In many ways I'm pretty close to navrins on some of this, but there's enough more that I'm not going to try to do this as a follow-up to their comment.
I don't divide the world into physical and metaphysical. I don't feel like I have enough information for that to be for me a meaningful statement. For me the central jumping off point is not knowing. (Long before I would have considered myself Buddhist. Now, in that context, I might say "無知" but mostly because I still feel a certain glee of finding things that I so painstakingly assembled for myself in texts written hundreds (thousands) of years ago, in a language I already read and love. My observation has been that people tend to waste a lot of time believing in things that they don't actually know, and which they can't actually know... and for that matter, mistaking their heuristics for interacting with the world with the actual world and thereby blinding themselves to what is actually there. I like to think that starting from not knowing makes me a better scientist and better Buddhist. (Not everyone would agree, but I haven't yet heard a particularly compelling argument to the contrary.)
If there is some kind of basic meaning to the universe, from which things like ideas about good and bad and such might be derived, I haven't yet run across it. So my current heuristics model meaning as something not innate to the universe, but that people create from their interactions with the universe. So, subjective, and yet something that we can also pass around between us. Over the course of human history we have built up many ethical concepts, and a huge proliferation of expressions thereof. A whole side of human existence is an ongoing conversation about meaning. I guess, starting from this footing, it's not really much of a jump to see why I vaguely group a lot of this stuff under aesthetics. Which to many people sounds as if I have decided they are frivolous and unimportant... but that mostly reflects their own reading of aesthetics. Not mine. To start with the universe as we experience, and try to make it better strikes me as pretty wondrous.
no subject
I don't divide the world into physical and metaphysical. I don't feel like I have enough information for that to be for me a meaningful statement. For me the central jumping off point is not knowing. (Long before I would have considered myself Buddhist. Now, in that context, I might say "無知" but mostly because I still feel a certain glee of finding things that I so painstakingly assembled for myself in texts written hundreds (thousands) of years ago, in a language I already read and love. My observation has been that people tend to waste a lot of time believing in things that they don't actually know, and which they can't actually know... and for that matter, mistaking their heuristics for interacting with the world with the actual world and thereby blinding themselves to what is actually there. I like to think that starting from not knowing makes me a better scientist and better Buddhist. (Not everyone would agree, but I haven't yet heard a particularly compelling argument to the contrary.)
If there is some kind of basic meaning to the universe, from which things like ideas about good and bad and such might be derived, I haven't yet run across it. So my current heuristics model meaning as something not innate to the universe, but that people create from their interactions with the universe. So, subjective, and yet something that we can also pass around between us. Over the course of human history we have built up many ethical concepts, and a huge proliferation of expressions thereof. A whole side of human existence is an ongoing conversation about meaning. I guess, starting from this footing, it's not really much of a jump to see why I vaguely group a lot of this stuff under aesthetics. Which to many people sounds as if I have decided they are frivolous and unimportant... but that mostly reflects their own reading of aesthetics. Not mine. To start with the universe as we experience, and try to make it better strikes me as pretty wondrous.