The Meaning of Meaning

Hi, I'm Dennis. I don't think we've met. This must be your first time at Thinkers Anonymous. The meeting is a little late getting started. The Chair is missing as usual. While we're waiting, let me tell you about a blog post I'm working on.

We have this amazing capacity to use symbols (words, art, actions) to communicate. Yet it often goes wrong. For example, I say “The chair is missing” and you go looking for something to sit on. You didn’t get my meaning; i.e. the meeting for which we have gathered cannot start until the lady in charge is present. She doesn’t like to be called the Chairman, so we call her the Chair. I use this symbol, Chair, to convey a meaning, and you have the job of decoding that meaning. Understand? No? Not surprising. It's complicated. The symbol has no intrinsic meaning. Its meaning originates in a conscious mind. You are using the symbol to read a mind. Better? No?

Let me explain about the Chair. She runs this support group with gavel in hand. You don't want thinkers to start talking unless you have some way of turning them off. The Chair is a thinker like the rest of us, a professor of semiotics (unlike the rest of us). She obviously knows what she's talking about, but nobody else does, so we have a co-chair with a second gavel in case the Chair gets out of control. This way we all get a chance to talk, so we keep coming back.

The Chair is probably stuck in a reverie somewhere. I might as well go on until she arrives.

Thinkers enjoy decoding, figuring out what things mean. Our enthusiasm for decoding leads us to misconstrue symbols and even find meaning where none exists. If an asteroid is headed for Earth threatening mass extinction, there will be prophets who blame it on human willfulness and divine retribution. That way of looking at the universe is an artifact of mental processes that don’t know when to quit. There is no intent directing an asteroid. At its most basic level, the universe is arbitrary, stochastic, utterly meaningless. Meaning emerges from mind, which has evolved through processes that have nothing to say to us because they think no thoughts.

No Chair yet, which is fine because I have more to say about meaning.

The meaningful and the meaningless are often blended. Choosing a mate and getting pregnant could be intentional and therefore convey some meaning such as life is good and there is reason to hope for a beautiful baby. But mutation, chromosomal crossover and the improbability of a particular sperm being the winner, those determinants are empty of intent. Nobody is pushing the atoms around. So, if a child is born beautiful, don't read too much into it.

I'm a little worried about the Chair. Either she ran out of gas or she stumbled on the theory of  everything. She's never this late. Just one more point about meaning.

Meaning is endlessly obscure. A symbol conveys finite intention but infinite context. Probing that context is known as exegesis, currently the main occupation of grad students who will soon be rendered redundant by AI robots. If you don't want rogue tech to have unrestricted access messing with your meaning after you are gone, you should explain yourself while you are here. Example. You point a gun at me. I deduce that you intend to kill me. But what is the context? You may mean to defend the doctrine of original intent against the heresy of emergence, or you might just want me to shut up so you can hear yourself think. You're nodding your head. You want me to shut up. No? You believe in original intent, don't you. OK, OK, I take it back. Everything happens for a reason, including the extra finger on your left hand, the meaning of which escapes me. No. Don’t shoot.

Bang, bang, bang!.

Aside to the Reader: calm yourself. There was no gun. The Chair has arrived, and her gavel calls us to order. Note the ambiguous meaning of "bang". You decoded it incorrectly. I confess that the gun was just a device to keep you reading, and my intent was intentionally hidden. Decoding symbols is complicated. QED.

Welcome to Thinkers Anonymous. Sorry I'm late. I was engrossed in thought, and you all know what that's like. Who wants to go first? Ah, Dennis, you have something to say, as usual.

Hello. I'm Dennis, and I am a thinker. My last thought was half a minute ago. I know. It's disgusting, but I can't help myself, so my life is a mess. I have no friends, my family has given up on me, and nobody reads my blog.

Bang, bang, bang!

Thank you for sharing, Dennis. We're here for you, but we won't be reading your blog. After all, we are recovering addicts. We can't treat addiction by feeding it. We have to stop doing things that stimulate the release of dopamine by the nucleus accumbens, control what memories get stored in the hyppocampus, and attenuate the conditioned response of the amygdala. During withdrawal we can substitute non-addictive stimuli such as reading the book I've just written, "Semiotics: Semantics, Syntactics, Pragmatics, and Other Tics"....

Bang, bang, bang!

Right. Sorry. Who's next then?