Encode, I am the farthest thing from a nihilist. Nihilist don’t believe in meaning, I believe meaning is in everything. But something you should know about me is that I sometimes like to suspend my usual convictions and beliefs and argue from a position that isn’t mine. Think of it as an attempt to scope out the other person’s thoughts: if they present to me philosophy X, I will sometimes counter with anti-X (even if I’m an adherent of X myself) just to see how they react, what their thoughts are. It helps to flesh out the details of their position.
I wholeheartedly agree, encode. Meaning is just consciousness, awareness. It is the process by which meaning is drawn from an experience and used to beget further meaning in a new experience. (<-- This, again, coming from my theory of consciousness).
As far as I’m concerned, subjective experience comes with all physical actions. If I throw a ball against a wall, I maintain that a subjective experience characterized by some quality is had by the ball/wall system. Only, I wouldn’t say the quality of this experience is anything remotely like what we’re familiar with in our own experience. It is incomprehensible for all intents and purposes. It is not the experience of vision, or hearing, or touch, or thought, or emotion, or anything we as humans are acquainted with. The latter experiences come along with a very specific kind of physical activity–namely, neurochemical events in the brain–certainly not a ball bouncing off a wall.
In general, I define consciousness, or more accurately “subjective experience” in terms of a trio:
- quality
- being
- meaning
I believe the fundamental substance of the universe, the “stuff” that reality is made of, to be the above three aspects rolled into one substance (and at the end of the day, my theory of consciousness is really a theory of substance). It’s aspect #3 (meaning) that, in my mind, makes the incomprehensible experience that the plant has meaningful, but like the man speaking in a foreign language, our brains are unable to imagine what it feels like, and thus have no direct access to the meaning therein.
Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll expand on this line of thought later if I come up with anything.
This is really awesome gib - I wonder if primitive man and babies have much in common when it comes to the way they approach objects - I never really considered primitive man often, what inspired you to take this approach?
Well, I’m interested in knowing what the “animal” part of the human brain has to offer. I’m rather cynical when it comes to the influence that society or civilization has on the human psyche. I don’t think it’s healthy. At least, it’s unhealthy in the way it conditions us to behave in pre-programmed way, or to behave and speak in ways that seem more like an attempt to adhere to the status quo rather then drawing from our authentic feelings and intuitions and instincts. They say that mankind first appeared on the evolutionary scene about 200,000 years ago (this, they say, is “mindkind” in the modern form, more or less genetically identical to the way we are today). I don’t think man came onto the scene fully equipment with a whole resource of religious beliefs and superstitions and comprehensions of complex abstract concepts. I believe that when man first appeared on the scene, he wasn’t that much different than an advanced animal… except for this one defining feature: he had the ability to not only build thought on past experience, and even build thought on prior thoughts, but the ability to pass on those thoughts to others, sort of naturally “downloading” pre-packaged memes. And “memes” is pretty much what this boils down to. Mankind evolved on the scene equipped with the ability to produce and pass on memes, and for memes themselves to evolve in the hardware of the human brain as they not only get checked and compared with further experience on the part of the individual, but in the very process of being communicated to others. IOW, the human brain is unique among other animal brains in that it was the first platform (as far as we know) on which a different kind of evolution could begin, an evolution of thought, of ideas, as opposed to biological evolution. This allows for a much speedier process of evolution, one that can go from quite rudimentary thoughts on the level of mere animals (like “I’m hungry”) to a sophistication of thought on the level of multivariate calculus or quantum mechanics. As speedy as it is compared to biological evolution, however, it still takes time. They say that the advent of religion and ritual emerged about 40,000 years ago. But if we are the same animals we’ve always been since 200,000 years ago, what happened 40,000 years ago such that religion would spontaneously (from our limited point of view) emerge? The answer is: that’s how long it took for religion to evolve. Memes being passed on, being built on top of other memes, memes transforming and evolving, becoming more and more sophisticate, until we get religion.
My interest in this, my a pantheist point of view (to bring God into the discussion), is to understand what God originally intended to convey to us. If religion, and all other forms of abstract thought we have today, is the culmination of an evolutionary process of memes, a process that we build, that we are involved in driving, then it could be argued that we are distorting the original message conveyed to us by God, the original message conveyed to us by the universe via the senses and the hardwiring of the brain, which I proposed is hardwired to take raw sensory data and build “objects” out of (like most other animals, I believe).
Science, I’m convince, is a kind of reconciliation of this departure from the original messagee. It is mankind learning to speak the language of God, to interpet our experiences in their own terms. Science is a Q&A session with God. The experiment is a question: is my hypothesis right? And the results are God’s answer: yeay or nay.
In today’s science, we have learned much about the inner workings of nature. Though this is obviously far from the original message conveyed to us by God (God never told us the world is made of atoms and molecular, of light photons, of black holes and quasars billions of light years away), I believe science offers a special edge by which God’s response to experiments (when it’s a yeay) can be interpreted as: well, that’s not what I originally intended to convey, but it’s more or less equivalent. ← Like a person throwing a message back at you in his own words. You could respond “yes, that’s right,” even though it’s not the words you originally used.
Boy I’m chatty today, ain’t I?
I have put quite a lot of thought into what you have posted - I do have some things to add but for now I am more interested in what you have to say on different things - I find your line of thought follows a divergent and semi parallel path to my own. It seems that we are independently discovering different things and at times converging on very similar items.
That may be, but I’ve been speaking too much about my own thoughts. You have yet to expound on your own. Where would one begin with encode’s thoughts if one were to grasp the big picture in encode’s head?