Indeed not, all of existence itself does, in absolute terms. I find that most meaningful.
I think thatās a different question, though.
Iām not speaking in absolute terms, simply considering that randomness and meaning can coexist.
But I think we are also talking about meaning and meaninglessness in different ways in our two different claims. And differently from what is commonly implied by āmeaninglessness.ā
I think you and I agree that meaning is subjective, donāt we? Which means that, although meaning is not inherent in things, meaning can exist, does exist, because we make things meaningful to us. We also share that meaning in the form of culture.
We do this unconsciously most of the time. Itās powerful to us as well as to our world. There is a lot more to say about this, but I want to get to the other meaning of meaninglessness.
I think that most people, who are deeply concerned over the idea of meaninglessness, have in mind one or both of two things:
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Objective, inherent meaning, (which depending on oneās understanding of the ground of what is, sometimes imply āmeaning resulting from having been intentionally createdā) is the only kind that ācounts.ā
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The absense of inherent meaning implies resistance to real meaning at all.
These are value judgements that reflect common assumptions, maybe specifically common Modern assumptions. It is an obsession of Modernism.
[I do need to read more Eliot. I just find it so hard to get past his snobbery. I think heās worked this theme thoroughly, however.]
I keep coming back to wondering how I can agree with both you and @MarkD in regard to meaning, because I think I do. I think what I described above gets closer to what I have in mind.
I donāt mean āmeaninglessā with a wistful sigh, as if something has been taken from me. It is value neutral. I think more that it is an opportunity for humans to do something really important, that outlasts our own lives even if only by a bit, whether it is of value or no value anywhere else in the all. That is irrelevant to me.
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Marta made the same point with regards to the resurrection of Christ, and I agree with that. Therefore, I changed to the raising of Lazarus. I think that your grouping makes sense. Origin of life seems to be a nice example of a type 2 gap according to your schedule.
I strongly agree that randomness doesnāt exclude meaning. For you meaning is subjective. I am curious about the difference for you between āthis has meaningā and āI appreciate thisā.
āI appreciate this,ā reflects one kind of meaning. Literally, it means, āI value this.ā Things can be horrific to us as well. Thatās a type of meaning as well, but of a very different kind.
May be not very different? Then it is: āI appreciate this to be removedā in stead of āI appreciate this to beā. Itās a strange thing that materials like we are can have actions like āappreciationā. A stone or a DNA molecule doesnāt appreciate they simply exist.
I think the thought you are expressing isnāt coming through in English. So, Iām missing your example. If you want to write it in Dutch (Dutch, right?) I might be able to figure it out. German is a close enough cousin, I can sometimes figure out Dutch.
Certainly. Sentience is an amazing thing that makes all the difference in the world.
Iād reject the description of ourselves as āmaterialsā. A person has not been described by providing a list detailing how much of of every element or compound constitutes a personās body. Being embodied is an important component of what it is to be a person, but it isnāt the sun total.
This stirs up some thoughts in me about meaning.
I feel like talking about meaning as if it was a substance is a mistake. I donāt think meaning is something extra that can be found in some things but is absent in others. It seems to me that meaning is more about what a subject experiences directly in regard to various objects, settings or events. Some meaning seems to be baked in as fear of snakes, heights and the dark are for many but not all creatures as an aspect of biological inheritance. But people have another vehicle for meaning in culture which can also shape what is experienced as meaningful. We can try to deduce why something should be felt as meaningful in terms of the significance it may have for well being, but the meaning we experience is not built up from those considerations; that is only the practical use to which it may be put. Being useful is not all there is to being meaningful.
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Thank you. To say it another way. I suggest that āto appreciate somethingā and āto disgust somethingā are entities of the same category, although the opposite in character. They are different in direction but not different in kind. (However, I am not sure of this)
Yes! I like how you said that.
I think particularly important is your emphasis on the subject, rather than the object as the source of meaning.
Much of the concern I think I feel from other people regarding the idea of intrinsic meaninglessness, stems from an understanding that meaningfulness comes from US, not the thing itself, and that if that is the case, the meaningfulness somehow doesnāt count.
Maybe this worry is associated with understanding meaning as if it were a substance, as you mentioned.
I think it is also associated with the assumption that things are, really existence is, only meaningful as the result of intention (i.e. Godās intention).
