What I have is a response policy to other folks behavior – including subjective verbal production. When someone tells me they ‘believe’ in Thor I can only try to discern compliance with Norse ethics and morality as evidenced by their behaviors. I can only respond to what they do. I don’t believe in meaning – I respond to meaning. I don’t believe in belief – I respond to the behavior of the professed believer. Believe it or not.

So it is with behaviorally and verbally expressed intentional states and their objects (e.g., my beliefs, desires, purposes and hopes as an individual): whether or not neural states represent propositionally (and it isn’t clear they don’t at some level), attributed intentional states play an ineliminable role in explanations of human (and some other animal) behavior that permit reliable prediction and control, just as references to the denizens of physical and biological theory play essential explanatory roles in their respective domains.

As naturalists, we can see there’s nothing immaterial or spooky going on in talk about purposes and meaning, since organisms and their behavior are fully physically realized. But there’s also no reason to suppose that we’re under an illusion in claiming to have purposes and pursue meanings in life, since referring to such things captures stable, brain-based behavioral patterns that can’t be captured at the level of our physical constituents. This allows us to understand ourselves in ways we otherwise couldn’t, where such understanding is cashed out concretely in prediction and control just as in any good theory. This qualifies intentional states as real as brain states. So I don’t see that the scientific story Rosenberg presents is a threat to the standard human-level account of why we do what we do, including the quest for meaning.

More in response to Rosenberg’s “nice nihilism” is at http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-naturalism-nihilistic.html

`Schmidt’s winemaking and other activities take time, as you might imagine, from his astronomy, but, ”My astronomy career’s going just fine, thank you.”’

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay.
Money, it’s a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I’m all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it’s a hit.
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit.
I’m in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.

Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
giving none away.

Be that as it may, there are a lot of people who simply do not look good without clothes.

Is a naturalist entitled to prevent a well-considered suicide by using force (such as forced hospitalization), the way religious people feel entitled to do?

In that case the answer is no. There is no objective meaning or purpose to life. Life is just a complex self replicating pattern, there is no more objective meaning to human life then there is to bacterial life or an existence of a rock.

All meaning is subjective, invented by humans and for human consumption only. What’s more all meaning is constructed from our experiences (often abstracted and highly processed), and therefore it only works if it can be decoded back through our experiences.

In case it’s not clear what I mean let me clarify where meaning comes from – why some electrical pattern of brain cells firing can have some meaning to us? It can only have meaning if it can be related to something we once experienced. For example when we see a tree, our brain region responsible for vision is stimulated in a particular way, our memory can encode some general aspects of this pattern of stimulation and associate it with another pattern of neural stimulation resulting from hearing the word “tree” if the two coincide often enough. This is how we learn language. The two patterns become linked and invoking one will invoke the other, when we hear the word “tree” the association kicks in and we have a vague and processed impression of a tree fed up to our processing center by memory.

Of course our brain can slice and dice our experiences in countless ways to define quite abstract meanings and can also use already known concepts to define new ones, but in the end all this very complex structure of meaning has it’s roots in our experiences, and it’s the only source of meaning.

That should make it clear why the idea of an objective meaning is patently absurd. How would that work? Even if some alien agent were to implant some neural firing patterns directly into our brains, those patterns would not be derived from any past experiences and when executed by memory would only produce gibberish. The brain would still try to interpret it in terms of past experiences but the result would be completely incoherent.

It would be like an attempt to encode sound in a bitmap image, sure you can copy some mp3 data and splice it into a bitmap, but the result will still be an image only now it will show random gibberish. The meaning here is encoded in the associations a decoding algorithm makes between byte values in bitmap and colors of pixels. In the same way the meaning of concepts in our memory is encoded in associations between neural firing patterns representing their names and those stimulating our sensual centers to reproduce certain aspects of our experiences.

All meaning is subjective and derived from past experiences of an individual.

“The rest is silence. O, o, o, o. [Dies]”

whereupon Hamlet then, finally, does what he’s told to do,
was intended by Shakespeare, or whoever, to be presented as
(in the order of the Folio):

O, where it conveys the sense of the person’s consciousness being surprised by receipt of a message, or messages, from his sensory apparatus, of Something Dire And Final At Hand;

o, where it conveys the sense of that person’s consciousness having arrived at consensus as to the meaning of that message, or messages, that This Is Really It, The End, Right Here Now;

o, where it conveys a sense of action, whereby the person’s consciousness is in transit, turning away from life in the form in which he’s become familiar and towards another form, complicated by emotions of regret and reluctance at what’s being turned away from, and of dread, or resolve, or both, at what is being turned to; and

o, where it conveys the person’s sense of surprise that what is being turned to is not at all like what he’d been urged to believe, yet rather more-or-less what he’d suspected.

I think the goal of science is to narrow that last sense of surprise, such that we don’t end up concluding we’ve been played.

(As to the “meaning of life”, I’ve been thinking that had been resolved, by that Finnish father-son team that concluded it was to dissipate energy, more particularly by the fellow who concluded that it was to hydrogenize carbon dioxide, and more generally by Monty Python.)

So… no love for anyons?