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> What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that exists outside of our own minds and experience? Why would you need or want to? I exi

> What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that exists outside of our own minds and experience? Why would you need or want to? I exist. My mind exists. My consciousness exists. My experience exists. I mean that in the perfectly ordinary, uncontroversial sense that we use every day. There is no particular mystery or problem when I say, "My cat exists" or "My socks exist". I can provide evidence for them, in the same way I can provide evidence for my own existence and the existence of my experiences. If you can read and understand this post you have evidence for my existence and the existence of my experience. Furthermore, because we are beings of a particular kind, the things we find meaningful--like the things we find nutritious--fall into a relatively small number of categories. Particulars won't be the same for everyone, but so what? It would be very strange to say that because I like meat and you like fruit there's no objective or universal standard of nutrition, and anyone can eat anything--rocks, trees, nothing--and get along equally well. Simply because our nature does not determine what we find meaningful or nutritious does not mean it does not constrain it. This is again a perfectly ordinary phenomenon that for some reason people get all confused about when it applies to the contents of our minds rather than the contents of our stomachs.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Not only that, but in fact the kinds of things that are meaningful and valuable to people are often shared with other people, which then provides us with the additional meaning kick of sharing, which, I am told, is caring.
ThomPete 12y ago
The question is not whether you experience you exist but what it is that exist. So it doesn't help your argument that you can point to a sock and say it exist. What you have to show is that there is only one way to interpret what you see before you can prove that what you see is in fact what you see. Only then is it truly "a thing" regardless of perspective. In other words. The rock exist in your head as a concept, it's not a concept in nature. A pattern perhaps but not an universal object and the pattern that it is is only one perspective.
haberman 12y ago
I think that truth is getting lost in your abstractions. You are comparing the human feeling of something being "meaningful" to the idea of nutrition, which is a general concept of how the food we ingest affects our overall health. Nutrition is a complex and multi-dimensional idea. If there is a food that makes most people healthy but kills other people because of an allergy, is that food "nutritious", in a universal sense? And it's tied into another complicated abstraction: the idea of health. If a person is addicted to a drug but functional, is it more "healthy" for them to stay on the drug indefinitely or is it more healthy for them to go through a potentially horrible withdrawal period to get off it? The abstractions of "nutrition" and "health" are complicated and ultimately based in our experience, just like the idea of "meaningfulness." And while you could make an argument that certain statements would be universally agreed by everyone in all circumstances (like "eating an apple is more nutritious than eating a rock"), that is far from being able to say that the general ideas of nutrition or health are universal or absolute.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Not only that, but in fact the kinds of things that are meaningful and valuable to people are often shared with other people, which then provides us with the additional meaning kick of sharing, which, I am told, is caring.

ThomPete 12y ago

The question is not whether you experience you exist but what it is that exist. So it doesn't help your argument that you can point to a sock and say it exist. What you have to show is that there is only one way to interpret what you see before you can prove that what you see is in fact what you see. Only then is it truly "a thing" regardless of perspective. In other words. The rock exist in your head as a concept, it's not a concept in nature. A pattern perhaps but not an universal object and the pattern that it is is only one perspective.

haberman 12y ago

I think that truth is getting lost in your abstractions. You are comparing the human feeling of something being "meaningful" to the idea of nutrition, which is a general concept of how the food we ingest affects our overall health. Nutrition is a complex and multi-dimensional idea. If there is a food that makes most people healthy but kills other people because of an allergy, is that food "nutritious", in a universal sense? And it's tied into another complicated abstraction: the idea of health. If a person is addicted to a drug but functional, is it more "healthy" for them to stay on the drug indefinitely or is it more healthy for them to go through a potentially horrible withdrawal period to get off it? The abstractions of "nutrition" and "health" are complicated and ultimately based in our experience, just like the idea of "meaningfulness." And while you could make an argument that certain statements would be universally agreed by everyone in all circumstances (like "eating an apple is more nutritious than eating a rock"), that is far from being able to say that the general ideas of nutrition or health are universal or absolute.