Well, if  a person knew how to change his life into something meaningful, he wouldn't be looking for meaning, since he would already know how to remodel his life to make it meaningful. Usually someone who is trying to escape his life, whether it's the guy at my cousins work who devotes long hours to his work, so he could avoid his nagging wife and spoiled kids, or people who escape through drugs and alcohol, they do so because they don't know how to or a see means to change their lives in a way that it would be a meaningful existence for them.

The question could just as easily be do you find your life meaningful? If so, what is it that makes it meaningful for you? I've encountered numerous people in my life who seem to live rather meaningless existences, people who just go through the motions of living, but unfulfilled and unsatisfied. There's no fortune cookie line to get them out of their rut, and often the solution is not so readily found.  

I have no clue as to what you're trying to mean? Why would a person think that its not up to them to find meaning? Who else would it be up to?

I spent some time trying to answer this post correctly, since language really is a limited tool and me using it in a semi-literate fashion does not make things better. I will have to try to 'entangle' our brains for this one.

We have this weird thing on our hands - somehow particles can enter a mode in which they are each other's opposite and exhibit opposite behaviour simultaneously over distance. There are five types of questions we can ask and attempt to answer:

1) Can we artificially induce this state on arbitrary particles? Can we get information from one particle about the other in a controled environment, like for instance both the wavelength and precise position simultaneously? Can we do this to whole objects, say copy structure and behavior of an apple on the other side of the room? If not, is this just some kind of a hat-trick particles do and means something completely different? ...

2) What does this discovery mean for our existance? What does it say about reality? How should we feel about this new knowledge? ...

3) Is there some new technology comming out of this research and what does it mean for our daily lives? How are we to interpret our role in the world, once some potential tool has altered our beliefs, changed our environment? What are the important social issues to be tackled in this new created reality, like what cellulars or computers brought along? What are the values that we want to keep, or are we to discard? ...

4) Could it be that all places are the same place and this is the ultimate victory of solipsism? Maybe there is a way for my position to win the fight anyway, what are the posibilities in Copenhagen and Bohm's interpretations? Is our team going to be the one to take the Nobel Prize for this or that piece of technology or theory that comes out of this? Am I going to have to listen to I-told-you-so at the office today? ...

5) How can I use this new thing to further my goals? Do my goals change with this new understanding? Can I use this new understanding to get some people on board for my own purpose? Can I hurt my enemies with this new understanding and technology? Should I try to suppress this temporarily, since it hurts my goals? Can I tell a narrative that includes this new piece of information, that would result in some benefit for myself? ...

For me personally, some of the questions in different categories create a sense of urgency, as if I would let something bad happen if I concentrated only on one type. Also some weird new questions come up and I can't really put them in any of the categories in such a way that this anxiety would go away. What do you think?

Ok, so I must admit I was fishing for these kinds of answers to show a point, but secretly hoping that you wouldn't go that way.

Those questions are irrelevant, what is interesting is this feeling of anxiety once you have gone through them - there is something missing from all of them and it has to do with addressing the negative side of just focusing on one type of questions.

Indeed, all of them beg other questions when types are combined. Try reading the third type, which is a sort of social responsibility type. Then go to the fifth type. Than go back to third. There is something missing in the third type, we are just not addressing the issues that arise from asking questions in type 5 concerning the discovery at hand. It's as if we assume we know the environment and know what's what here, and just go on like we are the ones that are running the show. People interested only in type 5 questions do exist and do have an effect on the world, but we are perfectly content with ignoring them or assuming that we know all about them.

So, we continue talking past each other.

Can you imagine it being any other way?

Well, if you can imagine it being any other way, what makes you pick a particular understanding is the common human inability to look at things out of the box. It's pretty clear that we can not answer a question like: where does the undevisible particle come from, since we instantly need to know what it's comprised of. And there are infinite questions of the sort. Materialistic view is infinite recursion, we can't get away from that.

Our understanding does not contain 90% of what there is, and the 10% is just the few holes we need to fill. Much more likely we understand 0,00001% or less of what there is to understand, and the rest can change our view completely a billion times over.

To say it in datalogical terms: we have pretty good heuristics, but we don't have the algorithm. To assume that universe is deterministic is to assume that you know the algorithm.

It's not baseless at all. Physicalism itself is a slight move away from materialism, and there will be many to follow. In a couple of years you will prefer another term. The string theory for instance is as far from empiric science as you get in the scientific world, yet many physicists are working hard on the pure theory of it.

Our way to see things really does end in infinite recursion. I don't think you will find anyone that doesn't think renormalisation is something we would like to get rid of, but which is necessary to make our most precise calculations make sense.

I try not to be a retard. It is hard when faced with problems in which you have to drop your perspective, just to understand the basics. Somehow I feel I was made to be a retard, having experience of only one mode of this phenomenon called "time" for example.

I suggest we keep in mind that our heuristics at best model the world, they don't explain it. We would like to explain things with our heuristics, but if the explanations can have bad consequences (social Darwinism where it's ok to be a winner at all costs; clockwork universe where nothing really matters since it's all written down already; afterlife where it's not as bad to kill people, since they live after death) I think we should just flat out slap ourselves, drop the explanation and go back to discovery.

One consequence of clockwork universe is this notion that the best we can hope for is finding meaning each for our selves, since there really can't be meaning in mathematical predictability. Humans just don't work that way. We would do well to recognize the threat of the need for meaning. This is a divide-and-conquer opportunity for anyone who would like to explain to us what our interests really are. I don't care for it.

Back to the questions I presented you with a few posts ago - combine any type with type 5 questions, and anxiety arises. Like a fear that we really are bullshitting ourselves, helping bad people do bad things, merely by giving up on meaning and leaving it to bad people to fill in the holes with some fascist ideology. We can do better than that.

BOOOM

You have no idea how much satisfaction I just gleaned from destroying your post, Luminon.

Theists aren't allowed to post in here.

Have an awesome day.

 - Kevin R Brown

Recommended reading:

The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom

Well i'm new to this but I'll give my thoughts.

The meaning of life is to reproduce. Nothing more, nothing less. The problem comes when you add consciousness (correct spelling??) to this. What does "meaning" in this sense mean anyway?  I think what people get at when they say "meaning of life" is they are looking for a task/mission/job etc etc. It's almost like they are saying "right, i'm alive, what do you want me to do now?" and the response being "live your life!" and them saying "to what aim?". We humans I guess need some direction....

Enter Bible!!! lol

A meaning of life, in my eyes, is a bit of a waste of time. If I have children I'll have done my bit. However I intend to have a meaning IN life. I hope to live a life a life I enjoy with people I enjoy being around. If I wanna watch football all afternoon in my pants, i'm gonna. If I wanna run for breast cancer, I'm gonna. If I wanna stay up till 11:30 writing on a website to you fine people, I'm gonna. Call me selfish but thats my MEANING OF LIFE!! lol