You just build in meaning from the get go, by fusing purpose into what the simulation 'is'. There is only a problem of creating meaning because we killed God, and so the universe isn't inherently meaningful as a purposeful creation. Since a simulation is in fact created by purposeful beings, you wouldn't have that problem.

In a book title and author forgot, the author demonstrates the ease with which a toy can be wired to operate in such a way that its operation seems indistinguishable from behaviour guided by intelligence, simple for simple wiring, but quickly becoming complex and sophisticated seeming. And by now most of us have seen videos of dancing robots, and of robots conversing. Programming is a very concrete activity, and to program "meaning" means meaning has to be very concretely defined. That is, to start, one must make some decisions. What might be some of yours, or even how might you start to define meaning? In programming such things must be built from the ground up.

The question to me that arises here is: is there free will or not? Are we going to let these human-like beings have the ability to choose what they do and not do or are they going to be given an allotment of choices after every action like a spreadsheet of possibilities?

Meaning, at least in my opinion, will be non-existent unless the creator programs it or the human-like beings create their own meaning...

how is meaning created — Wheatley

Drawing correlations between different things.

Some meanings or meanings for some beings in this world can come from free will or no free will. If no free will, you are the creator of everything that happens to these beings, therefore, meaning can persist in what you program to happen. If there is free will, then those beings can either subscribe to what meaning your program or not, but even in doing that they can then have the OPTION to make their own meaning or not.

Pain can't be realised in a computer, because computers are not organic. Pain means 'suffering' and 'hurt'. Even the simplest creatures will shrink from it. So, arguably, meaning is present in terms of pain-avoidance even in the most basic forms of living creatures. Plainly the ability to construe meaning is immensely elaborated in humans, but the underlying rationale of avoiding pain still continues to operate. And that is real in the sense of somatic, embodied, and therefore apodictic, can't be denied. Whereas if you regard 'meaning' as an artificial construct, then sure, it has no connection to reality.

Typically, individuals create a sense of purpose or meaning based on their biology, upbringing, education, culture, life experience. It can be theistic, atheistic, altruistic, selfish or a combination of all of that.

So, to the question of "programming" a singular sense of meaning or purpose - it largely depends on the ability to control all these conditions: upbringing, biology, culture, life experience - so that you can assure that each individual is getting the exact same thing (which is impossible even in a small family).

However, the closer to our biology, evolution or baser instincts the "idea" is, the easier it will be to program.

So, you could for example say that the "meaning" of life is to enhance pleasure - then it will be easy to accept because we naturally prefer pleasure over pain.

If it's not possible to program meaning into the simulation under any scenario, then how is meaning created in our 'real' world (assuming there is)? — Wheatley

Doesn't this hinge on what you mean by meaning? From one perspective, as embodied animals we are drowning in meaning. It feels good if X and it hurts if Y. Beyond the simple animal stuff, we want to feel like part of a community, believe in our work, and so on. Give people this, and most of them don't notice an absence of some other kind of meaning.

IMO, the crisis of meaning that people often mention on philosophy forums quietly involves time. Nothing endures. Everything is vulnerable. Is a contempt for vulnerability central here? Is the lack of meaning the lack of a hiding place or perfect suit of armor?

At what price can the deeper-meaning-seeker be bought? Eternal, indestructible youth in an earthly paradise? Is this particular crisis of meaning a frustration that one is not and cannot be a young god?
Some religions promise something like this in another world, and even down here some can revel in their youth and forget their vulnerability for awhile (forgetting also the lack of meaning.)

IMO, the crisis of meaning that people often mention on philosophy forums quietly involves time. — five G

It springs from the widespread acceptance that life is a fluke and we're products of an accident. Death of God, and all.

A fresh perspective to an old issue. If it were up to me i.e. if I were the coder I would want the simulated people to possess real, objective liberties - free will?? I'm averse to the idea of giving people meaning they didn't choose for themselves. That said, I would like to ensure an overall structure to the simulation, not necessarily a specific, clear-cut purpose but with a just a hint of form that would, quite naturally, give the simulation a nebulous meaningfulness and just a hair's breadth away from meaningless randomness.

