The Meaninglessness of Meaning

[Mudhammam]

For perhaps such powers of creation do reveal physical processes imbued with meaning - even if they are processes that exclusively reveal themselves in the abstract - and it is in the abstract that meaning is not meaningless . . . but what does "existence in the abstract" mean in the context of objectivity?

Could you give an example of this?

Hmm. Let's see. I'm going to borrow a page from S.I. Hayakawa's "Language In Thought and Action" to get my example off the ground:


Now let's say you love "Bessie," a cow, with feelings that rival the extent to which parents are said to love their children. Hence, she means a great deal to you, nay, even as much as you mean to yourself. At two levels of abstraction, say 2 and 3, you associate strong feelings of affection for the object you perceive, known to you (on level 3) as "Bessie," and (4) as "cow." You don't necessarily love all cows - livestock, farm assets, assets, and wealth, in general, don't possess any meaning to you, but you love Bessie, the cow. With her it is very, very different. You've created these abstract conceptions and labels to describe an experience, which, when verbalized, sound like "I love Bessie the cow. She means something to me" But Bessie, at bottom (1), is, like you - a conglomeration of molecules, atoms, elections, quarks, etc. that are always changing - a chemical and physical process no different, fundamentally, than anything else: boiling water, thunderstorms, gaseous planets. So, in some sense, the brain has created its own "realm of forms" where abstract objects (3, "Bessie," 4, "cow," 8, "wealth," etc.) represent physical objects (1 and 2) - none of which really exist as they're perceived and typically considered in thought, by "you," an "individual," to exist - because these, as everything, including ourselves, are composed of molecules, "jostling atoms," and further down, "particles" with no definite positions AND velocities. So, on the one hand, we have the unintelligible, raw data of consciousness - what the ancients called "impressions" - which are something like a mixture of images created by your brain in your body, as a result of registering what your brain believes to be external stimuli, such as light reflecting off other bodies, understood as "the real world," and on the other hand, we have our conceptions of these objects which are communicated by a language system using sounds and scribblings. So, I take it that meaning only exists from level 3 on up, in the purely abstract "realm of ideas." And in terms of physical reality, these do not exist objectively - there is no "Bessie," "joy," "meaning" - these are labels that describe physical processes after they have been subjectively abstracted and conferred with meaning. In other words, what makes us special, that the perpetual differentiation of chemical and physical states creates this delusion whereby "I" think some things are more valuable than others? Do we simply mean that they "resonate more" with our feelings of "pleasure"? Is my belief that anything is more meaningful than another just as groundless as the object "Bill" cherishes as his "spirit" or "higher power"?