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andrewduckerJack Cohen and Ian Stewart have suggested that rather than being called Homo Sapiens (wise man) we should instead be called "Pan narrans" - the storytelling chimpanzee. Recent genetic results would tend to also place us extremely closely (within 1%) with Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus, the two other strains of Chimpanzee currently in existence.
In many ways the name Pan narrans clearly highlights a problem I see on a frequent basis. On the one hand we are animals, creatures evolved to fit a series of niches over millions of years, with brains and bodies tuned for various strategies that worked well enough for our ancestors to propagate. On the other hand we tell amazing stories to help the world make sense to us - spinning everything from simple dramas about not trusting Uncle Bob with the whisky bottle since the incident last Christmas to hugely complex mathematical epics concerning the origins and fate of the universe.
There are certain kinds of stories that particularly appeal to us - ones with a clear Right and Wrong, ones where the hero (or heroine) succeeds against tremendous odds (whether success be in vanquishing an enemy, getting the perfect job or finding their One True Love), ones where everything goes wrong - but only so the hero can learn from the experience and come out of it a better person.
There are, of course, other stories - ones where everyone dies, ones where nobody learns anything, ones which deliberately play against type, or where the point is that there is no point (see Andy Warhol's films for one example of this last type). These, however, tend to be less popular - they don't comfort people, and their appeal tends to be towards those people who are either interested on a meta level (i.e. with the fact that the stories themselves are being played with) or who find it impossible to suspend their belief enough to enjoy stories which tell them that everything is going to be alright.
Sometimes we tell stories so simple, reassuring and hard to disprove that they become insanely widespread - helped by the fact that people will try very hard to believe something if it means they can stop thinking about something discomforting. Religion, for instance, deals fantastically well with the worries of meaning and death - meaning is gained from God's will, and by following God's will we will all be rewarded after death.
The problem being that in our modern secular world, people still feel this instinctual need to make their life into stories, and we've done a pretty good job of weakening (and in some case removing) several of the threads that were most commonly used to construct those stories. This problem isn't helped by the fact that we are surrounded by more stories than ever before - TV, books, comics, movies, theatre, radio - all pumping out vast numbers of stories, the vast majority of which reinforce the feeling that things will turn out ok, that life has meaning, that the world has patterns we fit into, that there is something more.
All of this leads us to feel that our lives are lacking something because they aren't leading anywhere, that there is some grand design, if only we could see it (and the corrollary - that there are people out there controlling this grand design and excluding us from it), that some day we will understand and find something meaningful that will suddenly let us know exactly what we need to do to be happy.
It took me a few years to realise that my search wasn't going to turn anything up, because there was no intrinsic meaning or grand design. Reading between the lines of Dave Sim's insanity, it seems that he too was looking for meaning, but when he realised that the direction he was heading in wasn't heading for a pinnacle of epiphany but rather for the blank freedom of nihilism he ran screaming to unquestioning belief. Some people find meaning in helping others, in children, in achievement or in the search itself. Others do without meaning, either finding other ways to keep themselves happy, or anaeshetise themselves against the lack they feel.
The problem comes when people want something more - and don't realise that this something more is going to have to come from within. We define our own meaning - we write our own stories - we find our own path. Living for someone else's meaning is going to bring you as much happiness as attempting to enforce your meaning on others will bring to them.
Stories can help you deal with life, but they aren't real. We're not the centre of the universe, the centre of the only story, headed for revelations and a nice conclusion that wraps things up. We're monkeys, surviving any way we can, mucking about in the middle of a chaotic planet in the middle of nowhere. We're not special, and expecting the universe to treat us as so is just going to lead to disappointment and a constant sense that things aren't going the wya they're 'supposed to'.
In many ways the name Pan narrans clearly highlights a problem I see on a frequent basis. On the one hand we are animals, creatures evolved to fit a series of niches over millions of years, with brains and bodies tuned for various strategies that worked well enough for our ancestors to propagate. On the other hand we tell amazing stories to help the world make sense to us - spinning everything from simple dramas about not trusting Uncle Bob with the whisky bottle since the incident last Christmas to hugely complex mathematical epics concerning the origins and fate of the universe.
There are certain kinds of stories that particularly appeal to us - ones with a clear Right and Wrong, ones where the hero (or heroine) succeeds against tremendous odds (whether success be in vanquishing an enemy, getting the perfect job or finding their One True Love), ones where everything goes wrong - but only so the hero can learn from the experience and come out of it a better person.
