“What is the meaning of life?” is a nonsensical question because it combines two concepts into a construction that has no (semantic) meaning. It’s like asking, “What is the color of sight?” or “What is the size of space?”—a category error.
Meaning is what humans experience when they feel a sense of purpose and significance. But life itself does not experience and thus cannot have meaning. Rather, life is what makes experiences of meaning possible, similar to how sight makes experiences of color possible. Life has no meaning, but is a condition for the possibility of anything that can be deemed meaningful, just like space has no size, but is a condition for the possibility of things that have sizes.
So a better way to phrase the question would be, “What is meaningful about life?” But then the answer is trivial: Whatever you feel is meaningful about it! Because now we are in the realm of human emotion. The question is no longer a grand metaphysical inquiry into the nature of life. It has become a matter of psychology or, when looking at cultures and societies instead of individuals, a matter of anthropology.
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Hi again Dom,
A phrase I coined in one of my papers is “Meaning is the oxygen of life.” I am using meaning in a well-defined sense compared with the normal vagueness: meaning as delineated by the system of semantic factors as set out. in Table 1 of most of may papers and elaborated in Annex 1. This is a dual system of descriptive and affective parameters of human experience.
I think the question makes some sense when understood through these parameters. The affective parameters are the most pertinent. Affective factors include: positiveness/negativeness; fulless/emptiness of value; bodily affect; abundance/deprivation; possession/loss; personal energy, motivation; uncertainty/definitiveness; displacement/normality. The factors are polar and scalar. We all have experience of these parameters of life and it not hard to see how configurations of them can encapsulate the character of lives, at specific times or even as wholes.
Understood in this way the question is valid and informative in my view. Such configurations can describe our saturation or depletion of this oxygen.There is a short section on this in my paper “The dimensions of meaning in language and biology” (p. 13).
Finally, life is not some abstract entity. It is essentially experienced, and it is experienced along the canonical lines of the semantic factors plus sensations.
Kind regards,
Trevor
Hey Trevor!
First, these parameters you enumerate seem to be psychological, i.e., parameters of experience, not parameters of life. They may be framed as physical parameters (neural processes), too, but then we have altered the level of description.
Second, if “meaning is the oxygen of life” and life is “essentially experienced,” then this would imply that any being without experience and a sense of meaning would not be living. Or do you advocate some panpsychic view of experience?
But what is human life without experience? Zilch!
The semantic factors are psychological in the sense that we can feel them. You can feel the factor possession in ‘hold’ and ‘have’. But they are more than psychological and neural. They are fundamentally biological, integral to every form of life. They belong to the ontological description of life.
I don’t subscribe to panpsychism, but something comparable to it: the presence of the factoral structure in the interaction of any organism with its umwelt. Monocellular organisms do not ‘experience’ in the human or animal sense, but their interactions have the same factoral structure (operate within the space of the factoral dimensions). This is built into their morphologies and utimately their genetics. The lif-oxygen operates at all levels of biology including plant-life.
Hey Trevor,
it appears to me that in order to constructively reply to your last comments here and in the article on PP, I will first have to acquaint myself with the ontological basis and conceptual framework of your theory of meaning. Your website seems well-ordered, so I think I will find my way around. I will come back to you when I have found the time to read your papers.
Hi Dom,
That makes sense. the best paper for your purposes is “The dimensions of meaning in language and biology”. A much shorter explanation is the email I have just sent to Jacob Hohwy which follows. The attachment was the Dimensions paper.
Dear Jacob Hohwy,
I have just read your paper with much interest. I wasn’t previously aware of your work although I have some familiarity with Friston’s. You present a powerful case for prediction error minimisation as a model of cognition.
My main background is in lexical semantics. I have identified something that has escaped the notice of other linguists, a smallish set of semantic features (a system) that are essential for the meanings of all words in all languages. I sometimes describe them as the alphabet of meaning that operates in concert with any language’s phonological alphabet. The semantic alphabet (Table 1 and Annex 1 of attached paper) does not spell out the full meanings of words, but their necessary structure. Encyclopaedic meaning is the main supplementary source. I call the symbols of the alphabet semantic factors.
