Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn't imply any kind of meaning. I can't even think of a theoretical way to determine if we're here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we're just here.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 hours ago

Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the "meaning" to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I'm blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can't smell), etc.

I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of "purpose" or "reason" is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the "purpose" of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like "I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet". Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn't need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since "purpose" aka "reason for being" is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.

Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be "to be entertaining".

So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn't one.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I don't think I'd be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there's no way for us to "escape" the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn't be less true, it's just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.

It's kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.

Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It's the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question "if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?", and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what's up). Though circularity doesn't imply it is wrong or incorrect, it's also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.

And this isn't an anti-science stance, I just think that there's a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don't think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn't turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).