Surely a guy or gal proposing to explain “The Meaning of Life, in ten easy doses” should be given a little leeway. Or maybe not. Such a bald and audacious claim should probably be met with little tolerance. I must admit, I have not yet gone back to read these elixirs in their order and in their entirety. Yet here I am, asking for two more Doses.

This is my situation. In working on the Grand Finale, Dose 10, it became too grand. I had promised “short and easy”, not long. So in navigating this Scylla and Charybdis of number or length, I have chosen to head for number and ask your indulgence in this brief extension and your forgiveness for my breach of initial agreement.

After all, “The Meaning of Life, in twelve easy doses” sounds pretty much as outrageous as ten! And I feel it’s coming along rather well, all in all. May God be with me, if only I believed in one in any traditional sense. I think I can get this done.

The “meaning” in life lays in its information. “Meaning” is a strange kind of ‘thing’. It is better to say that meaning is a relationship of things, rather than to say “meaning” is a kind of thing itself. That is a big part of the confusion about “meaning”. Meaning takes up no space and has no mass of its own. We do not “have” meanings like we have kidneys. The firing of Neurons does accompany a meaningful experience, but they are not that experience itself. Yet, all this does not make “meaning” supernatural nor any other kind of superstition. This post –and the following two– seek (yes, “goals” do really exist) to give meaning and information a place in The Universe.

“Meaning” is for living things, but especially for Persons. To us “meaning” is that strange but ever present ‘thing’ that is very individual and private, but also very social and public. It can be trivial or deeply profound; this we seem to agree. “I like broccoli, but you do not” is a good example of this vegetable having a meaning to us that is both trivial and individual. On the topic of broccoli, we do not much care how others find it. A “stop sign” is also a rather trivial example of meaning,

but it is very public and not the least individual. You do not get a license to drive if you don’t agree that that sign means: “You, STOP!” There is nothing deep or controversial about it, and we insist that we all “get it”.

On the other hand, a religion and a career are often taken to be profoundly meaningful. They serve as a focal point around which an individual organizes their own life but also with significant implications for others. A doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a priest, a married couple all take oaths or vows to preform their duties according to explicit standards on how they must conduct themselves in relation to others.

The political institutions of a nation have proven themselves, now and in the past, to be highly meaningful. Generally, massive groups of people are coordinated and their lives formed (in-formed) through political, religious and occupational institutions. The life of a peasant is significant to recall in this sense.

Language is probably the best test case for “meaning” as a peculiar but vital kind of ‘thing’. It exemplifies the above claim: Meaning is an organization of things, a form of interaction of them, as much as it is about the things that are so arranged. Take gibberish; we all can distinguish gibberish from meaningful statements at the extreme. “Xriimsqyl” is pretty obvious gibberish; it breaks too many standard forms. But what

about “shuttlecock” or even better, “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” In this last sentence the poet and mathematician Lewis Carroll preserves all the conventions of language (its forms) and yet it says nothing real, but seems to.

Some will object and say, ‘But language is about training, it’s not about meaning; we are each trained to speak our language and then precede to do so.’ And that is true; we are all trained in the standard forms of language–its grammar, its conventions, its current trends, its jargon—And Then WE GO ON TO SAY THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN SAID BEFORE, and despite the novelty of these statements, they are often understood by others.

“Meaning” is the consistency of Form that bridges the gap between the old and the new, the traditional and the progressive or regressive. New things arise from the use of Information, and by those standards of meaning, this novelty is also evaluated as to its worthiness by others. Meaning is the mutual occurrence, the essential togetherness, of “the private” and “the public”, “the individual” and “the social” (see Dose 7). Novelty starts individually and privately and then has the opportunity to become available to the group, thus become a “standard form”. For socialized and reasonably responsible humans — Persons — meaning is the “sharing of notes”, so to speak, about what our existence is “like” and is “about”. Meaning is a matter of Reference and Representation; it “looks out on the world” and interprets it as “Our World”! In this way, Persons negotiate “our take” on ourselves and our world, and create shared representations and the meanings for our life.

