The Origin of Meaning

Most spiritual systems point followers to a higher realm or being as a source of meaning and significance in our lives. But what is this meaning? How does it make our lives meaningful?

It may be of help to first ask, what would make our lives meaningless?

What makes a talk show meaningless? When it is on mute, we see mouths open and close repeatedly uttering words that non-lip readers cannot discern. Hand gestures, body language, and other non-verbal communication taken out of context. Most importantly we don’t know what they are talking about! So perhaps meaninglessness is about not understanding what is going on around us.

When we study an abstruse math concept, we question its practicality. Its applicability in the real world. We expect the math to be of some purpose. When we ask why we are learning this stuff, we expect an explanation into how it enables us to achieve a particular goal or outcome. We fear studying it might be pointless.

So possibly, meaning can be the combination of both understanding and ultimate purpose. Let’s consider cases in which one is present but not the other. A young child undergoes a dull traditional education. She knows somehow, from what her parents told her, that education is important for her future. But she doesn’t understand how education can be relevant to her future. An example was already given of the math topic which illustrates a situation in which there might perhaps be understanding but not purpose.

Quite clearly, understanding and a sense of ultimate purpose are both crucial in the meaningfulness of anything. How does spirituality or religion usually satisfy these requirements?

Understanding, besides being a state of comprehension, is also a subjective feeling. Like how we can feel happy when we get good grades, but also when we take certain drugs. An illusory sense of understanding can be achieved simply by giving a name to something that is to be causing the phenomena in need of explanation. For example, one of the characters in Moliere’s play The Imaginary Invalid, is asked by his physician-examiners to explain the means by which opium induces sleep. He replies that it induces sleep because it contains a “soporific factor.” This answer is applauded by the doctors. The playwright is, of course, satirizing the false expertise of these apparently learned men by showing their knowledge to be no more than sophistry¹. Such nonexplanations are commonplace in spirituality and religion. “God” for example, “explains” the existence of the Universe. “Sin” “explains” evil.

How should we live our lives? Why should we live it in one way rather than another? Most religion provide an ultimate purpose of some kind, which’s fulfillment requires the believer to act or believe in a certain way instead of others. Entry to Heaven, and avoidance of Hell, requires believers to be faithful and avoid sinful actions or violations of God’s commandments.

Drawing from an analogous situation inside the natural world, we satisfy the role of God to our children. We have purpose for them in mind which they do not yet understand. Going up some levels, the government administrates the nation of which we are part. Although we do not fully understand their policies, they give us a framework in which we can live out our lives. Lives that for the most part, we feel are meaningful. But does the government then give our lives meaning? Do we give meaning to our children’s lives? Of course not! We only provide for the possibility of our children’s lives, as do the government for ours. No, our lives are meaningful only because we have meaningful relationships with other humans like us.

But you might then ask, what makes these relationships meaningful? This yet again emphasizes the point that meaning cannot come externally from outside a system. To an outsider, an inside joke doesn’t make sense. Nothing but ourselves and our relationships with each other can make life meaningful. Suppose there is no humans, or that there is no human interaction, or there is no framework for human interaction that in this case is provided by the government. If any number of these entities exists without all of the others would life be meaningful? This is the reason why like age peers bond together. It is however, an indirect result of the fact that like-minded peers that bond together. Amongst themselves, our children understand each other, and they have common interests which serve as purpose around which their activities play out with significance.

Do cogs have meaning? Do cogs in a machine have meaning from inside the machine? Do they have meaning from outside the machine? Did you know that there is transistor #00812340 in your computer crucial for its operation? You don't because you are not in the system. What is important to you is the resulting function of all the system's interacting components. Their collective function; the ultimate purpose they serve. Not how they work. All you want as a user is to type up a report on a word processor, or play some computer games. God may very well exist, and we may very well be useful to him. We may actually mean something to him. But he is irrelevant as to whether our lives have meaning.

Mundane everyday situations are what make life meaningful. Not because they serve some ultimate purpose outside of the immediate system, but because they have a structure of relationships which human nature finds expression in. Within the system.

Nothing outside a system can mean anything to anything within it. A pure but abstract example illustrates this general fact. The Liar paradox: “This sentence is false.” If the sentence is true, since it says it is false, it is false. If the sentence is false, it would then say that its falseness is false, which makes it true. Where does the meaning of a sentence originate? Simply in what it describes. However, that particular paradoxical sentence describes itself. That sentence is referring to something outside the system it is meant to describe. It is describing its description. When you describe a system, its description is outside of it. Or more exactly, the description is one level above the level of the described. Like in a family tree of relationships. Which is a hierarchy, each generation being a level. The relationship “father-of” applies from one level to the level below it. It makes no sense when I say my uncle is the father of my aunt. Or even, Bob is father of himself.

