The meaning of life can only be felt

A common issue with people who believe life is meaningless is that they are unwilling to accept that life can be meaningful unless a logical proof of universally objective meaning is provided. This will never materialize, but that does not mean that “meaning” does not exist.

You are a manifestation of the universe observing itself, so by definition life is precisely as meaningful as you decide it is. If you decide life is meaningless, it objectively is. If you decide life is meaningful, it objectively is. To clarify: it isn’t so much the decision, as the feeling. If you create something that helps others, witness something beautiful, or fall deeply in love, and you feel an unassailable spark of meaning in your heart, then that spark is objectively real. Considering you are objectively the universe, and you are feeling what to you feels like objective meaning, then meaning objectively exists in the universe, and thus the universe is objectively meaningful.

One might point out that this implies that the universe is both objectively meaningful, and objectively meaningless at the same time, and that this logical contradiction means my conjecture is false. On the contrary, I believe wholeheartedly that it is entirely possible for two things to be the exact opposite of one and other, and both objectively true. The answer to a question entirely depends on the context in which one asks the question (or in our case here: the perspective), and there are a provably infinite number of contexts in which one could choose to ask questions, or posit answers. The following is a hypothetical example of true, but mutually exclusive statements.

Suppose we are sitting across the table from each other, with a handgun between us. We are engaged in a deep philosophical conversation about whether or not the gun is real. Through our common effort, we are able to prove the gun is not real on two accounts; the first being that our common perception of the gun consists of some set of information that has been gathered and locally reconstructed within our minds, but this set is an infinitesimally small subset of the total set of information associated with the “true” object of the gun, thus our perceived gun is to the “true” gun, as a single pixel of “A Starry Night” is to the entire painting. Second, we also find an irrefutable quantum mechanical proof that our entire reality is a holographic projection of a holographic projection of a holographic projection, and that in fact, all reality is a zero dimensional spatial point, with one dimension of time; a Turing machine that is ticking off a simulation of our universe over an arbitrarily long period of time, one Planck voxel at a time.

Having arrived at a satisfactory proof that the gun is objectively not real, I pick up the gun and shoot you in the arm.

Thus, as counterintuitive as it is, the gun now exists in two, seemingly contradictory states of being at the exact same time. It is both objectively not real (just proven), and it is both objectively real (are you really going to claim otherwise? I just shot you in the arm!). Note that the important point isn’t whether my proofs that the gun isn’t real are valid, it is that seemingly contradictory/mutually exclusive statements can both be objectively true or false, depending on the context they exist in.

In his book, “More Than Allegory”, Bernardo Kastrup makes a similar point that two seemingly mutually exclusive truths may indeed both be true, in so far as they are true, but incomplete representations of a higher truth. For instance, imagine that a cylinder metaphorically represents some higher truth. The shadow of a cylinder at a certain angle may seem to be a two dimensional rectangle. Rotate the cylinder, and it might now appear as a two dimensional circle. If Bob looked for the truth and found a circle, and Mary looked for the truth and found a rectangle, does the fact that they found fundamentally different things mean that they are both wrong? Of course, Kastrup also make the point [I’m paraphrasing] that there is no reasonable angle a cylinder could be rotated such that it would cast a nearly endless set of strange shadows, and thus we should be able to discount some truly absurd ideas (for example: the idea that I am standing behind you right now), however, given we cannot see the metaphorical cylinder, we can never truly know with absolute certainty what is true and what isn’t.

It follows that one must then ask what the objective and true context is. The existence of such a context is a ludicrous idea, as any context we posit must necessarily be defined within some other arbitrary context in turn, and we invariably find ourselves in a classic stack of turtles situation. I suspect the closest we might have to the “true” context might be the “context” of mathematics. Even then, what is the mathematical function to choose whether to kill five very old people or one baby? One might speak in a utilitarian sense, in which case the question simply becomes an optimization problem, but then we are forced to reconcile with exactly what we are trying to optimize, and that (as far as I know), cannot be addressed mathematically, as any definition of utility necessarily derives from the domain of the subjective experience of conscious entities.

Thus, if you want a universally true and completely objective rigorous definition of what “the meaning of life” is, you probably need to be:

A) An omniscient God who exists entirely independent from our universe.

and

B) Willing to destroy our universe, and create a new one with entirely different fundamental laws, such that the question posed makes sense.

However, from the point of view of a human, it makes precisely as much sense to claim that the universe is meaningful, as that it is meaningless. Pragmatically, the faux-intellectual belief that the universe is objectively meaningless is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and why would anyone in their right mind choose to believe their life is not meaningful?