Precisely. To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots. There is no meaning behind the universe, it just kinda, is.
The realization that the only sense you can find in life is the one you create yourself, makes a lot of things clearer. This is also why it should be irrelevant that life is meaningless, since what do you care about the true meaning of life (which probably doesn't even exist) once you found something better, more satisfying, that you can cope with and develop in?
I have two problems with this realization(not that it makes it any less true).
First, anything truly goes then and we are back to "might is right". Any state/laws some subset of humanity creates is no less right than any other subset of humanity which includes various levels of psychopaths.
First problem is not such a bad one as long as your own morale code more or less coincides with the society in which you reside.
Second problem is more personal. How do you choose what is meaningful given how truly short the life is?
At 40+ I realize that life can end with a whimper at any moment.
Barring some truly Kurzweilian breakthrough 40 more years of enjoyment is most I can hope for.
I truly enjoy the little pleasures of life parenthood, food, drink, chess, biking and so on. At the end of the day, you realize there is no hope of working on that unsolved math problem, that huge programming project, that great novel.
Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson).
So far the only solution is somehow to delude yourself that what you are doing is meaningful to you.
1) First, an old parable:
When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.
Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.
2) If I've learned one thing, its that without other people, life is largely meaningless, or at least, a very much great deal emptier. As such, I do not think it is a logical gap to say that therefore, a large component of the "meaning" of life, lies in one's interactions with other people.
It may mean sacrificing other things in life to accomplish, but if that's what makes you happy, the sacrifice shouldn't be a big deal. If making that sacrifice is too great, then it isn't what REALLY makes you happy, is it?
Now the "do whatever I want" thing works for a short period of time, but at some point you get to the end of the doing everything you want, and realize if you shit on everyone around you, you still aren't happy. And if you don't come to that realization... well... the rest of society is going to figure out how to deal with you and you probably aren't going to like that. not doing bad is just as much about self-preservation as anything else for those people who don't have a moral compass.
So that great novel it is not going to happen unless you have written a fair share of good short stories in your twenties.
That huge programming project again unless you've mastered your chosen language and the domain space, you are just going to be dissapointed.
There are many things that make me happy, but there are no grand plans left.
Trivial example: I took 6 months of daily Duolingo practice in German to keep up with my daughter. I was making some progress but it was slower than hers. It became apparent that unless I dedicated myself fully to study I would not be able to read Grimm's fairy tales much less Kant.
It is as Stephenson wrote: "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
Well, there are several artists that started out of nowhere in their 30s or 40s or even 50+. Especially in novel writing, this has been quite common.
Only one who comes to mind as far as writing goes is Chandler, but he must have done his own share of writing (oil business in 1920/30s must have required some writing)before that.
Joseph Conrad is another interesting case mastering English in his late 20s.
My premise: To be great you have to perspire early with some talent thrown in.
Early means in your teens, early 20s. After that it is near impossible to master the unconscious mastery of the basics of whatever craft you choose.
Again, I'd love to hear more counterexamples of old age mastery of something started in your 30s.
Your second point comes at an interesting point in time: if general robotization works out on the scale that's being talked about right now, jobs for humans will fall off a very big cliff. Meaning, current education systems, whose sole purpose is to pump out hard-working, quick-spending bureau apes, will become utterly useless. I was lucky enough to go to a very good school, and even there, we never learned to think. We learned more algebra or languages or what-have-you than the vast majority of other schools (which I could confirm in the first week of uni), but nobody ever told us what to do with all that. It's not in the program, because all you're wanted for is keeping the system running. No need to think outside the box, here.
Frankly, I don't see how humanity can not crumble into a fucktillion little pieces if we don't give the coming generations something to do. And I think thinking is something we lack hugely, so that would be a good thing. Now, the ablity to think doesn't pop up in your head one sunny afternoon. It has to be taught, by the parents, by the schools, by society. That means fuck adverts. Fuck legalese. Fuck politicians. Fuck expensive action movies. Fuck all the things that are meant to keep you from thinking.
I can delude myself that I have Free Will by choosing to take a vacation next week. Then I could flip a coin to decide my destination between Singapore and Bangkok.
Sure it was all deterministic at some level but the illusion was good enough for me.
To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.
Due to Bell's theorem, we know that either there is inherent uncertainty in the universe, or the whole bedrock of science gets called into question. If properly informed by physics, the view that we are robots must follow from the view that the uncertainty in nature is uncontrolled, i.e. purely random according to some distribution. Given that we have a subjective experience of choice, this presents the alternate hypothesis that the uncertainty is the result of choice constrained by preference. These aren't the only two possible hypotheses, but remember that all hidden variable models have been effectively ruled out, so no deterministic hypothesis is permissible. I would of course love to hear any plausible alternatives you could present.
