Why universe, or is there any meaning in this text?
Why universe, or is there any meaning in this text?
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. — Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Is it a given that the universe is meaningless?
There is a short anecdote that may be only apocryphal. One morning during his Annus Mirabilis, Einstein awakened to the news from a distressed friend that 100 or so eminent scholars had come out against his ideas in a joint collection of papers. At this, Einstein was unfazed, instead noting that if his ideas had really been wrong, one paper would have been more than enough to refute them.
Frequently - or practically every time - this question is asked, the prevailing cultural assumption causes an unreflective yes to be given in answer. But it is also just as often said, that it is, as a rule, good to be suspicious. Agreeing with that latter notion in a broad sense (as the narrower senses in which it becomes nonsensical or self defeating to be skeptical do not yet concern us), I intend to scrutinize the idea of a self evidently meaningless universe from the perspective of great philosophers and scientist, as well as looking at the contrary-ness of the proposition, when it is viewed from the perspective of the human experience of truth, beauty, and purpose.
Meaning, what is it anyway?
In the context of the question, a working definition would be purpose, intention, or the presence of semantic (qualitative) information.
But before moving on, I think it would be worthwhile to have the consequences of a negative answer outlined briefly. Say the universe is meaningless, so what?
Well, that's a good question. Not in the sense that we ought to be cowards and shy away from looking underneath our metaphysical beds to see what's really making the world go around, but rather we can by this be realist when we note that everything about this life we experience and participate in, would argue that no it is not meaningless. So to assert, absent some kind of over-awing argument I've never yet seen, that somehow the universe really is meaningless is to be decidedly unreal about it all. Why? A few reasons, but a fundamental one that shouldn't escape our notice is that to make an assertion that invalidates our own ability to know anything, while maintaining that this assertion is known to be the way things really are, is completely contradictory. We don't get to excuse ourselves from the consequences of what we assert and the consequences of this senseless assertion are inherently destructive, not liberating.
Is meaning something we can create for ourselves out of fundamental meaninglessness?
This idea that we can create meaning for ourselves by sheer force of will out of nothing is wrongheaded. No amount of willing can ever make circles into squares. Michelangelo needed the rough but meaningful marble to give the world his work, in like kind every story that's ever persisted down the generations carries with it great glimpses into the objective meaning, whether hewn subtlety or with hammer blows, from the marble of human circumstance. And when this meaning is absent or disrespected the work is markedly of a lesser grade of craft because no good draughtsman can afford to disrespect his or her raw materials.
To begin with, we must take into consideration the parts of man. For, just as each nation reckons by that monetary standard with which it is most familiar, so must we do in other matters. And, of course, man is the animal with which we are all of us the most familiar. — Aristotle
Ex nihilo nihil fit, from nothing nothing comes. The pretense that some kind of local meaning can be conjured as if by a magic spell in a tiny circle against the darkness of a universe of meaninglessness that would surround us if the universe was in fact meaningless is a vain hope. That is not to say that from certain parties it cannot also be considered a noble hope as well, but in recognizing the nobility we only insist more fervently for an explanation of how it can be that our experience of nobility can be somehow rendered absurd by so called fact.
Cui bono?
Also I think it is profitable to contrast our recognition of this nobility with a drop of cynicism. If we have to, as Nietzsche claims, "recognize untruth as a condition of life," and that "all attempts to portray truth are merely fictions masking the will to power," Then what makes one lie better than another? Nothing does or can, so whence cometh the justification for the mockery against those who say the universe has meaning, from those who insist the only truth about it all is that it is meaningless? Who is really, in this circumstance... living their life by fairy tales? It would seem everyone is, no one can escape this shadow, especially the ones who insist that they have.
On one level the recognition that we would need to live by lies inevitably, if the truth wasn't out there is fair enough. But the construal of the human situation to be one of the self deluded masses living in their religious opium smog while the noblest platonic men of gold stems the tide of ignorance is I think truly pretentious, and yet commonplace.
If we're living in a meaningless universe of lies as Nietzsche and many others continue to claim, then surely it is not unreasonable to say that these enlightened stand to gain as much (if not more) psychologically from a delusion that there is no truth as not. After all that is one of the major selling points of this brand: ‘eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we die’, or ‘get all you can while you can’. These sorts of lines are what the nihilistic (often but not always) like to say right before touting their ace-in-the-hole- sexual liberation. If that isn't skin in the game I don't know what is.
Even so, let us grant, for the sake of argument, that these sort are right about this idea of life being pointless. But that being granted, why do they tend to try and stop the corrosion at some place they find convenient. What rationale can be given to not taking one more step to the obvious conclusion... that all of our knowledge as human beings is then, meaningless—a lie. To attack human understanding in any one sphere is to attack the whole, because as one domino falls so will the rest. No sphere of human intellectual endeavor is entirely as insulated from the others as common prejudice has taught people to assume that they are. Period. And not just per Gutenberg. The corrosive force of this alchemical process can't be stopped if it is believed in, though this or that power structure in the degrading social fabric might use to to eat its opponents... for a time, till they are eaten in their turn.
Teleology
An intrinsically meaningful state of affairs is something that doesn't sit well with those who can't abide the idea that anything they could want to do or see done by others might be wrong in a hard and objective way because it doesn't take any regard for what the philosophers call teleology. Or from the more positive side of the question, that anything they might not want to do might nevertheless be the thing they ought to do whether they like it or not!
