*promote

No matter how many of his talks I watch, I always learn something new. Thanks Sean and thanks @kulpims!

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 2:23pm PDT - promote requested by messenger.

You'll notice he never actually gave a reason why one particular version of reality should be preferred to another. He gave an example of choosing to support gay marriage to create a fair and just society, which of course are value judgments about the ideal way to live. There is no reasoning as to why we should make those judgments in the first place. All he said was, if you realize that we are the final arbiters of right and wrong (which isn't true, but for the sake of argument I'll concede this), "chances are" that you would be more apt to choose gay marriage than not. That is simply another unsubstantiated value judgment, and does not provide a foundation of reasoning to support the conclusion; namely, that we can derive meaning and purpose from telling stories about molecules in motion. That this idea of extracting meaning from cold, dead matter will ever be anything more than a morass of personal preferences arbitrarily defined by a group consensus, the definition being subject to change at any time according to the whims of its members. I advance that if meaning itself is subject to our whims, then there is no actual meaning to anything after all, and the only solution left is nihilism.

Well, yeah, that's essentially what he said. There's no meaning to life apart from what we meaning we give it. Some people find that depressing. Some, like myself, do not. Let's just have a bit of craic!>> ^shinyblurry:

You'll notice he never actually gave a reason why one particular version of reality should be preferred to another. He gave an example of choosing to support gay marriage to create a fair and just society, which of course are value judgments about the ideal way to live. There is no reasoning as to why we should make those judgments in the first place. All he said was, if you realize that we are the final arbiters of right and wrong (which isn't true, but for the sake of argument I'll concede this), "chances are" that you would be more apt to choose gay marriage than not. That is simply another unsubstantiated value judgment, and does not provide a foundation of reasoning to support the conclusion; namely, that we can derive meaning and purpose from telling stories about molecules in motion. That this idea of extracting meaning from cold, dead matter will ever be anything more than a morass of personal preferences arbitrarily defined by a group consensus, the definition being subject to change at any time according to the whims of its members. I advance that if meaning itself is subject to our whims, then there is no actual meaning to anything after all, and the only solution left is nihilism.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.