Worldviews, Meaning, Enlightenment and Decaf.
Like a lot of people, I am of many worlds (not the interpretation of quantum mechanics, mind you), ancient, modern and futuristic, and despite the pandemic, these worlds are safe and free to visit. I often do, sometimes during the course of a single day, by way of sampling literature or art created by someone who lived, longed and no doubt died, centuries ago, or by delving into speculative narratives (e.g. “will merging with AI give us the ability to make decaf coffee with a fraction of a thought?” (me: “why decaf?”, also, “that sounds irrational”)).
Human history is many things to many people. The recorded history of humanity contains all the attempts by hairless apes ordinarily resident on a possibly unremarkable planet for cosmic tax purposes, (“fine tuning” is not interesting or insightful, sorry. Please do that to your radio or musical instrument!) to make sense of this mysterious universe, of life, of what it means to appear for a little while and duly exit, like a temporally extended pop-up window whose latency is evidently drawn from a pretty wide and dynamic distribution.
Sometimes our one-sided conversations with Time become powerful enough to entice more humans to congregate and endorse something as a worldview, or a tradition…often revealed to someone under circumstances that cannot be replicated by anyone not so chosen by some flavour of Absolute Reality (which does odd things with its time, come to think of it). Sometimes people just make stuff up for giggles.
Occasionally, people end up going “hang on a minute”…and proceed to dethrone centuries old ideas of what it all means for our species, or us as individuals. Historical eyeblinks, resulting in liberation from less-than-accurate models of the world to ones that have the decency to advertise their inaccuracies (i.e, any good scientific theory).
And yet, there exists a struggle for meaning in our hearts and minds today, just as it did millennia ago when people had a very different understanding of the physical world which allowed them to expound confidently on matters deemed aphysical.
Just before British Summer Time set in, I had a thought (I tend to have several per minute sometimes, and many of them turn out to be ideas, Before Sir Humphrey Appleby can interject, yes, perhaps I ought to become a minister :)). Considering my own internal adventures in the space of worldviews, where attempts at model reduction fail all the time, yet there are sufficient prediction errors to stimulate further learning, it occurred to me that the conflict between what we can know and make sense of through Science (the only reliable epistemic source available to humans) and what we hold variously as divinely inspired, wisdom, insights gleaned through contemplation etc is fundamentally, if not exclusively, about our relationship with meaning.
(Aside: I have often wondered how people can tell other people are self-realised/enlightened…I mean, is there an extension to the SVM algorithm or a physical apparatus I’ve never heard of that optimally picks out the enlightened from everyday schmucks? What are the error rates?).
Yes, before you appoint me Director of the Department of the Utterly Obvious, do note that I am not finished.
While it is obvious at first blush that different worldviews offer different accounts of “meaning”, what is subtler, is the fact that the generation of admission of meaning may not ever be commensurable across worldviews.
I hear cries of “waitaminnit..”, “science does not say anything about the meaning of life, it is merely descriptive, not prescriptive” etc. This is trivially true, but only if you care about truth in a trivial sense.
Much of the meaning-making machinery of a non-scientific worldview, say a “spiritual” one (to be vague, general and inoffensive enough) is nevertheless bound to generate claims that are pretty close to scientific questions.
Non-scientific worldviews tend to build on assumptions that are tied up with the origin of the universe, consciousness, selfhood etc. These are all scientific issues as far as I can tell.
Given the assumptions made in non-scientific worldviews, there is often a referent, a deity, a state of knowing or alleged enlightenment that provides the ultimate meaning of human existence. Science offers insights that we can use to construct meaning, provisionally, against the backdrop of impermanence, our own mortality and iterative minimisaton of ignorance that is perhaps too slow to amount to a summum bonum in any one person’s lifetime.
The scientific worldview does not concern itself with what can be meaningful, but it does provide constraints on the knowledge we can use to construct meaning. For instance, if one were to hold that life would be utterly meaningless without the appearance of a giant gold-encrusted blueberry muffin in one’s living room every Saturday precisely at 1430 hrs, science would provide reliable ways to ascertain the likelihood of such an occurrence. Given the reported rarity of this phenomenon (to put it mildly), one would have to dismiss this version of a “meaningful life” until proven otherwise, or wait for a black swan (or golden muffin) moment.
If one were to hold that the entirety of our experience; the moments of insight, of joy, sorrow, despair, fortitude, yearning, heartache, resolve, gumption, absurdity, fun, angst, irony and love; was but a shadow play orchestrated for some reason that has nothing and everything to do with us, or an illusion/dream from which we must break free, or a test ordained by some deity with too much time to kill, or a relentless dance of becoming against a backdrop of being that is but a void, the prospects for active construction of meaning are about as robust as the odds of my being Kryptonian (*stands outdoors in sunlight for an hour, no superpowers manifest…at least it is good for vitamin D production*).
So we have divergence on two fronts here, the “what”, and the “how” of meaning generation.
“Why are you going on about this, since you clearly have a bias here”…you say? (don’t we all?).
Well, I seek to engage and understand, rather than dismiss and deny outright, especially when I myself have had flirtations with the notion of enlightenment (the unexamined life is not worth wasting, I say). Human experiences of the supposedly *spiritual* or transcendental sort are curious phenomena and strike me as worth understanding. Much to my chagrin, consciousness remains poorly understood. I am comfortable with “I don’t know”, but not comfortable staying in that state of ignorance for long.
Internal negotiation of meaning appears to occur by way of abstracting/integrating across the various models one holds as having some connection to replicable truths/experiences.
I reject the notion of an unbelievably complex, unknowable Truth that we can all only come at from different places and receive a shard of wisdom for our troubles, never the whole or even 43.76% plus or minus 2! Why, you ask? Simply because it feels lazy and unimaginative to surrender when there is absolutely no kick in doing so.
Given that we’re all going to die, ashes to ashes (if that’s an ad for a Cricket tournament, please count me out…I prefer Chess) and all that, wouldn’t it be great to live life out fully, seeking truth systematically, making better models of the world, making a better world, inventing new invectives when things invariably bite us in the rear and perhaps instantiating the loftiest notions we have of divinity, love etc. so that what is perhaps often denied to us is nonetheless made available to others?
Methinks it would be meaningful.