There are, of course, other stories - ones where everyone dies, ones where nobody learns anything, ones which deliberately play against type, or where the point is that there is no point (see Andy Warhol's films for one example of this last type). These, however, tend to be less popular - they don't comfort people, and their appeal tends to be towards those people who are either interested on a meta level (i.e. with the fact that the stories themselves are being played with) or who find it impossible to suspend their belief enough to enjoy stories which tell them that everything is going to be alright.
Sometimes we tell stories so simple, reassuring and hard to disprove that they become insanely widespread - helped by the fact that people will try very hard to believe something if it means they can stop thinking about something discomforting. Religion, for instance, deals fantastically well with the worries of meaning and death - meaning is gained from God's will, and by following God's will we will all be rewarded after death.
The problem being that in our modern secular world, people still feel this instinctual need to make their life into stories, and we've done a pretty good job of weakening (and in some case removing) several of the threads that were most commonly used to construct those stories. This problem isn't helped by the fact that we are surrounded by more stories than ever before - TV, books, comics, movies, theatre, radio - all pumping out vast numbers of stories, the vast majority of which reinforce the feeling that things will turn out ok, that life has meaning, that the world has patterns we fit into, that there is something more.
All of this leads us to feel that our lives are lacking something because they aren't leading anywhere, that there is some grand design, if only we could see it (and the corrollary - that there are people out there controlling this grand design and excluding us from it), that some day we will understand and find something meaningful that will suddenly let us know exactly what we need to do to be happy.
It took me a few years to realise that my search wasn't going to turn anything up, because there was no intrinsic meaning or grand design. Reading between the lines of Dave Sim's insanity, it seems that he too was looking for meaning, but when he realised that the direction he was heading in wasn't heading for a pinnacle of epiphany but rather for the blank freedom of nihilism he ran screaming to unquestioning belief. Some people find meaning in helping others, in children, in achievement or in the search itself. Others do without meaning, either finding other ways to keep themselves happy, or anaeshetise themselves against the lack they feel.
The problem comes when people want something more - and don't realise that this something more is going to have to come from within. We define our own meaning - we write our own stories - we find our own path. Living for someone else's meaning is going to bring you as much happiness as attempting to enforce your meaning on others will bring to them.
Stories can help you deal with life, but they aren't real. We're not the centre of the universe, the centre of the only story, headed for revelations and a nice conclusion that wraps things up. We're monkeys, surviving any way we can, mucking about in the middle of a chaotic planet in the middle of nowhere. We're not special, and expecting the universe to treat us as so is just going to lead to disappointment and a constant sense that things aren't going the wya they're 'supposed to'.
"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." - Kurt Vonnegut
no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 11:25 am (UTC)I can't think of any point where this is true.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 01:08 pm (UTC)richard tarnas's rather neat summary of Kant. the mind can no more stop meaning imposing than lungs can stop processing oxygen, take your pick but: Hume, Kant, RAW, Crowley, Dan Dennett's version of memes (one of the few coherent ones), Lacan, Wittgenstien, all the same basic presupposition, that we are born into a world of meaning that is essentially transpersonal... the ones like RAW and Crowley who want to do more than just describe this process have made the interesting observation that when you start using a particular memeplex, the universe will start using it right back at you.
it reminds me of the bit at the end of ghostbusters, where they have to "choose the form" and Gozo the Destructor ends up as the stay-puff marsh mallow man,its what Lacan calls a forced choice, you can't chose for Gozo to have NO form, you will always impose something, otherwise, well, there wouldn't be anything at all...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 09:49 pm (UTC)and since there is no outside of our meaning, no access to the ding an sich, all bets on what might be absolute or what the object might be like if we weren't there are strictly off, we can never peek behind the phenomenal curtain (fade out on Laurie Anderson: "And they were all free and they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind the curtain?"...)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 11:19 pm (UTC)Then where do new thoughts come from? Surely you're not going to argue that nothing has ever changed in the world?
all bets on what might be absolute ... are strictly off
So you agree that meanings are personal, not absolute?
