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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

As a person with a doctorate in physics who basically totally believes that life has no fundamental meaning at all and that most humans are cursed to believe it does despite it being ultimately harmful to them (from my point of view, I hope that is obvious), I think your take is wrong in a lot of ways.

As far as I can tell very, very few people, scientists or otherwise, feel the way I do about the meaninglessness of the universe. As you might imagine, I know a lot of scientists and I don't think any of them are even soft core nihilists, so your characterization of the reaction of people to some kind of mush of science and philosophy and spirituality seems wrong to me. From my point of view, everyone loves that kind of bullshit. They can't get enough.

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You are part of the universe. You can create meaning. So, the universe has meaning if you create it. Meaning is an emergent property of letting hydrogen sit around in a gravity well for a long time.

I guess I just don't see the point of aggrandizing my personal goals and desires as "meaning," at least in the sense that people usually mean it. What I want is just what I want and the world would be a better place if people could just accept that about themselves as well.

isn't this survivorship bias? e.g. people who genuinely feel highly nihilistic, that there is no order, structure, meaning, etc. are very unlikely to be successful--and also unlikely to continue choosing to be alive

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.

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?

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.

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.

But, speaking precisely, there is no human nature at all. You and I have nothing fundamentally in common except that our atoms happen to be organized in a similar way. We have no nature in common except as a coincidence.

It is a coincidence that delights me and I happen to feel quite a lot bonhomie for my fellow human beings and lifeforms, but I don't see how it makes life meaningful in any universal sense.

Do you consider the relationship of two molecules of water to be similarly coincidental or along a continuum from e.g. the nature of two elections all the way to how two universes might be similar? I figure fundamental particle nature is less coincidental than human nature, which is correspondingly less coincidentally related than two heterogenous dust clouds.

I don't see any reason to have a strong belief about why any fundamental constants are what they are. This is so far beyond what even our best physics can say anything meaningful about that I feel an obligation to studiously have no opinion about it.

I will say that I see no compelling reason to believe that the values of fundamental constants are NOT just random.

That doesn't make you nihilistic, more of an absurdist.

Eh, potato potato.

I don't see why believing that life has no inherent meaning would lead to not wanting to be alive. I think this is all the result of random cosmic accident yet I'm having plenty of fun.

Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.”

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