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Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well.

...and by what standard should we judge "well"?

The standards that you yourself make.

So it's circular, you're saying? I don't disagree, but this is not ultimately very satisfying to someone who'd like meaning in their life. It amounts to saying "Don't want that, then", does it not? :)

Why should meaning to your life be supplied externally ?

That's a hidden way of arguing there can be no meaning to life without a creator, a feeling that religions the world over have handily exploited.

Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts within your own reference frame of morality that you have derived from your experience with the world.

There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.

I'm not sure how a creator would help provide meaning. If World of Warcraft characters were actually self-aware people, would providing fun for players really be the highest meaning they could aspire to? If not, why would a hypothetical creator's plan for us have any particular bearing on what we ought to do?

Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts

I can feel good about shooting heroin, but that doesn't mean it's right (or that it's not!). It really ends up sounding like "Do what makes you feel good, and try not to think too much about why it makes you feel good". That's not necessarily bad, but I haven't seen any argument that it is good, other than that it's not necessarily bad.

If what you're looking for is what's most satisfying, I'll agree that introspection and experiment will tell you that. If you're looking for what you ought to do, what's really "meaningful", it's not at all clear to me what can tell you that. Or that anything can, or that it's even a question with an answer. At least if there's no answer, continuing to think about the question can't be wrong. ;)

You forget existentialism has a clear definition of angst, despair and inauthentic living. That tie into what is "good" in existentialism. Essentially existentialism says yes happiness is good, but happiness supplied by drugs is an external source of happiness and is thus inauthentic. Poking yourself with needles, ie the act of consuming doesn't make you feel good, the drug does. Existentialism is in this respect where Eastern philosophies meet with the West. Read some Camus, or Sartre, but if you feel the need to see what existentialism is like with a higher power read Kierkegaard.

A creator would be able to provide meaning for the last person 'in the system' who wouldn't be able to point at someone else to provide his/her meaning.

World of warcraft characters are not self aware, but if they were, my point is exactly that they could aspire to higher meaning than fun for players, by their own standards of morality and what they choose to be fulfilling.

You can feel good about shooting heroin, for a little while, and then you'll realise that it is not all it is cracked (pun intended) up to be. So you will most likely either revise your value system or you'll die of an overdose.

Just doing what makes you feel good is not a very good system of morality, since it obviously allows you to do good to yourself at the expense of others. People that have such tendencies are usually labelled either unable to empathise or psychopaths depending on how far they go in their pursuits.

What you 'ought' to do, is to try to define a set of rules for yourself that start from axiomatic things that any healthy and well thinking person can perceive as 'good'.

It's not a coincidence that most laws tend to start off from basic principles like 'property is ok' and 'killing is not' and work out a whole series of codified laws from there.

For a moral viewpoint on life and a feeling of satisfaction you could very well do the same, on your own almost without external input.

Some people will come up with extremely selfish sets of rules, which is fine as long as they fit within the legal framework and make them feel good, some will do much better than that.

And some will fail, and end up in jail or become ostracised from society.

Dying of an overdose or doing well at the expense of others are things that most people can agree are things we ought not to want. But I haven't found a reason that I ought not to want those, ultimately. It just so happens that I (and most people) don't.

Whenever you see yourself saying, "you ought to"/"it's good to"/"it's moral to", notice the immediate reason that the statement seems true (assuming it does) is to satisfy some goal. You have a goal of not hurting other people (or, to say it another way, you want not to hurt other people), but while that suffices for directing your thoughts and actions on this level, if you back up a level, you'll see that this goal is in service of another goal. If human goal systems were regular and consistent, there would ultimately be a topmost goal which all this was pointing at. But that doesn't seem to be the case, so we're left shifting about aimlessly, considering only that which we happen to consider (our happiness, the happiness of others, life satisfaction, or whatever) without anything to direct what we ought to be doing.

Making up your own meaning doesn't solve this problem, but only ignores it. It might be that it's unsolvable (I currently think so, at least), but in that case, it can hardly matter that one keeps looking.

There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.

If your philosophy is consistent, then the above statement is only true for you, correct?

There are other things in live besides yourself and the empty universe, you know. In particular, other people are something external to the self that typically supply a lot of meaning for many.

Yes, and nobody will stop you from incorporating them and their feelings in to your rules to live by.

Ok, let's pretend for a moment that you're an intensely weird person who finds meaning in others due to a conscious decision to self-actualize. "Hey honey, we've been going out for a while, and so I've decided to gradually incorporate you and your feelings into my rules to live by. One step at a time, of course."

Then why aren't we allowed to integrate religion into our rules to live by? Are some things "external to the self" allowed, and others disallowed?

I'm perfectly ok with you integrating religion in to your rules to live by. But you don't have to and it is nonsense that you can't find 'meaning' in life without that.

Would you prefer if someone else had already decided the meaning of you life?

The scary thing (for me) is that I suspect the answer for a very large number of people is 'yes'. With setting your own rules comes the added burden of being responsible for the results, and plenty of people would like to be able to point to some third party when things go bad.

It's a trick question. :) If someone else had already decided the meaning of your life, you would prefer that, because they would have decided what you preferred, ultimately.

This decider could decide that you prefer otherwise, couldn't it?

Could they could arrange it so that your purpose was X, and that you preferred that your purpose was not X? I'm not sure if that's actually consistently possible. It's certainly possible for humans to want X and not want to want X, but something with a specified highest goal might not actually be able to hold both.

What's your net worth?

(For many, someone else has decided, and quantified it.)

Start the standard with happiness, add sophistication as necessary.

Just don't confuse happiness with pleasure. Sometimes what will give you the most happiness you won't find pleasurable at all to do.

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