A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

Since science† doesn't have anything to say on the subject of purpose (since it's literally meta-physics that speaks on purpose) we're already off the rails. However ...

> Few things are meaningful all by themselves; most derive their meaning from the things they point to. Of course, the buck has to stop somewhere, at some source of inherent or axiomatic meaning.

This is true of all things that are connected with being/existing (also known as the transcendentals - classically known as "Truth", "Goodness" and "Beauty").

----

† I presume here the author means "natural philosophy" by "science" not its broader meaning of "knowing" since that would be presuming the consequent.

It's not really funny to repeat the same point as GGP, and totally miss the point of the intervening comment you were replying to.

And we should seek to act in such a way that, all else equal, those humans have opportunities to do so, except in those cases where allowing masochists to engage in self-harm ends up causing more harm to others in the long run, e.g. if it emboldens them to torture others or if it causes them to end their own life which would otherwise have been rich and fulfilling for themselves and others. There's no need to generalize to some weird Kantian categorial imperative bullshit here; there's no "lying is always bad", there's only looking at two pairs of actions (or an action and its inaction) and running a net present value calculation on those actions from now until the end of time -- or at least doing our best at this. I didn't say it was easy: it's absolutely not. It's the appeal to a higher power or some bullshit categorical imperative that takes the easy, lazy way out. In fact my moral theory compels us to do a hell of a lot more work and deep thinking than any of the others do.

> While most of us want to maximize our lifespan, soldiers do not. They consider protecting their nations are far more important than their life.

Wow, no, that's not true at all. People don't join the army to lay down their life for their nation, they join the army because in that moment (as a teenager, often in the face of a very convincing recruiter who is loose with the truth), it seems like the best option for their lives.

> we all agree that what soldiers and Mother Terese did is "good."

No, we absolutely do not all agree on this, and "we all agree" is an opener to a lot of bullshit in this world. I don't know Mother Teresa's own internal motivations but the evidence suggests she was a horrible human being who caused a lot of undue suffering. Nor do many people, especially pacifists, agree that soldiers are automatically good people.

> unless, as I said in the previous comment, you're willing to redefine "objective" as the majority's preference

If I allow you to use the shorthand "preference" for the 20 or so measures that I stated (and there are hundreds more), then I'm not redefining anything. These preferences already exist. It'd be nonsense to deny that.

> Which is worse: having 10 nails in each pair of eyes of 10 people, or having 1 nail in either eye of 100 people?

Silly trolly problems get us nowhere. The answer is: it depends on the context. It depends on the people. It depends on whether they were already blind or not. It depends on what the course of their lives would be like with and without those nails. It depends on trillions of factors, and all we can do is do our best.

Luckily, the vast majority of problems we face in life are not gotcha-trolly problems where we have to make these kinds of decisions in absence of literally any other context. In real life, using this framework to orient our moral compass, and then acting roughly in line with that as best we can, will end up with extremely moral people creating a wonderful world for everyone. If we get to the point where we're having to fiddle over the minutiae of utility calculations, then we've already created a magnificent utopia for all anyway.

> There exists something that is an objective measure AND from it good or bad is determined

Yes, I already told you how to do this.

How about this angle: Does that creator itself have any purpose or meaning? If God exists, is he utterly nihilistic and void of meaning? After all, there was no creator to give God purpose.

If God does have purpose somehow, that shows that purpose does not only come from being created. Problem solved.

If God does not have purpose, then that creates a rather strange situation where a being without purpose can create beings with purpose. Presumably we too can create things with purpose, in a godless universe, and thus infuse the world with purpose ourselves.

Personally, I think people are too quick to mix up purpose (the how) with meaning (the why). There are all kinds of mechanical reasons as to how you came about, from nature, your parents, circumstances. And some of those reasons even include agency, for example, your parents might have decided to have a child. That's a decision they took, not just random luck.

But these are reasons as to how you came about to exist, not the actual meaning behind your existence. Meaning is something else entirely, it's a very difficult topic to struggle with. But we diminish it greatly by dumbing it down to "the meaning with your life is whatever intentions behind what created you". Our lives does not belong to our parents, nature or our creator, but rather, ourselves. And thus it's only we who can imbue that life with meaning, nobody else.