Lately, there is a concept that I cannot seem to escape: meaning and whether it exists outside of a self-reflective observer who can identify an object or relationship as meaningful. Talking about meaning generally goes down two separate roads. The most worn trails lead to existentialism or nihilism. The former describes meaning as a created thing, a construct that doesn't exist in the world absent of a (usually human) self-reflective observer that conjures meaning from a meaningless universe. The latter, nihilism, states that the universe is meaningless, regardless of attempts to assign meaning to any interactions within it.
On the one hand, people believe that meaning is a human construction; on the other hand, any attempt to create meaning from a meaningless universe is a fool's errand. Here, I am interested in describing meaning as something that exists within the function of physical systems, regardless of the existence of observers able to identify these functions as meaningful. In other words, the goal is to show that meaning is something that is found or discovered; it is neither created by humans nor entirely absent no matter how hard they try to create it.
The ultimate project of this essay is to snatch meaning from the clutches of anthropocentrism and show that meaning exists and awaits discovery by self-reflective organisms. I will show that the arguments against nihilism and existentialism are pretty simple. The former rests on the logical impossibility of proving a universal negative, and the latter fails due to the circularity of its argument. Meaning exists and is not created by humans, and I will promote a definition that rests on the compatibility and interdependence of parts within a functioning system. If both the arguments for utter meaninglessness and meaning created by humans are so quickly rejected via simple undergraduate logic, then meaning must be something that exists, even if it is not experienced by a brain. Thus, well-functioning physical systems are infused with meaning, whether or not there are self-reflective biological organisms to recognize them as such.
1. NIHILISM AS A LOGICAL FALLACY/ THE FUNCTIONAL ARGUMENT FOR MEANING
Anyone who has spent any time studying basic logic knows that proving a universal negative is logically impossible. Because of the almost infinite amount of logically possible objects or phenomena in the universe, we are unable to make claims that something that is not self-contradictory doesn’t exist anywhere in any possible world. Why, then, do many people insist on the universe being meaningless? How is it even possible to make such a bold claim that meaning cannot exist anywhere we might go to look for it? Oddly, the truth of nihilism seems rather obvious to some people. These people love to go on and on about soundless trees falling in the middle of the woods, as if just because there isn't an ear to hear it makes it an irrelevant, meaningless event in the history of the world. Well, it is not obvious to me, and I think a meaningful world is an idea worth defending.
I find that the idea of a meaningless universe simply doesn’t make sense intuitively, even ignoring the one-sentence logical argument given above. Again, it is easy to write off nihilism simply by stating that it is something that cannot be known to be true. One can at best be agnostic regarding the meaninglessness of the universe if they are interested in having a logically consistent belief system. So, what can be said of the aforementioned tree falling in the woods out of earshot of human ears? The fallen tree will die, making room for another to grow in its place, which means that it opens at the bare minimum the possibility for new life. The old dead tree being replaced by a fresh, new one (maybe even of a new species that survives better in the shade!) also means that there will be new opportunities for dispersal of fresh seeds for future generations of trees from the young growth that takes its place. The dead tree will be decomposed, its organic material broken down into non-organic nutrients that can fuel the growth of whatever happens to take its place. Innumerable bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates will feed on the tree's biomass to strengthen and diversify their own populations. This whole process could lead to a change in the composition of the entire biotic community over the next hundreds and thousands of years; indeed, this fallen tree could contribute to creating an ecosystem that is entirely unique to planet Earth. This would be an almost soundless process in terms of humans being around to hear, but does that make it meaningless? This feels obviously wrong. There is so much more meaning in an event than what can be detected by mammalian sense organs. In fact, the vast majority of the countless meaningful events that occur every day will do so absent a human observer. Our existence depended on these events, and they will continue to happen long after our demise.
Once we redefine what we understand meaning to be so that it isn't laughably centered around the ill-informed thoughts and opinions of the latest apes to arrive on the landscape, the idea of meaning itself becomes more meaningful.Function, what a thing does, and how it interacts with the other things around it is what gives them meaning. In this view, meaning ceases to be tied even to biological entities only and can be ascribed to all sorts of objects that exist in space and serve a function within some sort of dynamical system. Mountains are meaningful in how they contribute to the weather systems on planet Earth, creating obstacles that cause the winds to chaotically swirl, along with pressure and altitude differentials that drive condensation cycles. The biodiversity of the Amazon would be impossible without the salt deserts of Africa and the weather systems that deliver the nutrients from the latter to the former. Simply looking at function as meaning scatters meaningfulness all around. Meaning becomes unescapable.
