edit: zumby, the ground we are covering here ITT also constitues my reasoning in claiming morality doesn't exist or matter in an atheistic universe. Just thought I would toss that in there too.

One last go...
You don't think this. You don't think we'll find any, right?
Nonexistent ferraris aren't red and nonexistent meaning isn't contrived.

(This becomes so much easier if you concede there is meaning but it's unimportant, irrelevant meaning).

I simply cannot understand eternal meaning within the context of mortal consciousness. It simply does not connect.

To be honest I never understood theism in the context of mortal consciousness either. If something is totally undetectable, it essentially does not exist. If God is undetectable in this life (I assume you agree or you could not be an atheist) and if He is undetectable after death (since there is no one to do the detecting), in what way does He exist?

Why does something have to be detectable in order to exist?

When the first guy counted to twelve he isn't invent it, he discovered it. I think the first time someone thought of "supercilious" is similar.
I don't quite understand this last bit - as an atheist I don't think he exists. As a theist I did (and I thought he was detectable).

I think the inside of a brick is both undetectable and existent. Same with an idea nobody's ever going to have, a distance a shade above the Planck scale (maybe absolute zero is another).

I don't think detectability is a necessary condition for existence, although we need a damn good reason to believe in something we can't actually detect.

I tap I tap
You have submitted me.
I concede (grudgingly) there is meaning but it is contrived, temporal, and irrelevant.

In the same way someone with mere pocket change would say, "I have "no" money". They don't mean they have no money, they mean they don't have enough money to do anything with.

Yay (again)!

I think the loose change thing an excellent analogy (maybe you could even strengthen it - the atheist only has foreign currency - which does them no good no matter how much they have?)

You could probably add "arbitrary" to your list of negatives.

haha cool thanks. I will use your suggestions next time around.

If you cannot do any experiment that distinguishes between existence or non-existence or there is no detectable effect of the postulated "thing" whatsoever, how is that different from non-existence? We are of course talking about "things" that might or might not exist, not concepts like "liberty" or "free will". God would I presume fall into that category.

They are effectively the same, to be sure. But that has no bearing on whether something exists or not.

Agreed.

Is that true? Does mathematics exist on its own or is it created? What about "i"? Does it exist or was it created by humans to flesh out the group properties of numbers? Or maybe there is some other reason for creating it, I am not that strong on the fundamental justification for mathematical concepts.


I don't understand this. If you detected Him, why are you an atheist?

The inside of a brick is detectable. Its just not visible.

An idea that no one is ever going to have does not exist. Absolute zero is an anomaly due to our definition of temperature. It exists in the same way that infinity does. If you use statistical thermodynamics to define your temperature scale, you find that absolute zero is really a limit as that thermodynamic quantity goes to infinity.


I disagree. There is absolutely no difference between something you will never detect in any way and something that does not exist.

No, they are absolutely the same. If there is a difference, what is it?

Nearly everyone thinks they are created. I think they are discovered.
I was mistaken.
I don't think it is, but were getting pretty far afield.
Same thing here. I think it does.
And a distance/energy level just above the Planck scale?
No difference to us, but I think the world is bigger than we will ever experience.

The universe contains one but not the other.

There are things which exist that you won't experience/detect right? Same with me, asdfassf32, etcetera. Take the intersection of that huge number of sets.

What?

I think numbers, theorems, logical laws, etcetera exist separate from us - that when we turn our minds to maths we are exploring and discovering rather than creating and inventing.

Most mathematical philosophers believe that mathematical entities are essentially linguistic constructs. We create rules and symbols, then apply the rules to those symbols and arrive at mathematical theorems. It turns out those theorems can be used to model reality with a decent amount of predictive power but the mathematical entities themselves are not considered "real" in any sense separate from us.

My views are pretty heavily influenced by the experience of actually doing mathematics. There's a cutesy saying (which I'm never sure if I've got round the right way) that "mathematicians are formalists Monday to Friday and platonists on the weekends."

