Let me try to unpack this ChatGPT induced morass a bit, while getting bogged down obviously.
False. "The Meaning of Life is Language" is a philosophical statement that reflects a particular perspective but is not universally accepted as true.
Why it is that universal acceptance would be necessary for something to be true? A statement can be true without anyone accepting it except for the person making the statement. All 9 billion people minus 1 could end up believing the earth is flat and not spherical. And of course, things can be true without anyone accepting it because no one knows about it. There must be bucket-loads of unknown truths out there.
Usually for something to rise to the status of being true, there has to be evidence beyond reasonable doubt for it.
Empirical evidence and it has to be true at least more than once. The higher the frequency of sensory-experimental validation, the merrier and more solid such a truth becomes. Especially if all efforts to falsify it fail big time over and over again as well.
ChatGPT fell into my trap by forcing it to think of a question in terms of true or false where that distinction in fact doesn't apply. The question wasn't scientific because the answer cannot be validated nor falsified using empirical data. Which puts the question in the same ball park as asking; "True or false: The taste of coffee is delicious". Everybody immediately understands that taste is like a personal opinion: it occurs in the subjective domain and not in the public domain.
CAVEAT: both the subjective and objective domain are experiential; the difference is that we can experience a similar visual representation of the moon when we look at it simultaneously and shoulder-to-shoulder, but if at the same time I happen to have a head ache, you won't be able to experience my headache "empirically" because you have no sense organs that can detect and process my head ache simultaneously and directly.
"The good news": my head ache and your tooth ache are no less empirical facts than our visual experience of the moon. We can do empirical science on our own headache the same way we do on the moon; the distinction being that our sensory apparatuses are wired to the same external environment, but to different internal environments. There is nothing mysterious about this fact, and the reason why I can't observe your consciousness. It would be weird and a much harder problem to solve, if we all experience exactly the same anytime anywhere. A God-like One Heart and Mind some people still find an attractive proposition. Heaven of sorts. Finally "re-united" with The Whole of Being. Could be me, but that scares the sh*t out of me. ;p
The moon, head aches and tooth aches. All valid domains for empirical science with the "caveat" I mentioned. But what about these so called
philosophical questions about the meaning of life? Can they not be empirically investigated, just like tooth aches and the moon? Are they "too subjective" to be open to empirical research, fundamentally hidden, separated from all other empirical domains? I beg to differ... at least somewhat.
The meaning of life is a deeply philosophical and subjective topic, and it has been explored and debated by thinkers, philosophers, and religious scholars for centuries.
Here ChatGPT reveals its statistical modus operandi; most people will consider "what is the meaning of life?" a philosophical question, not one that can have answers derived from empirical evidence. Just subjective opinion, perhaps including references to positive experience and the goal of maximizing them, in the pursuit of happiness and pleasure, avoiding pain as often as you can. Whatever you put in that basket labeled "the meaning of life", it is "doomed" to be a subjective whateverish concoction of dreams, wishful thinking, fear-induced fantasies and placebo fruits. No real science is possible there. Fogget about it. From there it is only a few steps to the science-vs-religion separation, their wars and efforts to mend the divorce and try again one more time to make the relationship work. Right? Me thinks nothing of this is true. As people with anorexia nervosa being extremely thin but seeing a very obese person in the mirror, likewise the fact-fiction distinction is much less fat than it appears to be.
There are no different realms, nor "different ways to know things". How would that work? There only exists the experiential-empirical process that builds on and extends our sensory apparatus; science with a sense-extender toolkit that investigates the world where our brains engage in boolean statistical processes that generate probability maps of our "most-likely reality" from moment to moment. This is our world, and it includes both "the subjective" and "the objective". The subjective and objective are not on two different planets, more like two different regions on a map whose separation is functional and relative; not fundamental in an absolute sense.
Philosophical questions can be "empirical guesswork", the foreplay of hardcore empirical action. Fingering reality.
Imagination is considered by successful scientists like Albi Einstein crucial as well as a great joy. The best empirical guesswork is informed guesswork. So what about philosophical questions that seem to move away from anything empirically verifiable-falsifiable? Does it necessarily become Word salad gobbledygook immune to empirical research, moving into the realms of psychoses, delusions... dreams forever?
Woman: "Doctor, my husband thinks he is a dog!"
Doctor: "Oh my, for how long he believes this?"
Woman: "Since he was a puppy!"
Is there any empirical science possible on a man who says he is a dog and/or a wife who believes him? It is possible things are true and false at the same time, depending on who you ask: 1) the man's own thoughts and experiences empirically tell him he is a dog while people around him agree he is just a confused guy suffering from a psychotic-delusional episode, 2) he was just joking to his wife who then collapsed into a full psychotic storm believing she married a puppy, 3) doctor and bystanders who agree seeing a psychotic-delusional person but have in fact very little knowledge of a psychotic episode 1st hand. A doctor who never experienced a headache may believe he knows what a headache is, but that knowledge is second hand. Similarly, try to explain colors to a color blind person who never saw them. (Not to say that colorblind eye doctors can't fix retinas of course) How profound is your "knowledge" of things without 1st person experience of a particular beast? Not saying 2nd hand stuff is bad, just that it is cheap and often has hidden defects due to various wear and tear.
My contention is that any experience, also those considered delusional, deemed psychotic, mere philosophical word saladery... are all empirical facts nonetheless. Any conscious event, also recurring delusional ones are empirical data because they can be remembered and reported by somebody 1st hand. Those empirical-experiential facts/data points are then placed on your map to make causal sense; the dots must be connected. If there is no causal sense there is no map. The brain doesn't like disconnected datapoints aimlessly hovering over the surface not knowing where to land. Having a psychosis means your map changes, as well as the causal relationships you believe are there connecting all the dots. The ability to draw a causally coherent map of the world seems to me essential to mental health. I suspect no map is the same, how could they be? Similar yes..
Comfi-alert: whether or not this map is a very accurate representation (if at all it should be considered a
representation) of the experience-independent orginal... is an academically interesting and valid question, but the answer is probably not very relevant to your survival. For as long as you get laid, find resources, food and shelter, a place to drop your poo et-al... who cares.
When others see a different map saying that you are psychotic, seeing things that are not there... they can become demonic voices, disrupters of your own map, the only one you know and that at least tries to make sense for you. Respect the map, please! It is the only territory we know...
Believing your own map is a good, trustworthy representation of the world you live in... but then come the hordes of wannabe high-tech priests who now claim to know that you live in a simulation, that the world as you know it "is not real"! In such a situation, when your own map is apparently different from the map of others who claim to know you are either psychotic or not aware that you are living through a simulation-hallucination called "reality".. it may be time to conclude that either everybody is crazy, or that I am the only sane exception. Depending on the mood of the day and the weather, both conclusions seem appropriate to me.
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