Re:With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, th...
by eli_gottlieb on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @12:36PM
(#16317825)
>"Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout.
Yes, it does seem to me that "mu" would be a copout. A binary question about a well-specified (you could say, meaningful, ahaha) concept should not be answered with "mu".
>Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?
No, more that the kind of people who ask "is there a meaning to life?" are underspecifying the word. I think it would be useful to have a companion here to "mu", meaning, "Your question is so vague as to be meaningless."
An easy way to see the issue is to ask: what would it be like (whether that's what we really experience or not) for there to definitively be meaning in life? If you can't answer that, can't ground such a basically humanistic question in even potential human experience, then I charge that the question has become meaningless, and should thus be either refined or discarded.
Yes, it does seem to me that "mu" would be a copout. A binary question about a well-specified (you could say, meaningful, ahaha) concept should not be answered with "mu".
>Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?
No, more that the kind of people who ask "is there a meaning to life?" are underspecifying the word. I think it would be useful to have a companion here to "mu", meaning, "Your question is so vague as to be meaningless."
An easy way to see the issue is to ask: what would it be like (whether that's what we really experience or not) for there to definitively be meaning in life? If you can't answer that, can't ground such a basically humanistic question in even potential human experience, then I charge that the question has become meaningless, and should thus be either refined or discarded.