How are you figuring that meaning (in either sense) is permanent/unchanging? Doesn't at least some meaning shift over time?

I haven't said that particular meanings are permanent, just that meaning itself is permanently present.

So you're just saying that it's a permanent, essential, inseparable attribute of the world that there are meanings . . . as long as people exist? (Which doesn't seem so permanent)

Maybe you're just saying that it's a permanent, essential, inseparable attribute of the "sentent world" or something like that? (Although still "permanent" seems weird to me if we're qualifying it as something that's not permanent in the broader picture)

I'm saying that without people there is no world. But this is not to say there would be nothing at all. It isn't intelligible in any but a purely formal logical sense to say that the things of our experience, namely the world with its entities and relations, exist absent our experience,

So, I am saying that it doesn't make any real sense to make an ontological claim that the things we experience exist in the fullest sense; i.e. as we experience them materially to be, independent of our experience.

Of course in the everyday way of talking it is logical to say that they exist independently of any and all individual experiences; their existence is a collective inter-subjective representation which is independent of any and all individual experiences. How that is possible is not susceptible of analysis, because our language and discursive thought is out of its depth when it tries to penetrate beyond the empirical.

Every sentence of that last comment, pretty much every phrase, seems completely ridiculous to me. I could try to sort it out so that your view that meanings are inherent via intersubjectivity makes some sense to me under the umbrella of your views, but that would likely take way more work than you'd have any patience for, given that I find pretty much all of the above ridiculous.

That's OK, I also find most of what you say ridiculous; so there probably isn't any point in conversing, it's not likely that any point of commonality will ever be reached. It'd just be a case of perennially talking past one another, and time's too precious to waste on that!

Life is 70% ridiculous and 25% horrific and 5% everything else.

So any discussion about the meaning of the meaning of life is by default ridiculous.

We agree on that at least. ;-)

Asking what the meaning of life is asks what its ultimate purpose is, and the answer will be difficult to accept if one denies the existence of any higher power that created a purpose for our existence. If you are of the mindset that nothing we do matters outside of our own fixed bubble of interpretation, but that some just more vigorously push the rock up the hill than others just to watch it roll back down, then, sure, life has no meaning. We're just a random energy form resulting from billions of years of random collisions that now consumes and then exudes for no particular reason. If one day these random collisions result in our complete demise, what could be said of the past billions of years other than it was a cool yet protracted array of cosmic nonsense?

Trying to explain purpose to the godless seems a wasted exercise. None of this is to say that I know the meaning of it all, but if you limit yourself to causative explanations for everything, you necessarily foreclose the possibility of purpose.

Yes, without God there can be no overarching purpose, and even then...there is a distinction between what is understood in the light of deity to be overarching human purpose, and what we might imagine to be the overarching cosmic purpose. The two may only come together if God is understood not to be impossibly remote.

if you limit yourself to causative explanations for everything, you necessarily foreclose the possibility of purpose. — Hanover

hear ye, hear ye

I've always thought that that was an odd question to ask someone other than one's self. What the meaning and or purpose of your life is has little to do with another's response to the question. My guess is that that's why it's hard to ever believe someone else's answer. I know what my meaning and purpose is and it definitely isn't pointless.

Life is definitely without objective meaning, but it is because of this that life can have any meaning we assign to it.

Some seem to get depressed by the lack of a clearly shaped purpose in life, but it has only ever made me feel free to shape my life in the direction I want. A life with objective meaning would be a prison to many people; it is only in a life without meaning that we are truly free.

Al right, I am sick of this secular nihilism.

Here is some purpose to life for everybody to follow, an objective biological telos regarding human flourishing, namely to procreate with a stable long term traditional family.

More than one wife is traditional in some parts of the world. What cultural script should we follow?

If more than one wife is optimal to human flourishing, then so be it.

Al right, I am sick of this secular nihilism.

Here is some purpose to life for everybody to follow, an objective biological telos regarding human flourishing, namely to procreate with a stable long term traditional family. — Emptyheady

I refuse to restrict my life to your standards. I mean if having a "traditional" family is your thing go for it, but doesn't mean my life is defined by your telos.

Life is definitely without objective meaning — Jeremiah

Quite an objective statement!

Quite an objective statement! — Noble Dust

And?

Quite an objective statement! — Noble Dust

And? — Jeremiah

>:O

And seems self-refuting.

And seems self-refuting. — Noble Dust

Then think about it some more.