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 09:30 am (UTC)so meaning is impersonal, as for meanings, plural, its like the distinction between the ontic and the ontological, between beings and Being, sure we all have our own room in the city of meaning, so at that level its at least idiosyncratic, but no-one lives outside it.
the absolute, the ding an sich, like i said bets are off, it's strictly inaccesssible, but personal has nothing to do with it, we all stand in the same relationship to the whatever is behind the curtain, wondering. i think thats where stories come in. but even here the structuralists will tell you how similiar the stories are, the screenwriters how there are only 12, the Jungians how limited and repetitive the archetypes are, and Wittgenstein will point out the family resemblances between them.
the take i'm trying to develop on this one, because its seems hey, why not, is to go all ludic with it, RAW and Crowley seemed to have the most fun with the symbolic order, decided to play with the treasure house of images rather than just inherit it or object to it or say none of it is real.
I don't think its personal, but i do think the structure of the noumenal is formally undecidable, so you might as well go for colour.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 09:40 am (UTC)But your viewpoint of this city is personal. Nobody else is seeing it from quite the same point you are, so while you may all be looking at the shared environment, your view is your own.
I think you're confusing "Personal" with "Unique". My view is personal, but it's certainly not unique - well, the particular mix is probably unique, but its components are made of ones shared by numerous other people all over the planet.
You aren't an archetype. I'm not an archetype. We may both be reminiscent of archetypes, but we aren't them. I have more than 12 distinct friends - hell, I have more than 12 distinct friends who are _geeks_ - an archetype in and of itself.
So meaning is personal, and the city is made up of the rooms we each make. We model our rooms on the rooms other people have made, and those rooms are made for people to live in, so they tend to have a lot of structure in common. But each one is still personal.
Oh - and I get emailed comments when you post them, so I'm now going to amuse myself by seeing what revisions you made :->
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 11:03 am (UTC)but ontologically, at the heart of our subjectivity, is someting fundamentally impersonal. Kant argued, and the cognitive scientists would agree, that reality is posited, achieves its phenomenal coherence through the world-building activity of the observational machinery. However - “it is not possible to pass directly from the purely “animal soul” immersed in its natural life-world to “normal subjectivity” dwelling in its symbolic universe – the vanishing mediator between the two is the “mad” gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution.” (Zizek)
This “mad gesture” appears in numerous guises in the history of ideas, the Hegelian Night of the World, Schelling’s Night of the Self, the Abyss of Freedom, even Freud’s Death Drive. What all these homonyms attest to is a fundamental negativity, a moment between the noumenal and the phenomenal where the former must be utterly destroyed to be reformed as the latter. This moment can never appear in the phenomenal. We never see it, because it is the means by which we see. As Kant noted “the thing which thinks…is known only through its predicates”. Indeed it is absolutely essential that the means of production of meaning remain, in Zizek’s terms, foreclosed for reality to have its coherence. It is only when it begins to “peep through”, in moments of madness, that we even notice it at work at all.
So at the heart of subjectivity, for meaning to be there at all, is a completely impersonal and universal process which has absolutely nothing to do with you. Meanings may be personal. Meaning isn't.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 11:55 am (UTC)I _think_ you're saying that our interal meaning is produced by a process we have no access to. Which sounds entirely reasonable (short of the ability to stick electrodes into your brain and take a look at it, coming Real Soon Now). However, as these processes are, again, different from person to person, and affecting a set of genes and experiences which, while similar to each other, aren't identical, will still produce meaning that varies from person to person.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 07:15 pm (UTC)it's here, we can already point to the neurological correlates of consciousness, even the neurochemical correlates, but to move from correlation to explanation is a leap that even the most sanguine of the consciousness theorists have to admit that we don't even know how to begin to make - how does what happens at the biological level explain the phenomenon of subjectivity? the more pessimistic theorists reckon we don't even know how to frame the question let alone begin to answer it.
as for being esoteric well, yeah. the phenomenal/noumenal distinction is one of those tools for thought that prosthetically enhances our ability to think about the interaction between reality, representation and consciousness; like any other specialised language - like you have with computers - you can't really get to grips with the basics if you don't know the lingo.
i think meaning is basic. I think that we can no more mean differently from our neighbours than we can breathe differently, or our kidneys can process fluid differently, or our muscles can exert effort differently. Thats the level at which i mean that meaning is basic, universal, impersonal and not subject to individual variation. There are pathologies of it, for sure, like with kidneys, lungs and muscles, and the pathologies of meaning, like schizophrenia, probably do tell us something about meaning making in general, but no-one, other than Lacan, as far as i know, have tackled it at that level.