As is obvious, I'm trying to balance freedom with meaning as the too seem at odds with each other. If I give meaning then I take away freedom. If I give freedom I take away meaning.

Also, I would make it a point to give simulated people freedom, as much as is possible given the limits of the computing power, and what if even when this has been achieved people still look for meaning at a level that would require my (the programmer's) intervention at a much larger scale than the simulated people themselves. Does all life consciousness seek meaning? Is the thirst for meaning an inevitable consequence of consciousness, the kind we're familiar with? An open question.

It springs from the widespread acceptance that life is a fluke and we're products of an accident. Death of God, and all. — Wayfarer

Let's say that plays a big role. I still think it misses something. Would deism help with the crisis of meaning? To some degree, I guess. If there were clearly a higher being, we could worship that being sincerely, assuming we saw it is wiser than us and benevolent.

But if there were just a creator who left us to our own devices? And we were still mortal?

I relate to a contempt for flatland. Something in humans want to transcend the human, or at least transcend the settled and the banal. In the brave new world of sensual pleasure the human mind would perhaps find itself creating problems for itself, taking a perverse pleasure in its restlessness (or, a cynic might say, playing ever more complicated status games in the symbolic realm.)

life is a fluke — Wayfarer

Is life a fluke? I remember an a senior in college once telling me that the evidence for god is the order that's apparent in the universe. I was young then and I was impressed with what he said about how all the planets revolve around the sun in an orderly, mathematically precise, manner. I'm sure he mentioned our beloved solar system only as a stepping stone to, in effect, cover the entire cosmos itself, displaying a regularity which, to him, was impossible without the participation of an intelligent being, God.

I hadn't read logic back then but I recall being troubled by a particular aspect of his claim. Is it that,

1. order implies god

or

2. god implies order

???

If it's 1 then sure his argument is as good as any but what if it's 2?

If I had to prove 1 then I'd have to prove that all cases where there's order, there's always intelligence involved (god). That, prima facie, seems acceptable until we come to the realization that to hold this to be true is a petitio principii - you're presupposing god's causal association with order.

If it's 2 then we can't conclude that god exists from order.

A penny for your thoughts.

Does all life consciousness seek meaning? Is the thirst for meaning an inevitable consequence of consciousness, the kind we're familiar with? An open question. — TheMadFool

I think we can see a spectrum in human affairs. We can see humans arranging things to stay warm, stay fed, etc. And this we can also see in animals. But we don't see beavers building the pyramids. We don't see them arranging a dam so beautiful that they hope it will be remembered forever by all the beavers to come. And I don't think that we think that beavers imagine some radically different world.

You mention consciousness. Perhaps we have to add a vivid imagination, including that of the past and more importantly the future.

One last issue is envy. Maybe a beaver can envy the dam of another beaver or even its mate. But humans can envy in such intricate and surprising ways. I propose that the complexity of our pursuit of status is tied up with this. Some men committed suicide when they weren't allowed to join this or that war because they were medically unfit. I can also imagine a rich artist envying the talent of a poor, unknown artist, because that rich artist has taste enough to see what the world can't. Or one human can envy the tragic backstory of another, envy its negative glamour. And so on.

we don't see beavers building the pyramids. We don't see them arranging a dam so beautiful that they hope it will be remembered forever by all the beavers to come — five G

Beavers are not pretentious. They have accepted that they are fundamentally cool and so are comfortable remaining at that level, therefore, as they have found true balance in themselves, feel no urge to seek a radically different world.

We could do worse than to aspire to the Zen state of the beaver.

Beavers are not pretentious. They have accepted that they are fundamentally cool and so are comfortable remaining at that level, therefore, as they have found true balance in themselves, feel no urge to seek a radically different world.

We could do worse than to aspire to the Zen state of the beaver. — Book273

I agree. But can we manage it? Instead I imagine humans competing to see who can seem the most zen.

It's as if any good thing has a kind of surface or shadow that can be caught up in the same anxious play for proximity to it, whatever it happens to be.