We Act According to Our Information: Two Examples

Hippocrates, “The Father of Medicine. Removed the treatment of illnesses from the hands of the priests, and directed it to a more beneficial Information. Established naturalized principles for the cause, treatment and description of illnesses. Professionalized medicine with the founding of its first “school” that adopted these principles as a code of conduct for Physicians.

As much as medicine has done, more so it is a way of doing: a way to create a more useful and satisfying meaning for disease, with principles of behavior for its practitioners and participants.. It is an ethic: Primum non nocere: “First do no harm.”

(

(“Dose 9” of Ten, in The Meaning of Life, in ten easy doses, series.  How am I ever going to make it?  Well, let’s get right to it by making some important claims clear.)

“Persons” are The Most Real Thing.  Person’s are even more real than atoms, or Mt. Everest.  This is not because we, persons, existed before atoms or the mount — of course, they preceded us historically!— but logically we are prior to them.  The “know how” of being a person has precedence over “knowing that” a great variety of our beliefs are true. Persons are “knowers”, “representers” and “atoms” and “Mt. E”” are some of our representations; they are things we believe we know based on evidence, argumentation and agreement.  They are representations in our world, and our world seems to work pretty well in many, many ways as we set out to accomplish our desires.

Now, I know this makes atoms and Mt. E. sound rather squishy and made-up.  They are not!  They are in the world As Displayed from the point of view of our Design.   They are things that exist relative to us as physical things at our level of complexity, and  to our modern world view and ourselves in it.

These kinds of ‘natural’, physical things, ‘things’ we “take” as in the world independently of us, are a product of our reflective processes, too.  Even these kind of “Things” do not directly ‘push’ themselves on us..  It is, as if, we are in dialogue even with them (things: “them-Selves”) and that is why and how their “character” and “ours” have changed through history.  We keep adjusting and clarifying “our manifest image”, and granted it does now include far more “objectivity” and causal connection than at any other time.

But Compatiblist Philosophies, like this one, argue for a limit to our powers to Objectify the world. Not all “Perspective”,or “Subjectivity”, can, or should, be removed from our ultimate view of things. “Our World” displays to us, not only other persons, but also many other “Levels of Complexity”, many other Levels of Ability and Point of View.

Seemingly paradoxical to some, even Mt. Everest is not a basic reality in the world of physics; it is an emergent phenomena for us, to our point of view!  Even an atom is a little, truncated ‘self’; a point of initiation and an emergent ability that is “useful” at its level of complexity and existent from our perspective.  (More on this in later Doses, but also see posts on physicist Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture.)

Reflection in Nature

We have seen that the rebounded images of person to person is the mechanism for being aware of and thinking of ourselves as “selves”, but now we must consider nature.  Persons are reflected in nature, too!  This is the secondary form of reflection.  Persons reflecting each other socially is a later development in time, but logically is primary to ‘seeing’ persons in nature.  Once having discovered functional inter-personal relations in our social band — through language, gesture, the hunt, dance, the care of fire, etc. — we began to imagine Functioning Objects (Designs) in the world around us.  We achieved a greater awareness of self, a “‘selfier’ self”, quips Dennett, by comparison.  So, especially in living things, persons ‘see’ themselves in a rudimentary or incipient form.

We all have had this experience: An ant scurrying about reminds us of ourselves with our own goals and aspirations.  Step on it and it does not take much to feel a bit of sympathy.  Looking into the eyes of our pet dog, its person-ality seems clear.  Even the seasonal ebb and flow of plant life seems human:  we too brace for the winter and rejuvenate in spring.  Ants, pets, plants are “quasi-persons”, “semi-persons” and, jokingly, “semi-hemi-demi persons”, says Dennett.  We see in them an agency that becomes more full-blown in us, it seems.

