Meaning

Just because

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Just because we’re alive, it doesn’t entitle us to know what life’s all about.

Just because we are made entirely of stardust, it doesn’t prove that there’s nothing more to us.  

Just because we have explanations for the way thing are, it doesn’t mean that we have explained them. 

Just because we can talk about reality, it doesn’t mean we can talk ourselves into it. 

Just because we can see that effects depend on causes, it doesn’t mean that either the cause or the effect explains the difference.

Just because we can equate one thing to another, it doesn’t make them the same.  

Just because we use logic to understand nature, it doesn’t mean that nature is logical.

Just because the stars in the sky are ‘there’ doesn’t mean they are really there.

Just because we know reality as we know it, it doesn’t mean that we really know it.

Just because life is ‘uploaded’ from what ‘is’ already (qua physical necessity), it doesn’t mean that it is not also ‘downloaded’ from what ‘isn’t’ – ‘impossibilities’ becoming possible (qua unrealised potentials).

Just because we haven’t solved the meaning of life, it doesn’t mean that life is necessarily meaningless: it could be that there is more to life and meaning than our narrow version of it – that even the ‘meaningless expanse’ of the universe is a line-of-sight effect – a figment of a narrowed view of what is there to be seen of what can be.

Just because we know what we mean, it doesn’t mean that we know how to say it.

Mike Laidler

 

Contexts

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What can we say

about what we say?

Do the limits of our language

delimit our world,

or meanings

our understandings?

Must a certain meaning

preclude its opposite

of necessity

– to avoid contradiction

and place logic in charge

of truth?

 

Mike Laidler

 

 

 

Philosophy versus science

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There is no contest, not because they are doing different things, but because they are indispensably complimentary when it comes to the big project of trying to understand the essential nature of existence – and it would be naïve in the extreme to say that one can work without the other.

Stereotypically, science explores facts whilst philosophy explores ideas; however, there is no known fact or truth that is independent of its conceptualisation, and the ‘known evidence’ simply reiterates the problem of getting to know – for in order to make progress we need to constantly re-evaluate the evidence, which never was independent of our values. Indeed progress seems to require cohorts of dedicated scientists and philosophers who are passionately involved in their version of ‘the truth’.

Furthermore, values can prejudice our perceptions, including our approach towards knowledge and its ‘value-free’ content – since an understanding is not something to be recognised outside itself, nor does a fact discover its own relevance. But we don’t think of a scientific fact as beholding to its personal relevance for the discoverer, though it is impossible to detach the personal from any aspect of human endeavour. Yet it is assumed that a philosopher’s work can be entirely personal to them and of little or no wider significance until others happen to discover some meaning in it for themselves.

Mike Laidler

Translations

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Every word is a translation of a meaning, which we change by degrees when translating words into words, believing the words to be the source of meanings to be discovered. And so we find ourselves actively exploring what we have to say in the process of saying it.

Yet all the words ever stated and yet to be stated cannot encompass the meanings by which we bring them to life. And so we are able to debate interminably the meaning of what was said, sometimes admitting: ‘I think what I am saying is ….’.

Mike Laidler

The Meaning Well

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There is no meaning to existence to be found without the meaning in existence. And we know there is meaning in existence, even in our deficient quest for it, even when our quest for it is rendered deficient by our expectations of what we want to find.

Yet our commitment to the quest is enough to change the reality, and gird our failures along the way, for how else would we judge our own failure without a sense of what we are looking for – which is our hidden strength.

Only sometimes we hide that strength from ourselves – sometimes by giving in to failure, sometimes by reducing it to serve our ill-judged wants, which never satisfy. Thereby we forget how much more is to be gained when we stop looking for it as something to get, and see it instead as something to give, thereafter to be refreshed from the fathomless depths of its creative abundance.

Mike Laidler