This factoral system is not confined to language and concepts. It underpins our recognition of what we perceive as intelligible and actionable. It arguably operates in the animal and organismic domains as the “dimensions of the space of the interaction of organisms with the environment”. It is also arguably the code of semantic memory. With these functions it can be regarded as the language (metalanguage) of the mind.
In your paper you rule out one alternative to PEM. “In an ideal but impossible design, perception, attention and action would require the brain to simultaneously access both the internal estimates and the true states of affairs in the world. This would allow it to compare the representation and the represented, the attended and what is worth attending to, action planning and what is acted upon.” (p. 4)
This is close to a description of my semantic model of the operation of the mind. The semantic code has a dual nature: one part, call it A, represents a small group of key ontological features of entities in the world (such as materiality, particularity, surface, extension, contraction and others); the other, B, represents a small group of affects with motivational force that is crucial in language, action and behaviour (attraction/aversion, abundance/deprivation, possession/loss and others (all the symbols of the code are polar)). Combination of the factors allow the mind to distinguish the three aspects in your last sentence.
In terms of the PEM model, A represents “hidden causes”, key structural aspects of the world. The normative B can be taken to represent judgements of an entity from the perspective of a subject’s fitness (“hidden causes” of the subject). A + B represents meaning for the subject, meaning conceived in this new way. The causes are not hidden; they reside in meaning. There is no “evidentiary boundary”, no Markov Blanket, no predictions. A internalizes the physical aspect of the mind-world relation, B activates, not as “active inference”, but as an actual motivational force. The alphabetical system is best viewed as a bridge (or a probe that is sensitive to the basic structures of the world). Inherent models of the world reside in semantic memory as structures that have AB form + encyclopaedic memory and sensory gestalts. These are sufficiently malleable to enable the variabilities of percepts and contexts to be accommodated.
In summary, I postulate that the brain is a semantic mechanism with capabilities forged by evolution and previous personal experience. Meaning with its dual alphabetical structure is the driver of cognition and behaviour. This model of meaning makes the brain a self-evidencing organ. There is no evidentiary boundary because the brain has a working model of the world consisting of the system of semantic factors and the constantly up-dated semantic memory. Meanings as represented in the brain are axioms with working instructions for their application in adaptive response.
My approach does not recognise free energy minimisation. Its function is subsumed in the polarity and duality of the factoral system. These suffice to generate activity that counteracts entropy and builds negentropy. The essence of this vital function is the nature of the normative factors, their capacity to render activity adaptive.This occurs through “meaning-events”, entity interactions that exist in two extreme situations, word meanings and intracellular molecular recognition. The meaning of a word is an interactive event that involves an ontological entity in the world and a factoral modelling of that entity in the mind-brain. Meaning in molecular recognition invokes two molecules that combine in an adaptive manner through mutual recognition (pattern recognition) and positive feedback.
I propose that this is an alternative to PEM, and also the extended, embedded, enactive approaches to cognition.
I attach a recent paper, still a draft. I hope my approach to these deep issues is of some interest. I apologise for the length of this message. I fear it may still be too cryptic.
With kind regards,
Trevor Lloyd
Independent Researcher
Hey Trevor,
in that paper you write that the factoral system has “a logic that is determined by the salient physical features of things and situations and our means of intuitive judgement of the value for us of what words denote.” However, I still cannot quite grasp the origin of your list of semantic factors: are they methodically derived or philosophically postulated? You systematically link them to the letters of the English alphabet, but what justifies this link? In “The Alphabet of Meaning,” boldly arguing against de Saussure’s notion of semiotic arbitrariness, you semantically cluster words by their first letters, but what makes the first letter of a word so special that it justifies such clustering? I applaud your statistical reasoning in the same paper’s table 2, but would a statistical proof not require a large-scale analysis of at least the core vocabulary of multiple natural languages and, more importantly, a strict method to prevent confirmation bias during cluster building?
Best,
Dominic