There is however, a distinction between the qualitative feeling or sensation of meaning, and the conscious apprehension of it. Sometimes, we see life from a less involved perspective. Like when brushing your teeth you might suddenly realize that you have been doing this countless times, every single day of your life thus far. You realize that all your routines and habits are just like that. Endless patterns that seem to lack ultimate significance. How about passing buckets of water along to help put out a fire? The repeated senselessness of the immediate action can put you in a trance-like state. With all your attention focused on bucket-passing, the whole affair can seem quite meaningless. But you forget that you are working in a team to help put out a fire, to save lives. Lives that you know give meaning to people related to them. Lives that enable us all to share our thoughts and feelings however profound or mundane, with others like us. Deaths illustrate the importance of this fact best. We don’t mourn the dead because they go to Heaven or Hell, or will reincarnate in the future. We mourn the dead because besides our relationship we had with the deceased, we know that all their thoughts and feelings, their experiences in life, their experience of sharing such experiences with us, all that was there to give each of our respective lives meaning, is gone. Gone forever.

Where did we make such a mistake of seeking meaning where it cannot possibly be found? Humans acquired intelligence in our evolutionary history as a general purpose problem solver. Most other life forms solve problems instinctively, they respond to environmental stimuli very much like how a mousetrap springs on the rat. Humans however, despite having for most part the same desires, react to novel situations in a goal-directed manner. Which enables them to better cope with varied and varying environments.

Before the advent of civilization, although specific actions were as numerous as they are today, they play a more immediate role in achieving goals. In the past, we searched for food by hunting, or by gathering. The act of impaling an animal with a spear brings the immediate reward of sustenance. But today we manipulate numbers and symbols and produce squiggles and squoggles on paper, which gains us sheets of paper currency or even mere bits and bytes stored in some piece of silicon somewhere in a strange institution that supposedly holds our material wealth in various intangible forms. Then to satisfy our hunger, we give these ethereal representations of abstract wealth to someone else who does nothing but exchanges his ghostly wealth with someone else down there along the production chain to pass the food along! Of course, in the end, all these exchanges and specialization all brings us what we need and want. Life goes on as it has always done. Problems arise however, when we stop to think about it.

We hardly understand what is going on in our economic, social, and political systems. Our interaction with the world, and often even others, are mediated by layers upon layers of esoteric intermediate mechanisms. The satisfaction of our ancestral lives lies not only in the more direct relations of means to ends, the means themselves were significant. Someone who doesn’t like to run, but needs to do so to hunt, would not fare as well as someone who enjoys running. In fact, physical activity increases the level of dopamine in our brain, which elevates our mood, and gives us a sensation of pleasure. Our hunter-gatherer lifestyles provided for a harmonious interaction of means and ends, where there is no significant difference in the desirability of former or the latter. In the past, the journey was as good as the destination.

Civilization marked the transition to a lifestyle that brought to our familiarity the separation of Work and Play. Civilization destroyed the harmony of means and ends. Work is now required to meet those ends. The pleasure of meaningful physical exertion is thus relegated to Play, where upon further reflection, we realize serves no purpose. What is necessary is meaningless, what feels meaningful is purposeless. Is it any wonder why so many of our modern people feel lost?

Is civilization the problem here? Our proudest achievements arise when we deny ourselves the satisfaction of instant gratification and immediate sense of meaning, to create something of greater significance and value beyond the immediate time and place and people involved. The benefits we all gain from scientific research being just one such example. No, the problem is with us. Our failure to keep in mind the purpose of our endeavors. We still live to satisfy the cravings of human nature, through however longwinded a path. But are we thus merely like animals? Just a little smarter perhaps? But did we ask such questions on the ultimate purpose of our existence before there was civilization? Perhaps we didn’t have a higher awareness then? What is the ultimate purpose of you playing with your dolls and toy cars when you were a child?

The idea that life would be meaningless because it is ultimately for nothing is but a fallacy. In this ever complex world, it is even easier for various sources of religion and spirituality irresponsibly prescribe “meaning” from virtual-superrealities that even if existed, would not be relevant to our lives here anyway. With “understanding” and “purpose” satisfied, a believer feels as if life has “meaning”. Their lives however, do feel meaningful, despite what they believe in not being the thing that is actually giving their lives meaning. Yet it is only their beliefs that give them the satisfaction of meaning to their lives. Like how Prozac gives its user happiness, even though it is not really the Prozac, but its effect on the brain. Which, I’m sure we all agree, is better satisfied by experiencing a social life where there is love, family, friendship, understanding and all the other eternal human relationships that prevail through all time and place, culture and contexts.

Notes:

1. example ripped from Chap.1 of The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain By Terrence W. Deacon