The universe is mind-boggingly huge. We are very small in comparison.

You forgot to greentext that first paragraph

>>39190241
It's not referring to your perspective.
It's refering to a grand perspective of everything.
To the forces that govern existence you are less than a speck. Your existence is totally without significance and you have absolutely no power.
If you learn a star is about to explode within lethal light year range, you can do nothing except die.

I'm sure you have the power to significantly alter your own life within your scale of reference, but there are scales unimaginably larger.

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>>39190377

So it's about power and control? Is meaning contingent on the maximization of your power and control over all of reality?

>>39190377
But stars are much smaller than the known universe, they too are a speck, and yet the sun gives us life. Do you think the sun is meaningless? The sun has no power, it merely obeys the laws of physics? Does that mean it's without meaning?

>>39190441
Yes.
Events you can't influence can't be said to include you as significant.
You're essentially not there.

>>39190481
Again you're using only a personal scale of significance. You have to depersonalise and understand that yes, at some grand scale, it would make no difference if a certain star was there or not.

Meaning is a wholly alien attribute to the universe because it appears to lack sentient consideration, but if we attribute capacity for meaning to cosmic scale events, then yes, you'd be totally meaningless and beneath perception. As would a star at a certain level of significance.

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>>39190524

So by your logic, the entire observable universe is meaningless since it's probably a lot smaller than the entire universe, which might be infinite? And if it's infinite, doesn't that mean that any given part of it is irrelevant, and thus, by extension, all of it is?

And as such, all of it is?

Is reality only meaningful when you're in full control of it, i.e. God or a similar entity? But then, isn't any individual part of your creation irrelevant since it's such a tiny part of everything as well?

How do you work around this problem?

>>39190619
Meaningless at a large enough scale that I don't inhabit yes.
To me it would be quite meaningful if sufficiently proximate to me.
You seem to be strawmanning me.
Are you a troll?

we will manipulate the universe soon

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>>39190642
>Meaningless at a large enough scale that I don't inhabit yes.

But you're confusing meaning with size once again. Again, galaxy clusters don't matter to us in the same way that we don't matter to atoms. But it doesn't negate the existence of meaning, since it has nothing to do with it.

>To me it would be quite meaningful if sufficiently proximate to me.

Then you sound like you concede what I wrote in the OP.

>You seem to be strawmanning me.

How?

>Are you a troll?

No.

>>39190722
You're refusing to acknowledge the necessity to abandon human scales of relevance, which is misconstruing my argument.
That's a strawman.
When you can have a discussion without doing that, I'll put this thread back in the thread watcher.

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>>39190746

See the pic in the OP - you don't seem to get it. You equate *meaning* with *size differences*.

I'm saying, these are completely different things.

Here's how you sound: "Physical structure X is much larger than physical structure Y. Therefore, Y is largely irrelevant from the perspective of X not just in terms of physical size difference, but also in how much the existence of Y matters in and of itself."

But X being larger doesn't negate the meaning in and of itself of everything that Y is about. THAT is the point.

a big rock could squish a person so the rock is cooler and more interesting
but the moon could stop a big rock even if it went really fast
and the sun could totally beat up the moon
but other stars are bigger than the sun
but there's bigger stuff than stars too

whoa man big picture wooow

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What if it's all useless? What if there's no God, and at the end of time, there will be nothing, and there will have been nothing, ever? Isn't that incredibly depressing? All the joy of the world, all the pain of the world, billions upon billions of stories, undone, it will all have been nothing in the end. How does "life" even exist? How can things be experienced? How does that come about just from collections of atoms? I have been asking all these questions and more since I was a teenager, and I still have found no answer.

If we assume lower things don't matter, from a hypothetical perspective above everything, nothing matters.
Lest you keep yourself from saying anything, you can't separate from everything.

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>Just imagine how small you are in the universe and suddenly your problems will go away because you realize they don't matter in the grand scheme of existence, bro.

Oh, well that just changes everything now, doesn't it?

>>39190241
Yesterday, while on the pot, I had a similar thought.

On the screened-in window I saw a lil' bug. And I was thinking, wow, the world must be SO big to that lil' bug.
>But then I realized I'm not much bigger than it.

Nihilism is often true but it's just not compatible with our brains. Sometimes when I'm anxious I try to think the "hurr just a small space rock" shit but no matter what, your immediate senses are always the most important thing to us, and you can't trick your subconscious.

>>39190241
what is the context? meaning in my life is framed by my own experiences. this is high school level thought experiment, it's just a waste of time. i encourage you to fantasize about dragons and computers instead. only if you ever wanted to find the most depressed, self destructive morons on the planet, you can come back and talk about nihilism/determinism.

hmmm what's this I wonder, I wonder what this is in this youtube video link here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGUNkFf4_6k