Meaning of everything is in what it means, but how can one describe that?
You could explain all information about something like us humans, without that telling us anything about what that ultimately means. Information tells us how stuff works, its function and what have you, but it doesn’t tell us what much of that means.
Philosophy and science in particular have taken the secular road of description, whereas religion and ancient philosophy, Taoism and the like, attempt to tell us what things mean.
Well that’s one kind of ‘meaning’, but why does no suicide equal a meaning and what is that meaning? Would the world have a point/meaning to it if people were content or didn’t want out?
the thread is asking about ‘what we are is what it means to be human’, so why is there nothing on this! Everything tries to explain a given thing in terms of specific information, but when you do that to humans you only explain what it isn’t.
So, give me an idea on what You Yourself are looking for. Can you expound on this?
Write something in here pretending it was written by someone else - something which would satisfy your need and understanding of "what we are is what it means to be human.
Insofar as “what it means is in what it means” – I think a better way to end that line would have been ~~ to me… in other words, to each individual person.
One thing that it means to be human is that we are are unique individuals in a way though we also have our similarities.
Meaning is different to everyone, based on how they think, how they feel, what they love, what inspires them, what is repugnant to them, their life history, chemicals in the brain…et cetera.
Do you mean what it must be like to explain the meaning of ‘red’ to a color blind man? We, who can see red, know what it means, but we can’t always come up with an exhaustive explanation for it, such that we could explain it to a color blind man. But that’s because the meaning of red is in the seeing of the color itself. ← Is that what you mean?
Ah I see, fair enough. Perhaps if we know what we mean - what that means, then you may find a meaning for life. So it seems to me that understanding what that meaning is, is the critical aspect. Without that we can’t begin to understand what life means ~ if we don’t first know what we mean, and indeed what meaning means.
… importantly, what all this means is that there is something that means something, a ‘you’, its just that we cannot describe that without describing something else, or generally making third party definitions.
Arc
“what I am is the thingness of what I mean, and what it means to be me”. “I am the meaning of me, and all information about any aspect of that, is not that meaning nor me, but merely a part of it and hence nothing to do which what I am and what the whole meaning of that is”.
Insofar as “what it means is in what it means” – I think a better way to end that line would have been ~~ to me…
Well I specifically didn’t add any affixes or anything, because ‘what it means to me’ would be my description of me and that is an abstraction of the thing itself and not the actual meaning.
The meaning I agree is particular and different to everyone, but that’s a perception. To make that perception we have to go outside of ourselves and look at the thing or try to, and again we are then making a description.
Kinda, but the first person perspective of what it means is to me more akin to an object. For example the blind man doesnt know what red is, and I cannot describe that to him, but if he was ‘red’ then there is a meaning of what he is that is red, whether he knows it or not. So if we could see what we mean we would be ‘red’.
So I suppose the difficulty is ultimately in making a first person description of a thing.
E.g. you cannot define the relative positions of particles, but when there are collections of them you can say that object is there and what have you. So in a way, all of this is like saying that particles would have a position, but when we try to determine that our measuring is an abstraction [same as description of meaning of someone]. that’s not true in physics of course, the particles actually don’t have a position.
Ergo we are [what it means to be us] particles in specific positions, but if we describe that we are particles in different positions.
So we are pushing the particle by acting upon it in the form of measurement, ok. But does that mean the particle doesn’t know where it is itself? Perhaps not, but in the analogy here, a person does know where they are, as do all observers.
Good point, I’ve wondered much the same, but we don’t know where the particles would have moved to during that calculation…
I agree. maybe the duality only exists according to the way we look at something, so if you observe it in two ways you get a duality, if you make a measure we are equally splitting the action in two. …and its in the third party [the measure - act of].
