10/15 Our Meaning

This question is kind of ridiculously vague. So what is the question even? It's just two words. actually it's not a question. What I'm going to take it to mean is what is the meaning of us, our species, humans.

That question implies that there is a meaning, which is itself questionable. It's like this: When you're making a computer program, before you do anything, you have to tell it to "include" a bunch of other code and programs for what you're saying to make sense (true story; im in computer science ONE!). So this question only makes sense in the context of the general human assumptions that:

1. Meaning exists.
2. We have meaning.
3. We can know our meaning.

So first off, what even IS meaning and how do we know it exists? I'm not going to go to the dictionary for this. Actually I will....

"the end, purpose, or significance of something"


Actually that doesn't really help. "End", "purpose," and "significance" are all equally human and equally questionable synonyms for the original word. When you can't really define something it's best to look at what it does, and what the actual function of the concept is. So what does "meaning" do for us? Well, when something is meaning-LESS, we feel like we shouldn't bother doing it. Something without meaning shouldn't bother to exist. As in, there has to be a reason for something to exist for it to..... bother existing. Ok wait.

Cause and effect, which makes a lot of sense, says that EVERYTHING that happens has a CAUSE.

I just said that we don't do things that are meaningless. Meaningless things shouldn't bother existing.

If everything that exists has a cause, why would it not also have a meaning? How could you possibly distinguish between meaning and cause?

Well meaning means that something has a goal at some time in the FUTURE. That it's going to do something. That there's a plan to its action. But ultimately, in the universe, I don't think we can distinguish between an event's cause and its implications and effects. Although cause and effect flow forward through time, I don't think it's really two distinct concepts; it's all part of the same event. So the meaning of anything, then, is the same as the cause, and the same as the effect; it's all implied and tangled up in the same event which we can only faintly distinguish from all the other events ever. So an event's meaning is implicit in its very existence.

I got confused, so I'm basically saying that everything has meaning. Or that nothing does. I don't know.