What is meaningless?

[pErvinalia]

...not to mention a concept deeply rooted in our relationship with language, our ability to represent the world through language forms, and our apparent desire to communicate that to others.

Can you give me an example of a meaningless thing?

All things lack inherent or objective meaning.

Anything can have subjective meaning to a brain.

Accepting your qualification as relevant, and indeed necessary in terms of what you've said so far, this still did not answer the question nor touch on what I have been saying or which led me to start the topic. Perhaps it can be summed up thus:

• Nihilists find meaning in the lack of inherent or objective meaning of things.

For the nihilist, the declaration that things have no inherent or objective meaning carries some inherent or objective significance as, to them, it is held to reflect a kind of truth about the world - a world in which all things have no inherent or objective meaning. If this wasn't significant to nihilists then there would be no motivation to declare it as reflecting a kind of truth about the world, and isn't this kind of declarative truth statement essentially meaningful?

Sure, but it's subjective, not objective.

Surely sure, it's a subjective concern for the individual nihilist, but it is still presented as a kind if truth about the world, which is an objective concern. After all, 42 was talking about the lack of inherent or objective meaning of all things.

What? This sounds like some form of 'Atheism is religion' argument. Declaring a lack of meaning doesn't imply a presence of meaning. That's nonsensical.

[Forty Two]

I'm reminded of the zen meditation "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" - it's a meditation on the nature of meaning and whether it exists absent consciousness. You're meant to realize that we're meaning-making machines. We cannot apprehend even the simplest of inputs into our consciousness without it being assigned meaning. It's how conscious operating systems work.

Right. Things have no meaning. We assign meaning to them. That's all.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound. But, it doesn't "make a sound" even if someone is there to hear it. All the tree does is fall, and in falling it moves air molecules around and bounce into each other in wave patterns. That happens whether or not someone is there to hear it. However, the "sound" we hear is created by our brains in reaction to the wave patterns of vibrations.

[Jason]

Meaninglessness doesn't "exist." Meaninglessness is the absence of meaning, so it's not a think that exists.

Consciousness assigns meaning, of course. And, the absence of consciousness means there is no assigned meaning.

Meaning is only meaning "to" something. So, things that no conscious being is conscious of have no meaning to those conscious minds. They also have no inherent or objective meaning. Therefore, they are meaningless. That's not to say that meaninglessness exists. To say meaninglessness exists or pointlessness exists is nonsensical. They aren't things. Those words just describe the absence of certain value judgments about things.

Saying this another way -- a universe without any consciousness has no meaning of any kind. It may exist. But, it's existence is meaningless because there is nobody around for whom the universe can have meaning. Things have no inherent "meaning" built into them as such -- meaning is not objective. However, if after 13 billion years a consciousness arises that can assign meaning to things, and does assign meaning to things, then things have meaning to that conscious mind. If multiple conscious minds arise, then any meaning assigned is simply the subjective value judgments of those minds.

It's the same as valuing diamonds. One conscious mind may find them to be so valuable it would be worth killing or risking one's life for. Another conscious mind may view them as useless rocks. They have different values. Meaning is like that. A diamond exists. However, its existence does not entail a meaning. It just exists. Meaning is assigned by minds, and meaning isn't really a thing -- it's just a value judgment - it's an opinion about a thing. Subjective meaning to a mind is the only kind of meaning.

That's right in a universe absent of consciousness everything is meaningless. So? That's like saying in a universe absent mass everything is massless. Silly tautology not worth the effort except to realize a truth about the nature of our existence as conscious beings in time.

[Jason]

I'm reminded of the zen meditation "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" - it's a meditation on the nature of meaning and whether it exists absent consciousness. You're meant to realize that we're meaning-making machines. We cannot apprehend even the simplest of inputs into our consciousness without it being assigned meaning. It's how conscious operating systems work.

Right. Things have no meaning. We assign meaning to them. That's all.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound. But, it doesn't "make a sound" even if someone is there to hear it. All the tree does is fall, and in falling it moves air molecules around and bounce into each other in wave patterns. That happens whether or not someone is there to hear it. However, the "sound" we hear is created by our brains in reaction to the wave patterns of vibrations.

The usefulness of meaninglessness becomes apparent when we want to consciously move outside of our frame of reference to conceive of an unknown (real or imagined) which is then -ironically enough- given meaning in the conception. I cannot conceive of the tree falling in the forest without assigning meaning to it and neither can you.