The "Hard Problem" and the Meaning of Meaning

We all know what we are saying when we talk about what is meaningful to us. These are first-person statements. If the Universe is imagined as "outside" and the mind is "inside", meaning is on the "inside".

Einstein remarked that he was amazed that the fundamental laws of nature are discoverable and, by the way, beautiful. There is something behind this observation that seems almost spiritual - in fact, people talk about "Einstein's God".

Wilczek asks the same question on "A Beautiful Question". He's noting the same deep beauty Einstein is talking about and asking the subtle question - is the Universe "really" beautiful?

So here's a possible road to a "solution" to the hard problem: How do we experience meaning in the Universe? How does it feel to find meaning? Damasio builds his account of "mind" on this very question. This is not merely an "outside" mechanical idea. It's about how it feels to have a mind.

Damasio provides an account of how living organisms evolved central nervous systems - ultimately to discover what is meaninful to the organism.  He provides an account of how these twin phenomena (mind and brain) evolved* together. What binds these two concepts together is meaning, which makes perfect sense on both sides of the "hard question". Damasio firmly roots the feeling of being in physical reality - both the physical nature of the organism and the physical nature of the environment.

In "The Strange Order of Things", Damasio raises his sights to consider how "meaning" arises how meaning works at many levels - from cellular to "organism" to groups of organisms (such as human society). In my view, individual humans are programmed by culture to perceive (feel) "meaning". We imagine we perceive "meaning" as individual organisms, but, in fact, we simply cannot think without our cultural "programming" - most obviously the language we learned as children.

A question that arises is whether these "super beings" (cultures) are alive in some sense or even "conscious". It may be that this question as important but possibly just a matter of definition. However, we would scarcely doubt it if members of the culture were "wired together" by some kind of physical nerve cable. My feeling is that nerves "merely" transmit information and that their function depends on what information is transmitted, not the medium. Great sections of our brains are devoted to sending and receiving messages from other human beings - for example, by language. Again, the medium doesn't seem to matter. The fact is that cultures are "wired together". Individuals in a culture can, at times, pay attention to the same thing, care about the same thing and find the same meaning in the same experience. When we say that two people are "of the same mind", it is more than a figure of speech.  I have discussed ideas along these lines elsewhere.

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* Damasio's account doesn't depend on "evolution" - it's just a fashionable way of speaking of how organisms differ. While plausible, there is no need to drag in the idea that "consciousness" evolving for some reason imagined by the author - usually by imagining how there is some adaptive advantage to whatever phenotype the author is talking about. Personally, I'm not sure that consciousness is adaptive in the long run. The vast majority of organisms on the planet do very well without it.

The central idea of evolution is common descent, which means we can learn a lot about how our bodies work by seeing how other bodies work. We can look around to the billions of living things around us in the current world - postulated by Darwin to be our "relatives" to discover degrees and kinds of how different organisms "calculate" and "feel" meaning. Damasio's central arguments involve organisms with and without a "central nervous system" and how this particular structure is essential to providing a "model" of reality - the organism looks to the "model" rather than directly to "reality". In other words, the mind is a model of the world (and the internal status of the organism).