[Fis] Meaning. Meaningfulness. Meaning of Meaningfulness.

Dear Friends,

please allow me to comment on the discussion on meaning and sense, and whether and how we should presuppose it while regarding Nature. The point I try to convey is, that - due to differing socialisations - TU-people see meaning differently to Bio-Faculty people. The socialisation referred to involves the unique nature of valid (logical, realistic) explanations. There is but one reality on Technical Academies, there are several, concurrently existing realisties on faculties of the Humanities (belles letters, arts, ecology, biology, psychology). The difference could be paralleled to monotheistic or polytheistic concepts of basic explanational systems.

The subject of meaning and a-scribing of meaning to impressions has been looked into in psychology since Ebbinghaus (who invented psychology, by conducting controlled experiments).
It is an empirical fact that the human brain mistakenly recognises meaning even when there is no meaning at all (e.g. in randomly arranged light bursts).
The urge to find explanations even when there is neither a need nor a necessity nor a reason nor a cause for an explanation to be present is a consequence of our brain being optimised for a challenging environment: those animals which fabricate an understanding have clearly a better rate of survival compared to animals which do not have insight. The instinct to fabricate an insight can have - like everything - two kinds of errors: the alpha-error commit animals which do not recognise a pattern although a pattern is there, and the beta-error: this is committed by animals which experience a Gestalt (a meaning, explanation, connotations, reason, etc.) even tho there is no Gestalt at all (like in the Ebbinghaus experiments, and e.g. a dog barking the Moon or a cat playing with a ball, believing it to be a mouse, a child seeing Indians and Cowboys behind trees, etc.)

We know from experiments of recognition that a Gestalt is based on characteristic arrangements of stimuli in a spatial or temporal order. This makes a Gestalt a specific realisation of the general collection of arrangements of stimuli in a spatial or temporal order. Then, what we discuss is, how many specific stimuli can be on how many spatial or temporal places. Among these, the Gestalts are included.

Here we run into a philosophic, basic difference between the axioms about the world as revealed in Psych Inst-s the world over as opposed to the axioms about the world as revealed in TU-s the world over. Please do take seriously the assertion that in the cafeteria of a TU the unspoken, self-evident understanding about the world, and as a sane, normal student sees it, is that there is ONE, (1), exactly one right way of seeing the world and those who have understood how and what do understand the right solution of which there is - as mantioned before - ONE piece.
As opposed to this, in the cafeteria of a PsychInst or a Biol Inst or an Ecology Inst or a Sociology Inst or any Inst that deals with biology and living systems, there is the unspoken, self-evident understanding about the world, and as a sane, normal student sees it, is that there are MANY, (n), CONCURRENTLY TRUE ways of seeing the world and those who have understood how and what do understand that each and every solution is as right (in a formal-logical sense) as any of the n-1 other solutions. There is but one correct answer to sin(phi) but there are several correct answers to "what is the optimal rate of metabolism for an organism?" or "which is the optimal length of body hairs?" or "what color is the right color to attract partners?".

In the philosophical common sense of a TU man, there is one (right, valid, logical) meaning and it can be found. This is equivalent to saying that each and every measure does have a picture in N. (We use on the TU a basic reference grid, even if this is hardkly ever explicitly mentioned. We believe in counting and the correctness of results which come from counting.)
In the philosophical common sense of a Biology man, there are several, concurrently existing frames of reference, and meaning is ascribed pairwise, using a background and a foreground. There are relative meanings, always in dependence of the frame of references.

So, the discussion on meaning is not futile, but we have to dig deep until we figure out why we do not understand each other. Let us not give it up.

Karl

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Received on Wed Feb 8 16:49:33 2006