I’m pretty sure he meant that the claim made in the movie is horseshit.
Correct.
If we’re going to blame movies, how about “The Lion King” with its “Circle of Life” horseshit?
Yeah, the sun exists to feed the grass, the grass exists to feed the zebras, the zebras exist to feed the lions, and the lions exist to feed the bacteria when they die. Wait, no they don’t.
All horseshit. Every species on earth exists for one reason: to make copies of itself. Any species that doesn’t make copies of itself goes extinct. Any member of a species that doesn’t make copies of itself doesn’t get represented in the next generation of copies. Grass doesn’t exist to feed zebras, it exists to make more grass. If grass didn’t try to make more grass then there wouldn’t be any grass. Zebras don’t exist to feed lions, they exist to make more zebras. If they didn’t try to make more zebras, there wouldn’t be any zebras.
The reason we have a survival instinct is that an organism without a survival instinct would not try to preserve its life and would therefore die when the first organism that wanted to eat it came along. The reason we have a reproductive instinct is that any organism without one won’t reproduce and when that organism dies there are no more organisms without reproductive instincts left.
Channeling Neal Stephenson: Every human being, every lion, every zebra, every blade of grass is a stupendous badass, an expert in survival, an expert at kicking the crap out of other organisms and grabbing what it needs to live. And every one of our ancestors, without exception, was also a stupendous badass, an expert an surviving and making copies of itself. Any organism that wasn’t an expert at survival was promptly eaten by an organism that was…which is why every organism alive today is such an expert.
So every human being exists for the purpose of surviving and making new humans. No other reason. If we degrade our environment to the point where fewer humans survive and are able to make fewer copies, then we’ve made a mistake. From a universal perspective, human happiness is meaningless. Human comfort is meaningless. Human survival is meaningless. Life on earth is meaningless. The universe is meaningless.
The only reason we humans care is because it would be impossible for an organism that didn’t care to exist. They’d be gone before they even really existed. How are you going to convince a lion or a zebra or a blade of grass or a human to stop struggling to exist? Even if the lion can see that eating a zebra is tough on the zebra, what’s he gonna do, starve? Even if you point out that zebras are getting rarer and there aren’t going to be many zebras to go around in the future, what’s he gonna do, give away his zebra meat to another lion and starve? Lions that starve to death stop existing, therefore all existing lions don’t do that. Even if you point out that all the zebras are gone and now the lions are gonna go extinct, what’s he gonna do? He’s gonna look for rabbits, or bugs, or whatever, but he’s not going to voluntarily starve. He may starve, but he’s gonna kick and scream and struggle and hope that there’s still a few zebras out there somehow. Maybe he’s a short-sighted lion, but what else can you expect?
Your entire response is the most “meaningful” I’ve seen yet (no offense intended). When I think of meaninglessness, I think of it in terms of the human capacity to conceive of there being some “meaning” to it all, but only within our hopelessly limited and flawed faculties of perception. I still wonder (human that I am) why the hell we would be given such faculties (such as to conceive of “meaning” and “purpose”) when in fact these concepts do not exist, at least as we are able to conceive of them. Well, I guess we can imagine pigs with wings, too, but they don’t exist, either. What a burden this self-consciousness, and the imagination that comes with it, can be, especially in light of these being such a flawed abilities.
But might there be any validity to what we perceive as “meaning”? Might there not be any at all? It appears that you’re saying “NO.” I can live with that, but I still wonder if we’re not hitting into something that has some modicum of reality to it, even if we aren’t capable of understanding it completely.
Now I feel like I’ve gotten at the information I was looking for. Thank you very much.
Understood. I still think it’s an intriguing comparison, though.