It appears that once again we will be engaged with our own two-person salon. Despite having done this many times with you, there are few people on Planet Earth that I would rather converse with.
I am going to start with a topic, but if you don't like it, we can choose something else. The topic is MEANING, an old chestnut of philosophers and theologians. How do we define meaning? Is meaning the same as purpose? Does the cosmos, or God, tell us what is meaningful, or does meaningfulness vary from one person to the next on an individual basis? A related question: Can meaning be decided upon "internally," by one person or one community, or does it require an external platform to determine what is meaningful or not? Once meaning has been determined, how do we lead meaningful lives? And finally, perhaps the entire concept of meaning is an illusion, an artificiality, a human-made creation, a byproduct of a particular arrangement of biological cells (neurons) that thinks up these things and worries about them -- totally irrelevant and uninteresting to the rest of Nature.
Sometimes I pose to myself the following situation, which I’ll call the Smart Ant Conundrum: Imagine a colony of highly intelligent ants. Suppose further that this ant colony lasts for a hundred years. Normal ant colonies last only 20 years or so, when the queen flies off to spawn another colony, but let’s assume that a long dynasty of queens have followed each other to replenish this particular colony. Each individual ant lives only a year, so there have been many generations of ants in this colony. This is an old colony. Over the century, these brainy ants create a great civilization. They build advanced structures underground. They compose music. They create paintings and theater. They write books and record histories of their society. They develop science and make theories about the cosmos, both inside the ant hill and beyond. They have emotions and intimate relationships. Then one day, a flood comes and totally destroys the ant colony. Totally. There is nothing left – no ants, no ant books, no ant paintings, no remnants. Nothing. Everything is completely destroyed. There’s no trace left in the universe of this magnificent ant colony. The question I ask myself: Did the ant colony have any meaning? And now, after the colony is gone, with no record of its existence, does it have meaning?
Anyway, this is a start. As I said before, please feel free to change the topic if you wish. However, I'm sure that you will have some very meaningful comments to make about these issues.