Yes, I understand. This is entirely what I’m trying to get at with my theory of meaning. You must recall the many discussions we’ve gotten into about my theory of mind, right? You know how a large part of it has to do with meaning, right? It’s one of the three components of experience: 1) quality, 2) being, and 3) meaning. Just as the root meaning of red is in the seeing of red, so to is the root meaning of an object, like a truck, in the seeing of the truck. In general, anything we experience contains a meaning that defines what that thing is.
Yes, you can only get so much detail out of an experience. At a certain point, you have to accept that meaning is fundamental, that it doesn’t break down any further.
Define “thingness” to me. I’m not trying to be difficult here.
The way I look at it, and I may be wrong, but isn’t “thingness” too broad a scope?
If you could express those first six words differently, how might you express it? I’m trying to get at your meaning. Maybe what you mean by “meaning” here is the sum total of who you really are ~~ which facts and information about yourself or one’s self doesn’t explain that sum total.
For someone who loves words as I do, I often have such trouble communicating.
Maybe the reason for that is because when we find what we assume is the true meaning, we stop searching and diving further into learning about the experience.
Experience is like the iceberg. Most of what is “actual” cannot be seen. One has to dive beneath and explore.
What I mean by this is that when you try to describe an experience to someone by breaking it down into its components, there comes a point at which we can’t break the components down further. For example, how would you explain the experience of seeing a rainbow? You might say: “well, there’s red, there’s orange, there’s yellow…” And then someone might ask: “How do you explain the red part?” and you might say: “Well, it’s just… red.” ← That’s the point at which you have to say the experience of seeing red is fundamental–it doesn’t seem to break down into smaller components.
But there are other ways of reaching for descriptions of experiences other than by breaking them down into components. You might compare the experience to something similar. You might say: “red is like the iridescence of a rose,” or “it’s like passion or rage”. ← Descriptions like these might help a color blind man get a closer idea of what seeing red is like.
But doesn’t the actual explanation of the “experience” go much deeper than what we believe we see or the actual reason behind it?
It’s also okay to use the phrase color spectrum. lol
Exactly but the blind man may never have seen the iridescence of the rose, gib.
You might compare the iridescence of the rose to the feeling which comes over him when his wife or girlfriend lean in for a passionate kiss…
Rage doesn’t necessarily have to “see red”. It could turn things to black where is no light. lol
But I get what you mean.
I suppose that in order to explain your experience it might be good to know what wavelength the other person is on.
If one of another species came for a visit, you couldn’t explain the beating heart if that species had no beating heart. You would have to know what in his mind (HIS mind might not be like ours) was similar to a beating heart. Maybe there were what passed for drums on his world. lol This is getting ridiculous.
Depends on what you mean by “explanation”. What I mean is something like “describing what it feels like”.
No! This only applies to red!
We would have to assume there are experiences we and the alien species share in common. If they had drums in their world, and more importantly if they could hear those drums in the same way we do, we might be able to use that as a point of comparison when explaining what a beating heart was like.
Of course I remember our debates and your writings, I’ve been trying to expand on them ever since . I would hasten I small caveat though, because this is not just meaning in terms of red as the experience of red, but the very thingness of red. That red is not due to our experiencing of it, it is - I believe, an aspect of the world and we experience that not just in the sense that our minds can see/experience it’s projection. ergo it is in our minds, because it is ‘out there’ such that there is something in origins from which our vision of red is manifest. In other words the red exists before our experiencing of it.
Back to people and what it means to be human or anything, what someone else thinks is ‘you’ the object cannot be what you are. Equally what you think you are - if you attempt to explain that, is equally not what you are. The world sees red without eyes! If humans didn’t exist the world would still experience itself and know what red is, but it does that without ‘knowing’ what red is. When the tree falls in the forest it does make a sound, because there is a meaning in all things which is not knowledgeable.
Let me put it as succinctly as I cam; knowledge is a third party version of meaning, which is the first party version. A projection is equally in the third party.
This is why we find it so difficult to understand what we are, as knowledge is indirect, but everything in the world is in the first party. The tree, red and you, are in the first party, our experience of that is in the third ~ a projection.