I'm sure we've lost our audience by now. But for me, the only kids on the block, as far as even approaching a version of how matter has produced mind, are the more esoteric philosphers and thinkers. And behind most of them, behind Hegel, Kant, Derrida, even behind string theory, you can detect the influence of jewish mysticsm, of the kabbalah. Its a reach, I know, but if i want to get a glipmse of the miracle that is matter that has evolved to the point where it knows itself, conscious dust, (and thats just so damn odd) then i turn to the poets and philosphers and mystics. science, and i consider myself fundamentally a scientist, has not even begun to go there yet, doesn't know how. except with embarrsaments like Roger Penrose and "quantuum consciousness", which just go to show how far we are from anything like understanding the basic facts of our being.
(spot the difference :>)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 08:35 pm (UTC)I think meaning is basic. I think that we can no more mean differently from our neighbours than we can breathe differently.
Aaaah, so you're now using meaning as a verb rather than as an adjective. A linguistic trick similar to the one used by Robert Pirsig, and if my opinion, a bit of a cheat. We suddenly move from "the meanings that we have each attached to phenomena" (obviously different, if interrelated) and the act of attaching meaning (almost certainly identical in the majority of people).
To me the only kids on the block, as far as approaching a version of how matter has produced mind, are the people currently working with autopoietic systems and neural nets. Self-correcting systems with the ability to detect patterns are where it's at.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-18 09:04 pm (UTC)My use of meaning hasn't changed since this discussion began (and by the way your first description of meaning - "the meanings" - is a plural noun, not an adjective). i've always been trying to take it back to the process of meaning making (the ontological level, the impersonal) not whatever particular meaning that process might produce (the ontic, the personal). Science and theory can only progress by considering meaning at the former level.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-22 08:13 am (UTC)Plural adjectives - meaning is a quality of the relationship between an observer and an observed. The meaning of X to me is A,B,C and D, the meaning of X to you is B,D,G and H.
I've been using meaning in this sense since I started out, and I think fairly obviously so. When I said Some people find meaning in helping others, in children, in achievement or in the search itself. I'm clearly not talking about the process of meaning, I'm talking about the meaning they impart to and extract from their relationship with these things. If you were using meaning in a different sense, then highlighting that at an earlier stage might have been useful.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-22 05:17 pm (UTC)but ALL consciousness is a "relationship between an observer and an observed" or, as the philosphers put it in their little churches, all consciousness is intentional, all consciousness is consciousness of something. thats not an argument for meaning in your sense being an adjective, neither is its subjectivity, its BDGHness, not no way, not no how, (but see my comments on grammar in post below, which i should have stuck to, but i couldn't let it lie...boys will be boys)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-22 08:05 am (UTC)It's frequently my job to explain my work to business people - I have to deal with them, get their requirements, explain what they can have, why there are problems, and what we're doing, in non-technical language. And I can manage that, because I actually understand what I'm talking about, so I can break it down into simplified language.
If you can't explain something without using inner-church language, then you don't really understand it, you're just parroting the original author. It might take three times as long, because you can't use linguistic shortcuts, but it's always possible.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-22 04:39 pm (UTC)anything that can be said can be said clearly, said wittgenstein, and i agree. All im talking here is stuff like the phenomenal/noumenal distinction; the ontic/ontological distinction, in the paragraph that you said you didnt get, those are the main notions at work and particularly the relationship between the phenomenal and the noumenal, which is, for me, the basic thing our discussion is about. I was presumptious enough to assume you were ok with that stuff. I dont know what there you consider inner church/esoteric but i'll happily explain whatever was unclear.
As for my use of meaning, i think i've been trying to be clear, at least since i introduced the ontic/ontological thing into our little textual dance, indeed since i introduced Kant (and i'm sure he came on in the first act) at what level i think meaning is worth discussing with regard to theory or research or, well, life. At what level its a profoundly odd thing that we all do, a human universal. Maybe i've just been reading a particular kind of writer for too long. Thats why i wanted to stop reading/writing Theory and start reading about and writing screenplays - having done so, ironically, the totemic text of the latter discipline is a book called Story, about how the latter (despite all surface appearance of uniqueness and individual variation) is an inescapable universal, a fact of life...
at the ontic level, about our stories rather than our story making, i dont think they are arbitrary there either, maybe thats the level we should shift this too? or maybe its just me that needs to shift. enough with the ontology.
(and i still reckon if someone was asked to parse the sentence "what was the meaning of that truck running over your grandmother" they'd have meaning as an abstract noun, but lets not do grammar, im sure no-ones reading this as it is, any survivors the audience will shoot themselves if we start doing grammar)