I think most approaches to this question end up confused because seeing clearly where meaning lies is not easy because it’s a subtle thing that, without training and considerable experience, is very hard to see directly. Even our term for this things, “meaning”, is wrapped up in a web of connotations that suggests it is something other than what it is.
Most people tend to approach meaning as if it were either a thing (or at least a reification) or an essence that things have. I think all of your quotes have interpretations that show something of this, though some more or less than others, and all contain a hint of what I propose is properly meaning without all the extra confusion.
So where is the confusion and how do we pull it back? The confusion arises from trying to understand meaning as something more ontologically complex than it is, i.e. to understand it at the level of words and, less often, feelings, than at the level of perceptions. If we pull back and ask not “where is meaning?” or “what is meaningful?” but “how do I see meaning?” we can begin to approach an answer, which I’ll skip over a lot of explanation because it would take longer than I care to explain in this answer and just give you the conclusion I’ve drawn: it’s reduction of confusion. Yes, I’m saying the meaning of life, as you experience meaning, is ultimately about becoming less confused.
If you’ve payed attention to things like Friston’s free energy and procedural control theory, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise and you already have some idea of how this adequately explains many observed behaviors we might classify as “seeking meaning”, although often only after multiple layers of complex interactions, but no more complex than the way the simple mechanisms of evolution explain speciation even though if you told someone “speciation is genes trying to maximize reproduction” you’d naively be dissatisfied without the gaps being filled in.
So I give this answer knowing full well I failed to fill in those gaps, but you may find it useful and, for what it’s worth, I believe it’s grounded in millennia of investigation into meaning.
To clarify, what you’ve outlined is your current guess at the mechanism in human minds that is the root of humans experiencing a thing we call meaning? (as opposed to “I’ve found meaning in my life via becoming less confused”)
If so, thanks, and do you know if anyone else has written about this? Separately, I’d also be interested in knowing more about how you personally experience meaning. Given that you’ve put explicit thought into the mechanisms behind meaning, has that changed how you experience it?
Right, this is my current model of what meaning is and where the feeling of meaning comes from. This framing does have some power to help restore a sense of meaning that often arises after seeing the emptiness of the world and the meaning nihilism that often arises from that, but it doesn’t much create any particular meaning so much as just argue that meaning is possible and makes sense in some way, but you are still left to work out what feels meaningful to you right now and see how that evolves over time.
Most of my thinking on this comes from a combination of Buddhist philosophy (specifically the Madhyamaka school founded by Nagarjuna), especially the notions of emptiness and dependent origination, perceptual control theory, the transcendental idealism of Husserl (and some related philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, Schopenhauer, and, of course, Hegel), and my own investigations which lead me to those sources as my thinking converged toward what had already been worked out. Alas there is no simple place to link you that really explains this; maybe I’ll write someone one day, although there’s a good deal of my background for this way of thinking about meaning laid out in a sequence of post I made in 2017 ending with this one).
As for my personal experience of meaning, it’s a little hard to explain because it’s undergoing transition towards being depersonalized (held as object), but right now I am very much subject to it (it’s internalized as part of my sense of self and can’t be easily investigated directly, although I can experience what I believe to be its effects), and both of those being opposed to the dissociated way most people deal with meaning that I’m contrasting with in my answer above (the way meaning is thought of as something external and reducible rather than inter-ternal and dependent/transcendental/irreducible (mondaic?)). But I make sense of my personal experience of meaning as something like reduced confusion about the universe dependent with the life history that led to the confusion arising, that including very much the way I am part of a homeostatic system that constantly jitters around set points.
I agree with Gordon, though I’m not entirely satisfied with his articulation. This topic is notoriously difficult to talk about given how the referents are entirely mental and phenomenological.
Thanks. I am still working out how to explain this myself, as this is written very much from the edge of my understanding. I don’t really have a persistent understanding of what I’m talking about above; much of it comes from memories of peak moments of understanding and trying to reconstruct what was going on. Maybe in the future I’ll have a better grasp that will allow me to explain it.
