BUT ... WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Does Life (with a capital L) have any meaning? The following argument delineates my response to this highly popular question:
To set the table, I must begin with the reminder that there is a calculus of limits inherent in any explanatory process. All physics eventually fades to metaphysics. Consequently, the complete absence of meaning is inevitable. But even in this there may be some logic:
Statement 1 (the primary thesis): There is no meaning.
Statement 2: There are no reasons. This is statement 1 couched in different words. To say that there are no reasons is the same as saying that there is no meaning.
Statement 3: If statement 1 is true, then the statement itself has no meaning (and is therefore false). This represents the most typical response to statement 1, and at face value appears to be perfectly valid. Its falsity becomes evident, however, if we somewhat clarify the statements:
Statement 1 expanded: There is no meaning = A.
Statement 2 expanded: There are no reasons = A.
Statement 3 expanded: If statement 1 is true, then the statement itself has no meaning = NOT A. Statement 3, in other words is NOT statement 1 couched in different words. It is an altogether different statement. (It is something other than statement 1.) Only A (or the equivalent of A) equals Truth. This is the primary thesis. All other statements, whether we call them NOT A, or B (or whatever), are false. There are very likely many equivalents of A. For example, consider Statement 4:
There is no knowledge. This is also the same as statement 1. If knowledge existed, there would be meaning in the universe. By knowledge I of course refer to pure knowledge, not the practical knowledge of the material world (which, however, when examined closely, is easily seen to be not so much knowledge as sensation. Properly speaking, we do not have knowledge of the physical world so much as the sensation of it). In the non-physical world (the domain of the abstract) there is no sensation, except perhaps for the sensation of that which we call our feelings (also sensations that are themselves traceable to physical activity in the nervous system, an undeniable physical object). The world of the abstract is filled with nothing but words, period. There may be awareness of ideas, but not the objects that the ideas suggest, making said ideas nothing more than words. We are not aware of God, in other words, we are only aware of the word God.
Statement 5: Everything (in the realm of human behavior) is ultimately reducible to taste and/or desire. This is also the equivalent of statement 1. Desire and taste have no rational explanations (as in the saying, "There's no accounting for taste"). They are built-in features of our biological machinery. It is true that certain desires are affected by social programming, but the very acquiescence to such programming is itself traceable to the DNA, what we might call the nature of the beast, which prefers raw meat for no reasons worthy of the name, but merely because it is genetically engineered to want it. Thus the answer to the ubiquitous (and infamous) question about whether or not life has any meaning must ultimately be a negative one. So far as we know (to the extent that we are able to sense) there is only matter and energy in the universe, appearing in a multitude of forms, one of which is human language. Within the context of human language meaning does indeed exist, if only as a word. We may extract and elucidate various types of meaning between the words we have invented (linguistic meaning), usually a meaning that is somehow an association of one word with another (or perhaps several others). We should never forget, however, that we made up the whole language process. In contrast, we did not invent the universe. It invented us (as it were).
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