[Hope I said all that clearly.]
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Kind of like love. If that is only something that comes from us why bother? Or beauty: if itās only in my eye, who cares? For that matter if flavor is only happening on my tongue why choose meals on that basis? It all goes back to being embodied. Can we really step back from that and regard our own experience as a Martian would and, if we can, should we? The answer is no. The view from no where is no way to live a life. Hypothetical abstraction is in our bag of doing options but what we are is more basic than that; unless we are, we canāt do anything.
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Yes. This is probably why itās so important to us to find people who share or are willing to mutually explore meaning, values, likes.
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Trying to thinkā¦is there any difference between āmeaningā of something and our subjective reaction to it? Is this where moderns and post-moderns would differ? Mark brought up oneās reaction to a snakeā¦ if the reaction is not completely instinctive, and if a naive animal has not experienced a snake before it might not āemotionallyā react to it, but does the snake still have objective meaning? ādangerousā?
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Thatās an interesting question. Or set of questions.
To begin with, I think the kinds of questions of meaning that I have in mind are specifically questions that humans ask. They are associated with value, morals, purpose ā the kinds of questions I donāt imagine that non-human animals comprehend. But that might be a different conversation. So, I hadnāt considered instinctive reactions (the nature of which I do wonder about ā yet another conversation) as really part of the pondering of meaning, either. Although, as a person, I DO understand certain people as dangerous, which is directly related to my relationship with them, or my understanding of their character through their reputation.
Yes, I think there is a difference between the examples you give and our subjective reaction to it, which I call āmeaning.ā While something can be dangerous, a feature, thatās not really itās meaning. Meaning involves interpretation, which involves an other, who can act as subject observing or experiencing the object in question.
So for the naive animal, who has not yet established for itself a meaning of the snake, or busy road, or dangerous food, if it lives through the ordeal, it may be able to develop a simple sense of meaning for whatever the threat was the time.
What do you think?
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Hi, I hadnāt intended to drag the discussion to non-human animals necessarily, but had just picked up on Markās example of the āmeaningā of a snake, and thatās where my mind landed. I agree with you that in terms of morals and ultimate purpose, non-human animals probably donāt have the cognitive capacity for that type self-reflection to judge āmeaningā in what they do. While recognizing that (as human) I process events and objects through the subjectivity of my own senses and experiences to make sense of things, I confess that many ideas of subjectivity/post-modern thinking grate a little with meāit might be an ingrained view of ārealismā as a scientist? Anyways, just for the rabbit hole, this slide is from the lectures I give on ācommunicationā in animals, where I try to teach students the difference between āmessageā and the āmeaningā inherent in signals.
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Interesting. As you state it, āmeaningā is the practical implication of a āmessageā?
Your slide provides a great example of the subjectivity of meaning, no matter what type of animal is involved (human or non).
Oh, I think if nothing chafes, one is not asking enough questions. Not all questions are of the same value or stem from the same depth of understanding, but postmodern thought is broad enough and confrontational enough, that it invites/demands questions (and then turns them back on the asker, of course).
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I believe that the sort of processing that we as human beings do in a deliberate, self-aware way takes place not with raw sensory input
as it comes in but rather secondarily after a lot of subliminal processing has already occurred. The moral rumination we do rests on a bed of affective evaluation that also takes place as preprocessing which makes better sense of our experience than imagining everything taking place deliberatively. I believe our frontal lobes enable us to put the brakes on actually responding on automatic pilot too. It isnāt that we canāt ever monitor something closely and act in a predetermined way according to a plan we decide on. That happens too. But for we we canāt respond to all that life throws at us in that way.
There is an aspect of postmodernism which deserves to be called out any time it arises. You do hear people use it to justify the idea that every interpretation is as good as any other since all of them are just made up by us anyway. Just because not every interpretation or opinion can be settled by rigorous testing and peer review does not mean that some are not decidedly better than others, and that is not merely a product of it being the one we subscribe to. But it does mean that convincing those parroting cockamamie, conspiracy theories cannot be accomplished in a straightforward way with assured success.
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Yeah, in biology at least the technical definition of a āsignalā is the behaviour (the posture, the display the chemical exuded) transmitted by the sender, the āmessageā is what the signal encodes about the sender and the āmeaningā is what the receiver construes from the signal.
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