Taking the Person-ality Out of Some Objects

To us, this seems an obvious, even ridiculously obvious, step;  though it may not have been.  Consider the words of Edith Hamilton concerning the myths of the most ancient of Greeks:

“In all this thought about the past no distinction had as yet been made between places and persons.  Earth was the solid ground, yet vaguely a personality, too.  Heaven was the blue vault on high, but it acted in some ways as a human being would.  To the people who told these stories all the universe was alive with the same kind of life they knew in themselves.”*

To recognize this kind of agency is to “see the world from the inside”, as discussed in Doses 5 and 6.  But there are also reasons in our Design, to ‘see’ the world from the outside.”  English psychologist and philosopher, Nicholas Humphrey**, contends these two ways are embodied in our “fundamental distinction between sensation and perception.”  Sensation is “an affect-laden representation of ‘what is happening to me’.”   This is our fundamental experience that things are happening To Me and that ‘I’ contribute back a realization that ‘this one is “good” or “bad” or “unpleasant” or “calming” or even “color” or “cold“.  These are ‘the inside’ of events; how they are to us.

On the other hand, Perception is “affect-neutral representations of ‘what is happening out there’.”  This is the world as barren of “me” and “you’ to whom things happen, and barren of our evaluation and classification of them.  Things are not “solid or liquid”, “friend or foe”, “plant or animal” from this external view point.  “Here we learned to  Measure and not Classify,” says Alfred N. Whitehead.*** And this, largely dawned on us, in the 17th century, “The Century of Genius” he calls it.  Our scientific orientation to the world exploded upon the historic scene.  The laws of motion were discovered, and explained much.  “We only consider material objects in a flux of configurations in time and space,” he summarizes and then concludes that this is “a mere abstraction” from  which “it is quite obvious that such objects can tell us only they are where they are.“

*Edith Hamilton, Mythology, 1940   **N. Humphrey, A History of the Mind, 1995. Humphrey is a collaborator of Dan Dennerr.  ***A.N.Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, the classic 1925 Lowell Lectures.

Movement and Position are not Everything

It took me a long time to realize this, but this is what I believe “it” comes too.  “Movement” and “Physical Position” can not tell our whole story!  Yet, science has convincingly discovered the movements of all things.  Amazingly, there is a sense in which we can say that all movements are caused and that physical science is capable of knowing these. This is Objectivity In Its Extreme. And still, we can understand that so much in our experience does not even come close to being effectively characterized in terms of this Mass, Velocity and Gravity.  Not characterized fully in terms of the Bonding of Electrons in one Atom to another.  Nor our experience even closely understood in its full functioning, by the Firing of a group of Neurons in some stable pattern in the brain.

Yet, these movements and spacial patterns are Vital.  They are a True Background to our lives and our multifarious experience in it, but not all of it.  Somehow, and this is where it does get Rather Religious and Mysterious, What We Experience is an interpretation of these spacial entities; what they Mean and Seem-Like To Us is a legitimate Representation of Them. 

And that, that interpretation, that representation, that “seeming to us”, is just as real as the atoms and waves we can “take” our interpreting to be about.  Persons represent things. Our modern Representations are significantly different from what the Ancient Greeks felt and thought. My atheistic representations of these configurations of physical entities (“of Life”) is different from what a Fundamentalist Christian or Muslim feels and thinks; and different from what many scientist’s think is ultimately real, too. Even the physicist, who “knows” all movement is physically caused and ideally predictable, Acts as a person and scientist “under the idea of freedom”, choosing and believing according to ‘good reasons and evidence’ and in accordance with our Design.

The point of this “Dose 9” in the Meaning of Life series: Nature, even when very narrowly construed as a configuration of particles or waves whose behavior is lawfully and predictably understood, still leaves Free our Representative Faculties. What atoms and all their configurations mean to us, Is Our Doing. Their Meaning is not forced on us. Meaning is our baby, to have, to raise and to nurture. Even something as obvious as Death, is also obviously open to incredible human interpretation, and so it goes for all.

Persons make meaning, and we make it together. If our world seems meaningless and chaotic, that is on us, not on Nature or Reality!

