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March 8, 2015 07:31
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I think that the whole controversy of meaning is quite interesting (aren't we just so philosophical)! I would argue | |
that perhaps a mind capable of creating meaning does actually have intrinsic meaning in that it possesses meaning | |
within itself, if only for itself (to get back into the somewhat paradoxical strange loop/recursion idea). | |
That's not to say that it has extrinsic meaning outside of that person's own mind, and maybe that's the only kind | |
of meaning that matters! Who can say. The Nihilist in me is squirming at my use of semantics to create a sense of | |
hopeful reassurance that my life matters, when really I am not sure! I suppose it comes down to the fact that I | |
don't believe there is a way to know, which also sheds light on why I am agnostic rather than atheist when it comes | |
to religion. Maybe it's a bit of a cop-out, a way to allow my mind to not deal with a wholly meaningless universe, | |
but it just feels wrong to fully dismiss something that we know so little about, and maybe can never fully comprehend! | |
I don't know if you read that paper I sent you on the 'harm done by tests of significance,' but it dealt with | |
the idea that when experimental data isn't concluded to be statistically significant (below some relative p-value), | |
paper authors would mistakenly assert that the null-hypothesis was true. In other words, simply because they did | |
not see any significant meaning or connections in the data, they positively assert that there is no meaning in | |
the data whatsoever. Long story short, this leads to incorrect assumptions and conclusions because an absence of | |
evidence should not, and maybe cannot, prove evidence of absence. A positive claim should, in my opinion be backed | |
up by positive evidence proving that point specifically. This idea permeates into so many interesting topics: | |
religion, consciousness, induction itself! I guess a caveat to this is that it's important to remember to know | |
when to say when, at some point we have to accept some things as true and move on. Sometimes there is enough | |
negative evidence that it's absolutely safe to assume - 'good enough' - but in the case of 'meaning' and | |
consciousness...I don't think that we know enough, or have amassed enough negative evidence yet, to say | |
positively that 'it doesn't exist'! |
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