Happiness is achieved through Meaning

[coberst]

Happiness is achieved through Meaning

 

I suspect that when parents are asked what are the most meaningful things in your life they will answer “My kids are the most meaningful things in my life”. A kid might say anything when asked the same question. It may be their car, their boy friend, their new hair style, their new bike, etc. The parent has had more time and experiences about which to organize what is meaningful in their life than does a kid.

 

The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was the answer to the question “what do humans constantly strive for?” “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature.

 

“Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…]b]Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience[/b].”

 

Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Sapiens impose symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. Her conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts.

 

Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”

 

What are some of the fundamental considerations we must focus upon when we speak of creating meaning?

 

Meaning is an abstract concept. What is an abstract concept? Webster informs me that concept is defined as “an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances”. I would say that there are two types of ideas, i.e. concepts: concrete (generic) and abstract.

 

A concrete concept is the neural network that is created in the brain when we have a physical experience. An abstract concept is constructed, often unconsciously, by one or more concrete concepts. An abstract idea might usefully be thought of as similar to a molecule. The molecule is made up of one or more atoms and the abstract concept is made up of one or more concrete concepts. That is to say the conceptual and inference structure of a concrete concept is mapped into the “mental space” containing the abstract concept.

 

The concrete concept is an “objective” concept while the abstract concept is a “subjective concept”.

 

Examples of objective concepts becoming part of subjective concepts:

 

Infant feeling warm when held mapping into subjective concept of affection.

Sensing a foul smell into abstract idea of a movie “that stinks”.

Sensing the rise of milk while pouring into a measuring cup leading to a subjective judgment that prices are too high.

 

We are meaning creating creatures. We are creatures who create abstract ideas about which we live, die, and kill. Our task is to comprehend this fact and through the sophistication thus achieved we may be able to create abstract concepts suitable to permit our survival for a few more centuries.

[AaronAgassi]

You define meaning in the literal sense, whereas, surely, it is meaning in the deeper sense that is so crucial to happiness.

[coberst]

You define meaning in the literal sense, whereas, surely, it is meaning in the deeper sense that is so crucial to happiness.

 

 

We perceive something because it is meaningful to us. Out of the infinity of possibility our perception is not random; we focus our chose of what to perceive based upon what we find to be meaningful, one can imagine our perceptive apparatus scanning the world of possibility while seeking to focus upon that which is meaningful. If this were a western movie you would see the scout, i.e. the scanning apparatus, out front looking for “sign” in order to follow the tracks of the prey.

 

Meaningfulness is the result of our history, i.e. it is a result of our past, our present, and our will for the future. Basic-level categories stand at the foundation of our world of meaning because image schemas structure our perceptions and bodily movements.

 

Understanding has two major subcategories: there is direct understanding and there is created understanding. Direct understanding derives from directly understood sentences and from directly understood situations. SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) informs me that “A sentence is directly understood if the concepts associated with it are directly meaningful. Aspects of a particular situation are directly experienced if they play a causal role in the experience…An aspect of a directly experienced situation is directly understood if it is preconceptually structured.”

 

“Truth relative to direct understanding can be considered as a correspondence between the understanding of the sentence and the understanding of the situation.”

 

Objectivism informs us that if we know X that means that X is objectively true. SGCS has abandoned objectivism as a useful a priori philosophy and thus must develop a new meaning for the concept of knowledge.

 

“We get our basic knowledge of our immediate physical environments from our basic-level interactions with the environment, through perceiving, touching, and manipulating.” We may get our knowledge from many avenues but “the things we feel we know the best are those that can be most closely related to basic-level experience.”

 

Basic-level categories are those that the child learns first because they are about what the world feels like through our senses. Technology greatly enhances our senses and thus our basic-level categories are often greatly enhanced as we grow older and begin to use such things as a microscope or telescope or NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance).

 

“It is the technological extension of basic-level perception and manipulation that makes us confident that science provides us with real knowledge…Scientific “knowledge”, and scientific understanding, to a large degree, depends on the technological extension of basic-level perception.”

 

Knowledge is relative to understanding. Knowledge is built upon direct understanding and is extended by created understanding.

 

I claim that created understanding is developed slowly much like a papier-mâché statue. We create new understanding much like we create a jig-saw puzzle picture except that the pieces are molded and shaped by knowledge and understanding and do not come pre-cut and determined but are an act of will in conjunction with all other aspects of human consciousness. Created understanding is perhaps that which is most meaningful to the individual because it is a unique creation by that individual.

 

Quotes from Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff

[AaronAgassi]

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