A grain of sand is meaningless. But the fact that it is meaningless to me doesn’t make it meaningless from a universal perspective.Interesting article, I have a few comments to make off of it later on, but to answer your query about if objective reality would still exist if earth was hit by an asteroid. In order to do so, I'll ask a question, "What worth is a grain of sand to you?"…………….
That was a roundabout approach, but I do think that if Earth was eradicated...completely, like say through atomic vaporization....would the Universe really "care"/acknowledge? It is just one planet, one little rock, where we fight over definitions, and who has the better rock (piece of sand). Thus to some observers the universe would still exist, but to the observers present on the vaporized rock...not likely. Does the universe have a purpose? I honestly don't know, I see it as more of a sandbox where we're allowed to play. Purpose implies meaning, meaning needs an observer. If the universe has a purpose, it's purpose is relevant to you (aka it's subjective).
Imagine the human organism as a microcosm or mini universe. This means that it has the same basic structure of our great universe. It is obvious that one body cell is meaningless for us yet we cannot survive without body cells. A grain of sand may lack meaning but that is not to say that sand doesn’t have a place within the great chain of being.
What IYO is responsible for allowing us to play in the sandbox? If life is an accidental creation, what is gained by it if it is meaningless? Without purpose there is nothing to evolve towards.
What if as believed by panentheism that the universe is the body of and within this pure consciousness some call god? Then as part of the body, meaning for man is experienced through service to the body of God. In other words, the body doesn’t serve us but we serve the body and conscious recognition of what service means opens us to experience objective meaning above that of animal meaning. Is your purpose to serve your leg or does your leg serve you?
Again I’m not asking you to believe anything. I am just offering what has made sense to me during my intense search for meaning.
I agree. Lacking consciousness we become emotionally attached to opinions. They are judged in either a positive or negative way as you’ve described according to our conditioning. Avoiding this requires the capacity for conscious impartiality. Simone Weil called it detachment from the acquired habits resulting from the human condition.She wrote:....I think it's possible to create an internal mirror where one can reflect their own thoughts back upon themselves prior to interacting with another. Kinda like it's mentioned in Al Siebert's articles...the "bi-phasic" personality of survivors. You can be both agreeable, and hostile. Both introverted, and extroverted....etc.
Also, if you think the universe has a purpose, maybe you're projecting into the universe what you are actually thinking about yourself (a person can project into anything really). I've heard of people projecting, and attaching to bomb disposal robots...it's the same thing with pets. We're keyed into doing it, but we have to hone it if we want to seemingly make sense of reality, my opinion.
I’m a chess player. I enjoy experiencing the logic of a position. It just seems far more logical to begin with the assumption of universal purpose as proposed by those I respect and then seek to verify it through the process of personal experience and deductive reason. I’ve always had this concern for universal purpose and the purpose of Man within it. It isn’t necessary to project a belief onto the universe since it isn’t necessary. I gain nothing from a blind belief. IMO questions like those raised by kant can only be answered in the context of a conscious universe. The real question for me is why the power of imagination is so strong that it gradually creates conditions in which people are free to participate in recurring episodes of mutual self destruction called war. Common sense suggests if we are this ignorant and gullible, how could we be expected to collectively open ourselves to the conscious experience of objective human meaning and purpose?"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too”
'Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.” ~ Simone Weil.