Worth Re: [FoRK] Faith and/or Science - Newton et al

[Lion Kimbro]

  I agree with everything you've just said, except for the
  idea that you necessarily get "A"s in school for really
  going for understanding, rather than just test passing..!

  {;D}=


  So, backing up:

    "where does meaning come from?"


  It has no simple answer.  My caution is against
  saying, "I make my own meaning," because I see it
  as dangerously disrespectful to the 13.7 billion prior
  years, including the millenia of civilization that has
  brought you to where you are, constructing meanings
  in your head that are veeery similar to the meanings
  that other people are constructing.

  My thought is:  If we find ourselves astonished that
  people can communicate at all, we have to back up,
  and ask ourselves, "Okay, where did we make our
  mistake?"

  And I think what we find in the complexity is:
  There's a lot of shared experience out there.

  3 people walk in the room, and see a chair, and
  walk around it.  They call it a chair, and mean "the
  chair," even though individually, they have had
  individual (and therefor unique) experiences of the
  chair.

  More than just "external world," I think it goes
  similarly for experiences of sadness, happiness, and
  so on.  "Empathy works," for example, though not
  perfectly.

  http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b23/palookaville/Stumbleupon/UNIMED-PAI-E-FILHO.jpg


  I believe we're misled to talk about "meaning," as if
  it were some substance floating around within an
  object, -- personalized to the individual, of course
  (subjectivity.)

  We can talk about:

  * the world of material things and events

  * the world of thoughts in our heads, mirroring
    the material things and events
      - ideas of pens, pencils,
        people walking through doorways

  * the world of constructed ideas
      - artworks,
      - stories, scientific or otherwise

  If we talk about "meaning," we get confused:
  we might be talking about world 2, OR we might
  be talking about world 3.

  We all agree a pencil is a pencil is a pencil, more
  or less (world 2.)  So we know what pencil
  "means," right?  We know the "meaning" of "pencil."

  But what does it mean to live a meaningful life?
  Or when we say "it means so much to me," what is
  it?  Or we say, "I find meaning in X," ... what does
  that mean?

  (Jeff Bone pointed out this confusion around the
   meaning of the word "meaning.")


  Referring to "stories" avoids this confusion, since there
  *is* no world-2 meaning for "stories."  We all know
  they only exist in world-3.

  And then:  What is meaning?

  Meaning is the value of the parts of the story,
  with respect to the larger story.

  The meaning isn't found in the object;  It's not even
  found in the pair of object--beholder.

  It's really found in the object--story--beholder.


  So looking at "shared meaning," then,
  what we're really looking for is *shared stories.*

  If we say, "I make my own meaning," we can
  miss out on a lot of this:  The stories we share.

  As Karl Popper pointed out:
  Science is a shared story.



On Nov 30, 2007 10:56 AM, Corinna Schultz <corinna.schultz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 29, 2007 3:34 PM, Lion Kimbro <lionkimbro at gmail.com> wrote:
> >   But those stories come from an external source.
> [ ...]
> >   And he's absolutely correct.  We can't look to other people for
> >   the answers.
> >
> >   ** So how do we resolve this? **
>
> That's what I'm getting at. The original sources are external -
> Dalton, Beethoven, Sartre, etc. But they have no intrinsic meaning or
> significance. I can regurgitate facts for a test, or explain what
> so-and-so meant when he said such-and-such, but when I make it my own,
> it becomes integrated with other things I think, believe, and feel
> (subject to principles like coherence, evidence, etc). That internal
> synthesis is unique to me -- I can try to explain it, but I will never
> be able to adequately communicate what it means to me.
>
> [As an aside, it makes me sad to know that I will never really be
> understood by anyone, no matter how hard I try.  Perhaps people
> instinctively shy away from facing this sense of alienation? Maybe
> that's part of what the existentialists are referring to, I don't
> know.]
>
> I agree "no man is an island", but I also think there is no adequate
> meaning until the raw material is internalized, mushed together, and
> synthesized into something new. People who are more creative than I
> (like my husband) add their own material into the mix, and that's
> where you find new and interesting ideas being created.
>
> But people who rely on external sources for their meaning will spend
> their time (for example) wondering what Beethoven was *really* trying
> to say when he wrote that sonata, so they can see the true meaning of
> it. They will never try to understand it for themselves, or explore
> their feelings and reaction to the music, etc. The sonata will not
> change their perspective, or get connected to (say) Philip Glass's
> quartet, and that one song by the Beatles, and then lead to developing
> a personal musical taste.
>
> It's the difference between the student who gets straight A's because
> they study a lot, take good notes, and memorize the material, and the
> student who gets A's because they *grok* the structure of the material
> and see how all the details fit together.
>
> Self-help books are another example - many of these books (perhaps the
> better ones!) feel the need to say "take what works and leave the
> rest". I think this indicates that people have a tendency to think
> they have to follow the entirety of the advice they read in a book. If
> so, these people are not *thinking* about the advice and how it fits
> into their lives or whether it applies to their particular problem.
> They are not engaging in any kind of synthesis, but are looking for an
> external authority for answers.
>
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