OK. I have no comment.

On the basis of new information, or you just changed your mind?

It certainly is. The only thing that you cannot do is detect photons reflected from it into your eye and onto your cornea or the sensation of the contact with the material with your skin. The lack of those two consequences of existence does not equal indetectability. I could probably get a pretty good picture of the internal structure with MRI or XRay imaging.

No comment.

Absolute zero I understand very well so I have no hesitation commenting on that. I assume you meant distance below the Planck scale. That is the point at which the Standard Model of physics breaks down. Whether that truly is a fundamental problem remains to be seen, I think. But the Uncertainty Principle and the results of experiments have shown that fundamentally indetectable things really do not exist, such as the simultaneous knowledge of the momentum and position of an electron. Not only are they indetectable simultaneously, but they really do not exist.

Again, no comment.

I came to accept a different interpretation of spiritual experiences (and stopped having them).

As for the rest, I'm not seeking to persuade you (although you didnt address the intersection of sets of things none of us have ever or will ever detect or experience - seems a slam dunk to me). I think it makes sense to treat things we have no evidence of as if they dont exist - I dont think it follows that they actually dont though, nor that everything in existence will eventually be detected/experienced/conceived.

RLK, did you miss my last post ? here

Or is it that you feel its not worth responding to?

edit: Or that you are busy

None of the above.

I read it but was not quite sure how to respond to it. I decided to just let it simmer for awhile and see if that gave me some insight. It turns out I had misread it and thought it said something a little different than I now think it does. So here is a response.

There is a difference in the two cases, mortal and immortal. In the mortal consciousness state you have the inevitable path independent state, at which point none of one's preceding choices makes the least bit of difference. Non-meaning is established.

In the immortal case, the path independent state may never be attained. The exact state may always have some dependence on preceding choices so meaning may exist. You have said that meaning still may not exist and I agree. But if you look back on my old posts I never said that meaning must exist in the immortal case, I only said that the immortal case creates the possibility of meaning, which is absent in the mortal case.

After thinking about it a bit more, it seems like the simulation hypothesis is a pretty clear counter-example to RLK's claim that on the physicalist hypothesis our lives can't have any ultimate significance. If the simulation hypothesis is true (which is at least possible, and maybe even likely), then we have no way of knowing whether our lives have ultimate significance as that would depend on facts about the reality beyond our simulation, about which we know nothing. Also, in case this isn't clear, the simulation hypothesis is consistent with physicalism. Thus, under the physicalist assumption we would seem to be in a parallel situation to how RLK describes the theistic assumption--it is possible but unknown whether our lives have ultimate significance.

I disagree.

From your point of view, if the consciousness created by this simulation is mortal you still get to the path independent end state. If the state is independent of path, then the path does not have significance.

What you have done here then is to postulate another level of creatures who created this simulation within which you exist and for whom your path is somehow important and presumably immortal. But that is not new. That is essentially Bunny's theism of a God but no afterlife. But that is no different than the mortal consciousness with atheism. They are indetectable during this life due to the nature of the simulation that confines us and they are indetectable after death because our consciousness ends at death. They will never produce any effect for us so the correct assumption is that they are not significant and in fact do not exist.

The crux of this problem is mortal versus immortal consciousness. How that consciousness arises is irrelevant.

So by meaning, we are talking about personal meaning? This is the only way I can see that path independence can be relevant. Not meaning as some inherent characteristic of the universe, but meaning as in something you value? Which gets us back to the point that you are simply valuing it because you value it.

If stuff we do now may change OUR path in the future, then that gives what we do meaning?

I still feel that you havent answered my point about meaning being a content of thought

Under the simulation hypothesis, our consciousness might not end at death. You compared my scenario to bunny's theism without an afterlife. The challenge I think the simulation hypothesis presents is rather that of an afterlife without theism.