Having said that, I think we all sometimes really do enjoy the zen of the beaver. (You might say that we are only metaphysically human in a state of angst [Kojeve talks about something like this.] )

Gophers also have managed an admirable state of Zen.

And no, as a species we are far from achieving a Zen state.

:ok: :up:

Is life a fluke? — TheMadFool

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. — Bertrand Russell, A Free Mans Worship

One of Russell's earliest essays, published just after the turn of the century ~ 1901.

I think the reigning consensus has been that life is the outcome of chance as distinct from providential design or divine creation during the last century. That is one of the major grounds of the so-called 'culture wars'.

In that Russell quote a big deal is made of personal annihilation and the second and arguably greater death of the species itself. This second death means that individuals cannot escape death by storing their genius in works of art and science that will survive them -- or in the more usual vessel of descendants.

Our madness is strangely our glory and our privilege. Give humans time, and they will revolutionize their environment and their lifestyle, until it's normal for them to video-conference with humans on the other side of the globe or worry about terrorists with dirty bombs or the onset of an AI-perfected surveillance state.

What is the individual's fantasy these days? To disrupt, change the world, getting credit for something new and important. Anti-zen is something like our religion. I can't simply rebel or complain because even that rebellion and complaint must be original and disruptive in order to be good. In a certain sense rebellion is conformity in systematized permanent revolution.

Free Man's Worship sets some of the major themes for 20th century philosophy and literature. Existentialism, death-of-God, the Universe as a blind mechanism. That's the context for meaning and meaninglessness. Jacques Monod, Nobel winning biochemist and staunch atheist - 'chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.' However it might be noted that Brandon Carter's paper on the Cosmic Anthropic Principle suggests rather a different picture. The question also should be asked whether 'chance' is an hypothesis at all.

Beavers are not pretentious. — Book273

They're critters. They have no self to save.

Maybe the common thread is the fear that life is not going anywhere. Don't people want an unambiguous sense of indestructible progress? If evolution is directed by trans-human intelligence, then presumably it is going somewhere, and one can perhaps participate in (or at least adore) this trans-human intelligence.

Along the same lines, thinking the heat death or just the death or sun suggests a blind machine unimpressed by what humans call progress.

Does the demystification of rulers figure into this? We want to believe that genuine, noble adults are in control. In the age of Nero, Christians had a secret king who was at least on his way. If the world is not run by holy or rational or noble adults, then one has instead a vision of the runaway machine.

Since a simulation is in fact created by purposeful beings, you wouldn't have that problem. — ChatteringMonkey

Let's imagine that our world is a simulation created by humans who are more technologically advanced. If they are ethically no better than us but only have more power, would that really satisfy our need for meaning?

How has the idea of God comforted people, given them a sense of meaning? It seems to me that God 'has' to be adorable in order to function. Think of a son wanting to grow up and be like his good father, who seems not only full of love but also full of power and knowledge. Anything confusing or questionable in the world can be explained in terms of the son's incomplete education.

If all we have for a god is a confused older brother, on the other hand,...

Since a simulation is in fact created by purposeful beings, you wouldn't have that problem.
— ChatteringMonkey

Let's imagine that our world is a simulation created by humans who are more technologically advanced. If they are ethically no better than us but only have more power, would that really satisfy our need for meaning?

How has the idea of God comforted people, given them a sense of meaning? It seems to me that God 'has' to be adorable in order to function. Think of a son wanting to grow up and be like his good father, who seems not only full of love but also full of power and knowledge. Anything confusing or questionable in the world can be explained in terms of the son's incomplete education.

If all we have for a god is a confused older brother, on the other hand,... — five G

This is an angle I hadn't exactly in mind, but sure. I think all that is needed that people believe in him, so he needs to be believable for it to work. There have been all kinds of different gods historically people believed in, good, evil, neutral etc... The problem, in relation to believing in a god anyway, in our current age is our commitment to empirical truth and scientific advancement. So I think it has more to do with the general cultural climate, than what a particular God looks like... but being all powerful, all knowing and infinitely good probably helps, yes. Though the pantheon of Greek gods weren't exactly all that perfect or impeccable, and that seemed to work alright.

