What does it mean for something to be meaningful?

[DocWatts]

You might be interested in this write-up for my philosophy book, which goes into the embodied, biological roots of meaning. In essence, meaning isn't some transcendental aspect of a supposedly 'neutral' or objective Reality - it always exists for a particular someone, and within a particular context.

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MINDS DISCLOSE WORLDS

Orienting Metaphor :
World disclosure is the mind’s way of constructing a home for us within Reality.

What Is A World? And What Do Worlds Have To Do With Minds?

If this book can be likened to a ‘guided tour’ of a seven story building, with the executive suite on the top floor representing our relationship to our beliefs about Reality, then the premise we’ll be exploring on this ground floor is that minds disclose worlds. Our orienting metaphor for this section is a home, and the central idea we’ll be exploring is that minds create homes for us within Reality.

And just like a house is constructed to be compatible with the lifestyle of human beings (houses aren’t built underwater, nor are their doorways accessed from the ceiling), minds construct a version of Reality for us to live within that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. The process by which minds turn Reality into a home for us to reside in is called world disclosure.

What a world refers to is a cumulative whole of meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships for a living Being. We can think of a world as what Reality is on an experiential level for an individual. To disclose is to reveal or uncover something. So world disclosure is the process of revealing a meaningful world within the whole of Reality.

SIDE NOTE: The way we are using the term world denotes a more specific meaning than what’s normally meant by ‘the world’. ‘A world’ refers to an individual’s experiential world. While ‘the world’ is a cumulation of the broader social, cultural, and ecological environments that exist on our planet. What’s being referred to here is the former rather than the latter.

What’s important here is the capacity for meaning that’s created by world disclosure. As living beings whose survival hinges on our ability to appropriately interpret and respond to what we encounter in the world, we do not and could not reside within a bare Reality. What we reside within is a meaningful world.

In our metaphor of home construction, houses of course don't build themselves. Rather, they are constructed from building materials that are put together through the labor of people. Likewise, minds disclose worlds from the opportunities and demands of a particular environment, through the organizational structure of a living body. And just as houses are built to different specifications for specific environments, living beings experience different forms of world disclosure based on their distinct evolutionary adaptations.

Hence, it is only through the living body that a mind has access to a world of people, places, and things. Another way that this could be stated is that minds are inherently embodied. Therefore, when we speak of a mind we’re also necessarily speaking of a living body as well. The term somatic is used to describe ideas and practices that deal with our direct experience of the living body. Thus, what we are articulating is a somatic theory of mind.

Consequently, minds do not ‘invent’ worlds independently from the living body, nor does world disclosure take place in isolation from our broader shared Reality. This is because world disclosure is fundamentally relational. Which puts world disclosure at odds with philosophical theories such as solipsism, which deny the existence of a shared Reality beyond one’s own mind.

In case the distinction between an environment and a world is still a bit unclear, an ‘environment’ refers to the physical and social spaces which exert evolutionary selection pressures on a living being. In contrast, a ‘world’ denotes the meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships that a mind experiences throughout its life. 

Alternatively, we can think of worlds as what environments become through minds which are hardwired to experience meaning. The difference between an environment and a world can also be likened to the difference between a house and a home. For a home isn’t just a physical space, but a significant place which has been suffused with a rich tapestry of familiarity and meaning.

The larger implication of all this is that minds aren’t passive spectators that are ‘parachuted’ into a preexisting world with fixed features. Instead, minds actively shape the characteristics of the worlds they inhabit. However, this doesn’t mean that minds are free to reside within just any type of world; nor are the characteristics of a world a ‘choice’ that individuals make. Rather, the type of world that a mind resides within is a consequence of its bodily structure, along with the opportunities and demands of its environment.

Therefore, a world is not solely a product of a mind, nor is it an inherent feature of physical Reality. In fact, it is not a ‘thing’ at all! Rather, a world is a process that’s created and sustained by the interaction of a mind and its environment. How this process unfolds for a living being is a direct consequence of how that individual uses its evolutionary adaptations to meet its survival needs. Consequently, what Reality is for a living being can’t be asked in isolation from what that organism does.

Using ourselves as an example, there are aspects of our physiology that are especially important for the types of world disclosure that human beings experience. These include highly expressive and communicative faces, a bipedal posture that’s oriented along a front-back axis, highly dexterous hands that are used to manipulate our surroundings, and forward facing eyesight that serves as our primary navigational sense. 

Edited July 5 by DocWatts

[Princess Arabia]

I think the only time something has meaning is when it adds to the individual's construction and survival. Anything other than this, get's obscured.