Jack Symes

to take that away from us like we have to live with it i think as someone who's never embraced christianity i have no idea what that's like what a gift that is to do something bad and be forgiven by god from it and so it's like a great life hack can i push back on this idea that the world's meaningless though yeah this cold and meaningless and uncaring well

I think that's exactly right. But it's a different kind of meaning to the one which the world ultimately lacks. So call one meaning with an uppercase M, like meaning with a capital M. The ultimate meaning.

Like if God exists for the Abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout their lives and to the end of their life. What we're talking about or you're describing there is what you might call like not the meaning, but like a meaning within life. And there's a problem here.

Yeah, but it depends. Again, when you strip away all of these Judeo-Christian principles, we're left trying to find worthwhile meanings to non-worthwhile ones. So let's say you said the meaning of your life, Joe, was like counting blades of grass on your front garden, right? And I said my meaning was like being a doctor and helping people.

Yeah, but imagine you thought that, right? Imagine you said the meaning of your life was counting blades of grass. And I said mine was helping people with medical care. I have the more meaningful life. But if what you're saying is true, if it's like there's no ultimate meaning and all meanings are just created by the person, like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful.

We need some kind of way of differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile. Yeah. And so there's a problem there. I think we can solve that problem, which is, although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning, we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering, right?

The reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right and you're doing something which... I'm not willing to concede that it doesn't have meaning.

That the world doesn't have meaning.

You're not sponsored by Samsung, are you?

I want to separate the meaning, though, there from the thing we do. Define meaning. Well, in the thing that you're giving there, it's called the is-ought fallacy, right? It is the case that certain things do this thing, so they ought to be doing it more. So you might run a similar argument.

Imagine you come down to Earth as aliens ages ago, let's say like 30,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food. What are the humans? They just eat sugary food. That's their meaning. That's their purpose or something.

You'd go, no, like the meaning or the purpose of them or their natures isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past. Right. It's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you. It's imposed from elsewhere. It's quite odd to think about what it would be like outside of religious beliefs because that's the problem of agnosticism. It's an absence.

Or better put, I keep saying that the world is meaningless. What I really mean is... It's seemingly meaningless, like it's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be like or it feels like it ought to be. So it's not the case that the world is meaningless. But I think maybe our disagreement here or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is.

I think, as you mentioned earlier, you're quite a fan of these pantheistic views where the world is moving towards a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and the like. So if you hold that view, then, yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning if there is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with.

then, yeah, if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process, then it can be meaningful. But there are problems with that view, too. So I don't want to cash out and go, that is the view. Hence why I embrace the agnosticism.

This view is pretty close to, I think you've had it on the show before, Philip Goff, who's my colleague at Durham. He's currently defending a view just like this, right? He thinks that the fundamental nature of the world is consciousness that is identical to what we should describe as God. And that this is a process by which we're becoming, making the world better.

And we have parts to play in that. And that's what constitutes a meaningful life. So I sort of got two problems.

Like the meaning there for Goff would be something like the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before. And if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful. If you're sat on your ass not doing anything and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then... your life isn't as meaningful as the person.

So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful in this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be.

They weren't the people I had in mind when I said people sat on their ass doing nothing. Well, they are sitting on their ass doing nothing though. Okay, I'll bite the bullet. I'll say there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a Buddhist monk sat on your ass doing nothing. Although, here's the value of what they are doing, right?