Today, we can only slightly understand the most mundane details of planet Earth's evolutionary and geological history. Hell, our destructive nature has put us in the sorry position of barely being able to stitch together the history of our own species that has occurred since we started keeping track of it. Humans have destroyed entire civilizations without giving a single shit about those civilizations’ discoveries or thought systems. I sometimes wonder if the real underlying motivation for the Western obsession with the meaninglessness of life is to easily ignore all of the horrors it has committed on a world trampled in the name of the relentless spread of its ideologies. It's easier to explain away one's past and deny responsibility for shaping the future if one can simply shrug and say, "well, as we know, it's all meaningless, anyway." This idea is not only ridiculous and logically incoherent but saddening to those of us who have spent some time trying to understand the world around us and found it bursting with meaning. Worse, it fuels apathy for the world our children have to grow up in.
But enough of the insanity of nihilism, and onto the slightly better but still incorrect view that humans create meaning out of a meaningless world.
2. MEANING IS FOUND NOT CREATED
Over and over, I read and hear that the only route around nihilism is the idea that meaning is created by people, and the individual is in control of what is meaningful to them. This view still takes for granted that the physical universe itself is meaningless. It is the only legal step proponents of this idea feel there is to take. We must say that meaning exists but is created by people and therefore is fictional. Meaning exists in the same way that Spiderman does; a construction of the human mind projected onto a world that inherently lacked it before we showed up. The problem here is that this mindset breaks another basic rule of logic and begs the question.
Why does meaning exist? Because I say it does, full stop. In this view, the only proof that life is meaningful is that people create the meaning that seems so meaningful. To be fair, this certainly is not the only philosophical idea put forward that begs the question; examples are everywhere in philosophy and religion:
Christians: How do I know God exists? The bible says it does. Why should I believe the bible? Because God commands it.
Descartes: Why can I trust my senses? Because a benevolent god doesn’t deceive. How do we know god doesn’t deceive? Because god is omnibenevolent.
Kant: How can we know that we have free will? The presence of moral reasoning. How do we know correct moral reasoning is accessible to all humans? Because we have free will.
Where the thinkers who demand certainty of an uncertain world go, so does the circular argument. Dogma creation is always the last dying gasp of this quest. The existential dread caused by the mere contemplation that maybe radical skepticism is correct leads to fantastic mental gymnastics that, while fun to read, only serve to hide the circularity of an argument from the creator of the argument themself.
My aversion to the idea that people create meaning is further fueled by a deep intuition that it is grabbing the stick from the wrong end. Those like me who suffer from depression that has resulted from a life of professional failure might be able to commiserate with me on this point. I think back to long nights of whiskey drinking and pot-smoking, wondering why the hell I cannot seem to find a career like so many of my friends and family have found. Sitting alone in a room and just trying to decide that life has meaning even though all signs point to the opposite just plain does not work for people in the throes of depression. But the things that do work, like making songs, taking pictures of birds, long hikes, and writing long-winded essays about my feelings, are things that I recognized a long time ago are not really creations in the way most people think of them. Saying I “create” a bird picture or a good tune is just as fallacious as saying that I “create” meaning, in the same way that a scientist cannot (honestly) “create” a discovery. These things are stumbled upon by those of us who go looking. They usually result from accidents, of sifting through garbage for hours or days until suddenly a keeper shines through. Although meaning seems to be everywhere, it is special because it requires work to uncover it. If it could simply be conjured from thin air, there would be no drive to look for it. If meaning didn’t already exist in the world, it is highly doubtful that anyone could ever find any.
3. CONCLUSION
We use words to describe things we experience in the real world. Of course, my opinion is highly skewed by my insistence on naturalism as the correct worldview to adopt if a human is interested in the truth. Obviously, many people will disagree with the opening statement to this conclusion. But I have become incapable of viewing my conspecifics as anything but beautiful outputs of the blind process of natural selection. I feel the best way to describe what we do as humans lie in our discovery, description, and reorganization of things that had existed long before we showed up. Meaningfulness is one of those things, and the word itself attempts to name something in the world that might otherwise be ineffable. The language barrier between reality and our capability to describe it is strong, likely unbreakable, but we can make abstract shortcuts that trick our monkey minds into believing that maybe one day it could be shattered. Because of this, we mustn't mistakenly take these abstractions as total phantoms or, on the other end, things that never existed before humans showed up and planted them in the universe.
Meaning is hidden under the hoods of our cars, in the interactions of organisms within ecosystems, in harmony created between the strings of guitars and voices singing together. It can be challenging to find, but nothing worth doing is easy. Go out and find some.