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Over the past couple days I have been struggling over the intrinsic meaning of the universe. Such questions as, What role does humanity play the universe? What do our personal lives mean? Is there any reason behind why we are here? Etc. I was reminded of a statement I read by Hegel some time ago where he was discussing atomism and said something along the lines that being is a quality and not a quantity. This statement had always ringed with me but I never quite understood what it meant. Then it dawned on me.

The words "meaning", "meaningful", and "meaningless" are nonsensical when applied to a quantified Universe. That trying to make statements of quality within a quantified picture of the world doesn't make sense. This is where we get confused. We try to find a truth about what the Universe means within a picture that doesn't allow such statements. I always thought we could find the ultimate Truth of the Universe through math and science. But such an idea is naive.

This thinking can be continued. The problems about "color", "pain", "good" and "evil" all exist in this world of quality and being. Trying to find the ultimates of these categories within the quantified word is nonsensical. These categories allow no absolutes because it has no metric for quantification. The observer is in a relative position to other observers. The private world of consciousness separates what is what between us. Of course there is a sense of modal or shared "private" experiences that allows for communication. This in a sense leads to the next conclusion.

The worlds of quality and quantity are separate but linked. My intuitions are that there exists an injective mapping between the two but not a bijection. That would mean the two spaces are equivalent in structure which they are not. The Universe itself might be the world of quantification that has the world of quality as a subset. There might be categories beyond quantity and quality which might be unimaginable to us. Anyway the place of being and consciousness lead to a connection between quality and quantity. The problem of being is that without an observer their can not be an existence. Of course one can say "I exist" but this is the observer observing himself. Also one can claim things to exist outside our own being. They have to in order for being to come into existence in the first place. There is pure being or the ultimate universe, Being. However saying "there exists" is in a sense bringing something into existence. This seems like a paradox prima facie but it might not be. It might be along the lines of the Axiom of Choice. I digress and I might examine this at a later time. Anyway back to being with a lowercase b, it is like the quantified world splits itself and creates a gap within itself which becomes being. The act of language is an indication of our own existence.

This led me to another problem. What does language mean? Is language just communication? Surely atoms, cells, and maybe other what we call inanimate objects in a sense communicate. They share information and can merge into new informational states. We tend to think information as something nonphysical. I wonder about this. Maybe information is an important dimension to the universe like time is. One would say that time is not physical but it does exist in the material world. Therefore I must conclude that language and information are not the same thing. Information does not require an "I" like language does.

Here is the conclusion. Our language has words like "color", "pain", "meaning" and "good" because it is intrinsic within the world of consciousness and being. However these words are nonsensical outside of this world. The problem arises when we try to apply these words to the quantified world. It simply makes no sense. I wonder if this is what Wittgenstein meant in his Tractatus

*I use the word mean and "meaning" in different ways here. The logical or quantified meaning is something syntactic and semantic. This where things mean something via language. We can use our language to process quantified statements but is also endowed to understand things of quality. This why I say the worlds of quantity and quality are linked, but not the same. The "meaning" of something is beyond quantity and rather metaphysical. We confuse the uses of the words mean and "mean". That in a nutshell is the problem.

Deleting trolltalk is stupid wikipedia.