It really does boil down to a problem with authority in many instances, or at least a problem with an authority that is perceived as not having given a good account of itself. To the extent that the best members of all the various sides of the question don't like the idea of being at the mercy of an authority that would better be described as being a tyranny, well so much the better. But again if there is such a thing as tyranny then there is such a thing as legitimate authority. Anything else reduces to absurdism, it would be absurd to complain about the degradation of authority into tyranny about any issue whatsoever, unless we suppose that legitimate authority, real truth, real meaning, exist. And so I claim those who insist that tyranny is wrong (whether manmade or aliens from the planet GablZuuk 19), are all recognizing that we live in a meaningful world.
Teleology is a word that we don't come across every day, (and given its unsettling implications contra the zeitgeist I think we can all guess why), but the concept is straightforward enough, it means the innate purpose of an entity, and can be used in reference to persons or objects in the world. It should be obvious that there could be no such thing, if the universe (including us) didn't have any intrinsic meaningfulness already sans our own opinion about it.
Here is the inconvenient thing about truth—If the truth, if meaningfulness, exist in the universe... then it can be ignored for a time, but never overcome. And interestingly at the same time as truth stands above it all; it simultaneously is the only thing that can make anyone free. And yet, a lot of thinking these day has misconstrued freedom as being a condition in which the human being is beholden to none, not even truth. Why might this be?
The metaphysical presuppositions that compel human kind to admit by force of syllogism that the universe must be truthless /meaningless are, it is claimed, beyond question by reasonable people. This is false. It is a big lie in excess, in both consequence and cunning, of anything the most ambitious propagandist has made. And why is it so cunning? Because it is so pervasive, it is embedded so deeply into the collective mental make up that its been mistakenly identified as being one and the same with that mental entity.
And why is it so big? Because it flies in the face of the truth's we know, like the inborn ability to grasp say mathematical relationships such as Socrates demonstrated to the skeptic Meno, or the moral knowledge (not emotion, not feeling, but knowledge), or even our intimate self knowledge, our awareness that we can make our own choices and work to correct our misperceptions up to the point of even arguing with ourselves. What creatures are we!
Here it would be best to pause, and keeping the possibility that this idea of a meaningless universe is not a given truth, but a philosophical spike driven into people from external forces, what might loosen the grip this spike has so that it can be extracted?
I think the insight of the some of the great (and others not so much) luminaries would be an intuitive place to start that process, and so that is where we will start, (because if you're still reading, well we're in this together).
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose. —Richard Dawkins
The insight from Dawkins above can be illustrated, have a look below at the difference between this garble of meaningless patternless shapes...
ypnv'vosdbvnm,afкпщытозщвмp;alnkwfp9ey0pca\fjnefmwe;lnebfwefnefuhewlfefnkhbsdcnsdcdsijcndcmvk;osалощзмыцiewygudcj;ovumkfvk'pasdaвыщшмоывзщцзхлsvmks;jviflskmfkef[iepjf;emlfkбюбхщpuiheowkbзщзлущйзсотewjgueiufhl!
...and this sentence you're reading now. The idea that maybe it is unreasonable to dogmatically insist that words on a page could have magically come into existence by themselves, shouldn't garner nearly as much resistance as it tends to, in my book. We all know words here, and we know the work we put into them. Reasoning inductively back from our knowledge of what constitutes meaningful information let us consider the below:
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. — Albert Einstein
To put it in somewhat overly simplistic terms, what Einstein is talking about here, is exactly the same sort of contrast between meaningful words written on pages, and the gobbledygook above, as applied to the universe and our relationship with it. Does this comparison seem inappropriate? It shouldn't, as the whole field of Biosemiotics shows, (the idea that life is based on semiosis, i.e., on signs and codes), the universe is closer to being a book as not.
Einstein recognized that the universe is brimming with meaningfulness, otherwise it would be completely incomprehensible. And yet, we do comprehend it, to the point where it inspired another great mind to say:
You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. —Richard Feynman
And now, let's appeal the case to Darwin:
We see beautiful and curious adaptations everywhere in the organic world. — C. Darwin (What is it with British Biologist and last names beginning with 'D', one does wonder)
And now back to Einstein:
Without belief in the inner harmony of the world there could be no science. — Albert Einstein
Yes, I hope this makes plain that the idea that those who believe in an intrinsically meaningful universe are somehow voodoo sheeple people, is really rather a bridge too far. Those who insist on running over the bridge into the void can do so, but they don't get to tell those who'd rather not, that they're somehow obviously dull knives who just need religious whoo. But all that is for another time, and if you aren't one of those sorts of close minded and overly confident people, forgive me for indulging in calling those who are out.
What further might be taken away here from the testimony of these? I think it is very interesting indeed that Feynman would speak of beauty as if it is something out there in the world that commands our acknowledgement, in this, he is 180 degrees from the Zeitgeist. And that is not incidental or minor in its scope.
It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts. — Henri Poincare
What's this? Yet another eminent voice from another one of the great scientist, those men and women who our culture have granted oh so much epistemological authority too, and yet he is saying something that doesn't at all (it seems to me), jive with the times. Again he is speaking of beauty and the role it plays in our most intricate knowledge of how the world actually works. And here I sense an objection in the minds of some, but what does beauty have to do with meaningful information? To answer this question is no great matter, one need only pay attention to the semantically meaningful communication of birds in the jungle or better still whales in the depths of the ocean as they communicate with one another to realize that beauty is tied in with what is meaningful—it is a feature, not a bug.
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres. — Pythagoras
If objective beauty is real (and I believe it is), that would be points off for the materialist reductionist who argue that beauty is merely something in the eye of the beholder, and that morality is nothing but emotionalism. That is not to downplay that such topics are hard and weighty, and that the questions such objective truth poses to us must be approached with humility, but handwavium and dismissal is not the answer.
