The Risk of A Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible. Weinberg specializes in ethical and metaphysical issues regarding procreation, birth, death, and meaning.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time, and reported the following:
In a book as ambitious as The Meaning of it All, which is a book that explains what Ultimate Meaning is (it's the point of leading a life at all), what Everyday Meaning is (it's the meaning in our everyday lives), what Cosmic Meaning is (it's the meaning of our role in the cosmos) and how death and time relate to meaning (death much less than has been claimed, time much more than has been noted), page 99 turns out to be a page on which a narrow point is made. It is therefore not the best sample page if you are looking for a page that gives you a good idea of the book, since this book addresses big, broad, deep, and important matters. But page 99 will suffice to demonstrate that the claims made in the book are well argued, with specific premises that lead to their conclusions, and that even the narrower points are of interest.Visit Rivka Weinberg's website.
Page 99 of The Meaning of It All addresses the view that significance – how much something matters – is only relative to other things. On this view, our cosmic significance would be greater if we were the only intelligent beings in the universe and lesser if we weren't since significance is relative: "the broken knuckle on your finger is insignificant when you've also been shot in the face" (that's from page 98). So we should hope that we are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos because that would make us more cosmically significant.
I dispute this on page 99:This perspective neglects intrinsic significance, which does not depend on how many things there are that can be considered similar to you. Although there are billions of people in the world, Kahane is wrong to conclude that we are each, therefore, “terrestrially insignificant” because significance— how much something matters— has both an intrinsic and a relative component. There’s no shortage of people in the world, “plenty of fish in the sea,” yet each person matters. Each person, like Walt Whitman, “contain[s] multitudes”; each person, a world, because each person has unique, untransferable, unfungible, and intrinsic value. You can’t kill a person and claim you did something insignificant because there are billions of other people. There is an intrinsic kind of significance, just as there is an intrinsic kind of value because how much something matters cannot be divorced from its value. Generally, the more valuable something is, the more significant it is: the more it matters if you lose it, destroy it, ignore it, create it, nurture it, etc. Intrinsic significance doesn’t disappear no matter how widely you pan out— even as far out as the entire cosmos—because it is inherent in the thing itself. Therefore, since we are intrinsically significant, we are significant wherever you find us. In this way, we have cosmic significance because we are significant in and of ourselves, and therefore significant anywhere, including the cosmos within which we reside. Does this make our lives more Cosmically Meaningful? I don’t think so because it doesn’t change how significant we are. It just reflects a fact about where that significance is located: in the cosmos.This discussion tells us that even though we are intrinsically cosmically significant, that doesn't add a lot of meaning to our lives because it doesn't seem very different from our earthly significance, so what does it add, really?
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And this challenge runs throughout the book's chapter on Cosmic Meaning. If we assume all the miracles in the world, what kind of meaning would that give us? How meaningful would it be to commune with god in the afterlife or enjoy heavenly bliss? Probably not very meaningful because, think about it: heavenly bliss sounds more like a drug trip than a meaningful experience, and communing with god probably gets old too. Why? How? Well, for that, you'll have to read the other 176 pages.
--Marshal Zeringue