1989 - Meaning Machines

Journal Entry 9/89: Meaning Being

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, change seems to occur by the incremental additions of new facts into the framework of an existing “paradigm” or because some higher level of generalization subsumes older paradigms and relates them in a new one. Any attempt to see established facts from a new perspective is a formidable undertaking. The difference between the Ptolemaic and Copernican solar system was but a different organizing generalization that seems simple today, but for Copernicus to make his argument was at the time quite complex. The following is concerned with how we see what we know and as such can't avoid some complexity on route to a high level of generalization.

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The past twenty years have seen an enormous increase in the sophistication of our understandings of: quantum mechanics, molecular biology, information processing, brain functioning, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, systems theory, chaos theory and human potential. Yet, more striking than the strides made in each discipline is the emerging paradigm they all share about the universe, nature, life and more specifically human beings. They all agree, reductionists and wholists alike, we are meaning being. We are the cutting edge of “being” learning.

At the level of physics it is said that a “signal”, an “event” or a fundamental “particle” has meaning only in relation to some observational context (itself a meaningful frame of reference). Similarly, from the chemical messages of DNA to the complex telecommunications of modern society or the relationship between parent and child, anything that is meaningful is so only in a context. The basic attribute of context is meaning, therefore, meaning is irreducible. According to all we know, probably according to all we can know, meaning is the basic “stuff” of existence. Change of any kind is first and foremost a change in meaning.

Biological entities, such as ourselves, are meaning being. Our bodies process food according to laws and habits which create a context for the complex chemical interactions occurring. At a higher level of generalization, the music of Mozart has beauty because there is meaning in the way it resonates with our nervous system. Similarly, when learning mathematics, a given formula is a method from which meaning can be assimilated and transformed.

We are a near infinite confluing of co-implicating contexts, which are incorporating meaning in relation to an infinite environment, and doing so throughout every measurable interval of our existence. The way we process meaning, how we do it, why we do it, and how different meaning is to being than to awareness, we are studying. But that we are meaning being, that life is meaning being, that meaning beings are life, is as close to certainty as we can get.

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