Dueling Quotes

Quote 1 (seen via Overcoming Bias):

That's an easy one boss. The definition of the word "meaning," is something that is conveyed. So, who is conveying this "meaning" that you speak of? To put it another way, if "life" is a painting, then who is painter? Whoever is the painter is the one who decides what meaning the painting has. Now, depending on your outlook, the painter is either yourself, or God. Depending upon how you answer that question, you should now be able to figure out the answer.

Quote 2:

But then I started thinking about neuroscience, my own specialty. According to the facts of neuroscience, your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. You are simply a fancy kind of cognitive fakery, an "epiphenomenon" of the cortex. The self is a fiction.

A large fraction of “progressive” thought is based on a bait-and-switch: First, you are given the bait of self-actualization and then told there is no self to actualize.