I think the meaning people generally seek, is feeling part of some greater (cosmic) plan. If God created the universe, then you have such a plan because presumably he created it with a purpose.

The problem, in relation to believing in a god anyway, in our current age is our commitment to empirical truth and scientific advancement. So I think it has more to do with the general cultural climate, than what a particular God looks like... but being all powerful, all knowing and infinitely good probably helps, yes. — ChatteringMonkey

I know what you mean about the climate. I'd like to believe in a good God, but I just can't. I had some belief when I was younger, and there was something nice (if also eerie) about a consciousness who could witness and care about every detail of my life and consciousness. If you have real faith in a benevolent God, you are never truly alone.

I do still find it hard to make sense of an evil god, except as an enemy of the good god which is actually worshiped. What I can make sense of is a conception of the big bad world in its entirety as a metaphorical god, but then the relationship becomes ambivalent. Or there is the strange vision of God as presented in the book of Job, a glorious and powerful God who is beyond human notions of good and evil.

I think the reigning consensus has been that life is the outcome of chance as distinct from providential design or divine creation during the last century. That is one of the major grounds of the so-called 'culture wars'. — Wayfarer

My hunch, for what it's worth, is that all this talk of "life [the universe included] is an outcome of chance" by scientists and their ilk is, far from being even half an explanation, a smokescreen that conceals the truth, the truth that we have no clue as to how the universe, life, came to be.

To say that something, say x, occured by pure chance is simply to assert that many possibilities existed and that one of them actualized. That's all that the notion of chance/probability achieves - it doesn't, in any way, inform us why one possibility and not the others actualized and that's precisely the question that should've been answered if chance were a good alternative to a creator-god explanation for the existence of the universe.

Give it a moment's thought. Firstly possibilities are true for a creator-god too: there were many options available and a creator-god chose one of them and here we are. This feature of probability - possibilities - inheres in all creation including divine creation. Secondly, why one of the possibilities (in our case this universe the one in which we exist) became a reality isn't explained by chance for the simple reason that to do so would require those who claim it does to demonstrate how this universe is more likely to exist than not but that's a piece of information which, to my knowledge, we don't have. Were it that we possessed this knowledge, the matter would've been settled a long, long time ago.

I think the meaning people generally seek, is feeling part of some greater (cosmic) plan. If God created the universe, then you have such a plan because presumably he created it with a purpose. — ChatteringMonkey

I agree with you about participation in the cosmic plan. The only hitch is that maybe humans could resent and rebel against the plan of a god they considered evil. Or perhaps they obey out of fear of Hell or some other punishment. That makes the world a kind of prison, and casts God as the worst tyrant ever.

It's possible that I'm thinking from humanist prime directives that I just can't see around. For 'us,' a god must make sense, be rational, and seem virtuous by human standards in order to 'truly' be god and not just some powerful alien tyrant or inscrutable, cold machine.

Thoughts?

It springs from the widespread acceptance that life is a fluke and we're products of an accident. — Wayfarer

Accident presupposes intent, purpose, reason...

My hunch, for what it's worth, is that all this talk of "life [the universe included] is an outcome of chance" by scientists and their ilk is, far from being even half an explanation, a smokescreen that conceals the truth, the truth that we have no clue as to how the universe, life, came to be. — TheMadFool

I’m kind of with you, but I’m also very reluctant to endorse anything associated with intelligent design.

The way I frame is, as I’ve said before, is that excluding ideas of ‘divine creation’ is required by naturalism as a matter of principle. However, methodological naturalism should by the same token not try and peer behind the curtain, as it were; naturalism ought to be circumspect with regards to philosophical ultimates.

Scientific method excludes the Aristotelian ‘final cause’ - the ‘why’ of things - in any sense other than the functional or instrumental. But saying that science ‘proves’ or ‘shows’ that there is no such principle as a final cause is a bridge too far. That is one of the things science ought to be circumspect about.

Regarding the ‘cosmic plan’ - the notion of ‘dharma’ is that the particular role you play or part you perform is a reflection of the cosmic dharma. Dharma is at once a cosmic law and an individual duty. Such a concept is sorely missing from current cultural discourse.