I don’t know, maybe meaning isn’t the right term for red, trees and things in themselves, maybe that’s something that is not meaning or knowledge. I know its splitting hairs but I am trying to get at ‘it’, what are all these things like red and the sound of trees, if the description is merely representative. How can that be scientific? For example; if there were ‘red’ and nothing else but the infinite void, what is red? This is very fundamental because its saying science is partly wrong, red cannot be physical [or experiential come to think of it] if it exists. That would infer that ‘you’ cannot be physical if the it that you are is like red. Take light, a transparent photon is seen as colour and brightness, so we cannot say red is a quality of light. Ergo take the universe away and we have many examples of ‘it’, in fact we have every example of everything - don’t we? So a world without the physics is what we begin with, and it is that world which the mind experiences, the physics are merely communicators of those qualities.
additionally…
Arc
See above ^^. you are right, that thingness is too broad, red is a thingness not present in light. You are a thingness not present in the body or brain. It is counter intuitive, but the thingness cannot be exposited by knowledge or any third party version of it.
No not the sum total, that would be a collection, but I am one.
Ok, so then you must mean that the world has the only “true” perception of things–seeing things as they really are, as opposed to us who might distort the way things are.
I think what you’re getting at is how things are “in themselves”–like the Kantian noumena–and you’ve come across an insight that this is tied directly into the meaning of a thing–what we mean by ‘red’ or ‘that person’ or ‘this particle’–what it means is directly tied to what it is.
And this is why I think this lead straight into my theory. This connection to meaning is what hints that there must be a mental aspect to the core identity of things, for meaning is exclusively a mental phenomenon.
Yes but its not a perception because you need a brain/processor to perceive, and eyes to see red. But the world doesn’t have those faculties. I agree with your theory in terms of experiential projection in our minds, just that every aspect of that has derivatives - origins. I don’t know how we can know something that’s not there, like the sound of a tree falling in the forest if it doesn’t make a sound itself.
Meaning in our mind is the result of processing information which itself is a third party; to inform - to yield what a thing is to another thing [a delivery of ‘something’ from one party to another]. The universe cannot do that without there being anything to report - an original meaning.
Would you suggest that mind is primary then? So you somehow got an universal perception of things which is then being projected. Even in a universe mostly without the presence of mind. That’s a very fundamental problem, especially as I don’t know how we can have what we are [mind] if mind isn’t also derivative and exist in origins ~ at least prior to our own existence.
I am inclined to think there is something that can become mind and other things which aren’t mind too. But that’s impossible without those other things then also not having some element of mind, or for that matter, mind not having some element of non-mind [a contradiction]. I can only imagine that the original state doesn’t have any contradicting aspects, which possibly means that ultimately there is no such thing as mind or non-mind. …kinda takes us away from the meaning of what we are if we get into all that, and we end up with no meaning?
So what we mean is not what we mean? There is no meaning in things and no derivatives. Aaahhhh!
Yes, there’s definitely something there and there’s definitely origins. But I think it’s the objects of perception, which reside in perception, that are the origins and the “something” that lead to knowledge. ← Perception and knowledge are two different areas of our minds. But even the perception needs an origin from which to derive. That, however, is outside the reach of our experience and our knowledge. I do believe, though, it’s still a form of experience, just not our own.
Yes, mind is primary. If mind is composed of three components: 1) quality, 2) being, and 3) meaning, then it is being which ties your points together with mine. To me, mind is not something that needs be derived. It is fundamentally being itself. Being must be the foundation of everything that exists, for it makes no sense to ask: what underlies being such as to support its existence. It must be such that it supplies its own existence just from being what it is. I think mind fits this profile because 1) it manifests being at face value, and 2) it manifests its own necessity and justification (<-- that which supplies its own existence just from being what it is). ← This we see in component 3): meaning.
