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.
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.