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A Universe Empty of Meaning
That’s good news. It means we have a lot of space to fill with significance.
What’s the meaning of existence, life, the universe? I don’t know. You don’t either. If by meaning we mean some supposedly objectively verifiable quality that is completely independent of us, then the universe is completely devoid of it. Anyone who tells you that they do know is being dishonest with both you and themselves.
Having gotten that out of the way, consciousness, among other things, craves meaning. It creates it everywhere it goes. As conscious beings, we’re meaning-making machines. In the absence of anything else to work with, we’ll turn a piece of trash into a treasure trove of significance. We might even turn it into a metaphor for the divine, create a myth to explain its importance, and build a religion around it.
You might think this makes us rather absurd creatures. However, I suspect meaning-making is something all complex life forms in the universe are rather good at to one degree or another. For life to succeed anywhere, some measure of pattern recognition is required. Otherwise, encounters with food and poison would forever remain random events and life couldn’t evolve beyond its simplest forms. When we get right down to it, survival of the fittest is just another way of saying survival of the best…