However, there is another sense in which you are correct to suppose there must be an origin from which mind derives–that’s temporality. Every instance of mind requires a temporal origin. We see this best when we look at thought. Every thought is derived from a prior thought. And this is also a good example with which to see how necessity and justification ties into meaning and gives rise to “flow” ← the process by which mind unfolds and metamorphosizes. Every thought has a meaning. That meaning is what gives rise to other thoughts. With syllogisms, for example, we see that we derive the conclusions from the meaning of the premises. We say that if all X’s are Y, and if this is an X, that means it is a Y. The initial thoughts (the premises), in virtue of what they mean, give rise to the flow of thought, a flow governed by the necessity of logic.
Now, when it comes to experiences like sensation and perception, the origins of these experiences come from something prior to what we can claim to be consciously aware of. But I still say it’s an experience nonetheless. It’s an experience whose quality determines a meaning which justifies or necessitates the next experience in the flow, and this flow eventually gives way to human sensation and perception. Sensation an perception, in other words, are like the conclusion to a set of premises, but these premises are outside the reach of what we can claim to be consciously aware of. And sensation and perception, in turn, get to be the “premises” to everything we get from them: knowledge, inferences, interpretations, etc.
If you want to trace experience back to the beginning of time, then we come to the Big Bang. I have some special views on the link between that cataclysmic event and the experience that accompanied it, but that’s a whole other branch of my theory. Suffice it to say, I know it has to be a “special” kind of experience if it is to serve as the “first” in the universal flow of experience. If each experience justifies or necessitates the next in the flow of experiences (like premises do a conclusion), then what justified/necessitated the first? It must have been “special” in such a way that it somehow justified itself.
It’s kind of like particle/wave duality, isn’t it? In the way physicists tell us that an electron isn’t really a particle as we think of it, but not really a wave either. It’s neither/both. I think my concept of mind could fit this formula. I’m definitely coming up with a whole other concept of “mind” that’s nothing like the conventional sort. In fact, it could be better defined as: little pieces of everythingness–not mental at all. It’s like, what do we really perceive when we look at a tree (for example)? Do we see “a perception”? Or do see the tree–exposed for the solid object it is. Given my theory of projection, I would say that’s what it really is ← the solid tree. But then you take something like an abstract thought: 2 + 2 = 4. ← What is that? Well, you might say it’s a thought, and you’d be right–it is a thought–but in the very midst of thinking it, it doesn’t feel mental at all. Rather, it feels like a truth, or a fact. So these pieces of everythingness can be solid objects like trees, they can be abstract truths or facts, they can be moral right and wrong, they can be the past, present, and future, they can be color or sound, even the themes of music of the beauty inherent in a sunset. They literally can be anything–everything. All I’m trying to get across with my theory of mind is what they all have in common–they can all be reflected upon as having this experiential aspect, and aspect that allows us to at least conceptualize them a mental things. But at the end of the day, it’s their projected form, the things they feel like they are in the moment which define their true essence. So it’s neither mind (in the conventional sense) nor matter (in the conventional sense), it’s “bits of everythingness”.
^ Sorry, huge mouth full there. I can get carried away!
Are we looking for a description of meaning or are we looking for a felt experience?
What is the “meaning” of description? Why do we want to “know” something in the sense of being able to represent that knowledge to us via symbols?
If I cannot feel meaning, then it seems to me that no definition of meaning will suffice for my understanding. So again, what is doing the seeking here? Is the drive to experience meaning doing the seeking, or is the drive to represent the word “meaning” doing the seeking? Are you trying to draw a map of meaning? Or are you trying to explore the territory of meaning.
I’ll throw out one possible definition of meaning.
. I would hasten I small caveat though, because this is not just meaning in terms of red as the experience of red, but the very thingness of red. That red is not due to our experiencing of it, it is - I believe, an aspect of the world and we experience that not just in the sense that our minds can see/experience it’s projection. ergo it is in our minds, because it is ‘out there’ such that there is something in origins from which our vision of red is manifest. In other words the red exists before our experiencing of it.