Quote from: the joint on October 23, 2013, 09:44:32 PM

I'm saying it's a leap of faith if you believe the Universe is inherently meaningless. Saying it's meaningless but then giving your own desires and sufferings any significance is just a non-sequitur. There can be no logical justification for anything in a meaningless Universe. If you assert that set x is meaningless and set x contains set y, set y is therefore also meaningless. You should have no business talking about what's good or bad for you in a meaningless Universe.

As was mentioned, the question isn't whether the universe is meaningless, but to whom is it meaningless. It has a lot of meaning to those people with the pleasure and pain centers who are following the actions they were wired for, but it's pretty much meaningless to the rest of it's planets, stars, and existence in general.

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Saying you 'just happen' to be wired a certain way is like saying it 'just happens' that everything in the Universe adheres to mathematical laws...as if it were some kind of fluke. Given that mathematical laws are meaningful, it's self-evidently the opposite.

I guess in this case it depends on your definition of meaningful. Plus, fluke implies that it could/should have happened one way, but turned out to happen another way. With the universe, it just happened. If there are other universes, things likely happened differently there. So, it's not so much a fluke as just inevitability. I'm not sure that mathematical laws are meaningful, either. Again, to whom? We think they are meaningful, because they help us understand the universe and create awesome tech gadgets. The universe doesn't really care. And if the laws were diffferent, some other inteligent creatures would have likely found them meaningful in some other way, while the rest of the universe would just continue to exist.
So, maybe you're ascribint some definition of meaningful to mean "it isn't just random, it's specific, has meaning, can be used to exchange information," and I'm not sure what the goal of that is (for a creationist, that would be proof of inteligent design), but I don't think they are meaningful, or even significant, beyond our own personal interests.