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> Why bother understanding anything if it's all just random and and accidental? Sheer curiosity? Why do you feel like your feelings (for example the desire to

• xyzelement 4y ago
  Imagine I show you a string of numbers and letters. Will you spend time trying to decipher the code? Does the answer depend on whether I told you there was a meaning encoded in there, vs it was produced by a random number generator? In the most logical view if the universe was randomly created, there's nothing to be curious about, it's all noise.
  • ookdatnog 4y ago
    The question of whether I'd attempt to decipher the code depends on whether I believe it would be intellectually engaging to do so. In the case of a code, yes, that probably requires that the code encodes something meaningful. But it's not hard to think of structures where interesting patterns emerge without the structure having externally imbued meaning (or at least, it would be terribly difficult to prove that it does). Game of Life would be such an example: it's a structure that arises from some simple logical rules, there is seemingly no meaning behind it, but it produces interesting patterns that many people have studied extensively.