I think most approaches to this question end up confused because seeing clearly where meaning lies is not easy because it’s a subtle thing that, without training and considerable experience, is very hard to see directly. Even our term for this things, “meaning”, is wrapped up in a web of connotations that suggests it is something other than what it is.
Most people tend to approach meaning as if it were either a thing (or at least a reification) or an essence that things have. I think all of your quotes have interpretations that show something of this, though some more or less than others, and all contain a hint of what I propose is properly meaning without all the extra confusion.
So where is the confusion and how do we pull it back? The confusion arises from trying to understand meaning as something more ontologically complex than it is, i.e. to understand it at the level of words and, less often, feelings, than at the level of perceptions. If we pull back and ask not “where is meaning?” or “what is meaningful?” but “how do I see meaning?” we can begin to approach an answer, which I’ll skip over a lot of explanation because it would take longer than I care to explain in this answer and just give you the conclusion I’ve drawn: it’s reduction of confusion. Yes, I’m saying the meaning of life, as you experience meaning, is ultimately about becoming less confused.
If you’ve payed attention to things like Friston’s free energy and procedural control theory, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise and you already have some idea of how this adequately explains many observed behaviors we might classify as “seeking meaning”, although often only after multiple layers of complex interactions, but no more complex than the way the simple mechanisms of evolution explain speciation even though if you told someone “speciation is genes trying to maximize reproduction” you’d naively be dissatisfied without the gaps being filled in.
So I give this answer knowing full well I failed to fill in those gaps, but you may find it useful and, for what it’s worth, I believe it’s grounded in millennia of investigation into meaning.
To clarify, what you’ve outlined is your current guess at the mechanism in human minds that is the root of humans experiencing a thing we call meaning? (as opposed to “I’ve found meaning in my life via becoming less confused”)
If so, thanks, and do you know if anyone else has written about this? Separately, I’d also be interested in knowing more about how you personally experience meaning. Given that you’ve put explicit thought into the mechanisms behind meaning, has that changed how you experience it?
Right, this is my current model of what meaning is and where the feeling of meaning comes from. This framing does have some power to help restore a sense of meaning that often arises after seeing the emptiness of the world and the meaning nihilism that often arises from that, but it doesn’t much create any particular meaning so much as just argue that meaning is possible and makes sense in some way, but you are still left to work out what feels meaningful to you right now and see how that evolves over time.
Most of my thinking on this comes from a combination of Buddhist philosophy (specifically the Madhyamaka school founded by Nagarjuna), especially the notions of emptiness and dependent origination, perceptual control theory, the transcendental idealism of Husserl (and some related philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, Schopenhauer, and, of course, Hegel), and my own investigations which lead me to those sources as my thinking converged toward what had already been worked out. Alas there is no simple place to link you that really explains this; maybe I’ll write someone one day, although there’s a good deal of my background for this way of thinking about meaning laid out in a sequence of post I made in 2017 ending with this one).
As for my personal experience of meaning, it’s a little hard to explain because it’s undergoing transition towards being depersonalized (held as object), but right now I am very much subject to it (it’s internalized as part of my sense of self and can’t be easily investigated directly, although I can experience what I believe to be its effects), and both of those being opposed to the dissociated way most people deal with meaning that I’m contrasting with in my answer above (the way meaning is thought of as something external and reducible rather than inter-ternal and dependent/transcendental/irreducible (mondaic?)). But I make sense of my personal experience of meaning as something like reduced confusion about the universe dependent with the life history that led to the confusion arising, that including very much the way I am part of a homeostatic system that constantly jitters around set points.
I agree with Gordon, though I’m not entirely satisfied with his articulation. This topic is notoriously difficult to talk about given how the referents are entirely mental and phenomenological.
John Vervaeke’s ongoing lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, seems to be getting at this. We’ll see where it goes.
Thanks. I am still working out how to explain this myself, as this is written very much from the edge of my understanding. I don’t really have a persistent understanding of what I’m talking about above; much of it comes from memories of peak moments of understanding and trying to reconstruct what was going on. Maybe in the future I’ll have a better grasp that will allow me to explain it.
Perceptual control theory?
Yes, sorry, typo.