(The amazing hypothesis that a “Larger SomeThing” — The Human Social Organism — creates human persons, see Dose 7, will be revealed to be composed by a process called “Reflection”.  Persons find themselves ‘reflected’ in the other persons and the living creatures of the world around them.  These results are basic to the Evolutionary Process.  The mechanism of reflection — this feedback loop — will start to be analyzed through a discussion of the codes involved: genetic and linguistic.  “Dose 8”, in “The Meaning of Life, in ten easy doses” series.  REVISED VERSION OF THE EARLIER “Dose 8”.)

To be Thoughtful

“The final advantage for us, as the highly connected humans that compose The Human Social Organism, is the most difficult to explain and the most important.  It concerns the ability of persons to “reflect”.

“What could we possibly mean by “reflect”?   Eventually, we will see that “to reflect” can mean “to be thoughtful.”  But here, initially, all that has been discussed in previous posts, is Persons share the stories of who they are, and receive feedback from those around them.  This feedback is ‘their reflection’, which they ‘see’ in others. This kind of reflection can contribute to a change of story.  A ‘person’ is just that kind of ‘thing’ that participates in this interchange of persons.

“So, personhood is a very unique form of interaction, a kind of ‘hall of mirrors’ and the by-product is not only the formation of self-identities for those involved, but also a collective story, a “manifest image”* of the kind of ‘thing’ a person is.  It should be noted that this reflection is ongoing.  All these individual stories, and the collective story, are constantly under revision.  This is simply to say, we are ‘reflecting ‘ or ‘thinking’ all the time; working on who we are and what is this world we are involved in.

*The American philosopher of science, Wilfred Sellars, originated this phrase and its use has been taken up by Dan Dennett.

Thinking

I’m not sure why this was hard to say, except that “Thinking”, in this description, has been turned into a social process and not the individual, in-your-own-head activity we usually believe it to be.  Thinking is a kind of social ‘reflectiveness’, if you will; it takes place within the Human Social Organism. It’s the way this organism hangs together and coordinates; and then gets into the individual’s head, your head, my head, as “me”, talking to myself!

 

 

“In this way, we are like a flock of Starlings, except it’s persons that are the  units in this social process.  Surprisingly,  human animals become human persons by participating in this extremely social way of living!  So, that is why it was difficult to express; I tried to seriously shift our understanding of a very basic activity — thinking — and a very basic ‘thing’— a person.  Each of these ‘things’ became much more social, and far less individual, than is often thought.”

So, Reflective Thought starts out as an interpersonal exchange, and then this dialogue gets into each individual’s head.  This is why Thinking is like Talking To Yourself; because it is!  Individual humans have instantiated this social process into the interaction of different patterns of their brain.  Thinking IS Talking to Yourself!  (This is Dan Dennett’s contention, see his From Bacteria to Bach and Back, for example.

(“Talking to Yourself” gets very little ‘cred’, But is Should!  This dialogue is the basic form of Thought.)

Even physical things, ‘things’ we “take” as in the world independently of us, are a product of our reflective processes.  “Things” do not directly ‘push’ Them-Selves on us.  It is, as if, we are in dialogue even with them and that is why and how their “character” and “ours” have changed through history.  Seemingly paradoxical to some, even Mt. Everest is not a basic reality in the world of physics; it is an emergent phenomena for us, to our point of view!  Even an atom is a little, truncated ‘self’; a point of initiation and an emergent ability that is “useful” to us, and exists for us.  (More on this in later Doses, but also see posts on physicist Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture.)

“What we are doing is unpacking our commonly used word, “reflection”.  It contains two very diverse elements: an act of ‘thinking’ and the process of ‘a rebounded image’.  It’s an awkward association that cries for explanation!  This is similar to the work of analytic philosophers, Richard Rorty and Daniel Dennett.  The significance of this compound meaning has not been lost in the history of philosophy.  From Socrates to John Locke, the “dialogue between persons” and “the reflection of an object” have vied for the meaning of “truth“.

“We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us…Consciousness is not something that happens to us.  It is something we do”,    contends U.C. Berkeley, philosopher, Alva Noe.  This is the idea we are exploring.