Meaning makes life full, as I am sure many people agree. And what does meaning mean? This question poses some difficulty. Herbert Mead believed the word meaningful was meaningless. Quine mentioned that linguists that specialize in meaning “are in the position of not knowing what it is they are talking about.”

What meaning means is a fundamental and foundational question. Meaning is about sense too. When we cry because a lotus flower is too perfect, that means something. When we pay our taxes, maybe it means something to people we don’t know, but for us we often feel busyness, loss, and frustration. So we can feel a meaning, also as Kant offered more recently than most that reason (or sense) is a passion, being backed by many much older thinkers. And meaning is not just sense. Jokes can be funny in a meaningless way, such as in using derogatory words frivolously. My father believed that tragedy meant more than comedy. Comedy seemed to him rather pointless because continuity doesn’t weigh as much to the mind as a tragic end. One time he wrote a humorous essay about fatherhood. He had me read it before publishing, and he saw me laughing. He asked me “why is it funny?” He really was asking; he didn’t know. So I told him “because it is so sad.” We tend to seek the grain of sadness or fear in levity, but not the tiny bubble of enjoyment and happiness in a satisfying tragedy. The bubble gone unnoticed makes it all the more enjoyable.

Sometimes when we mean something, we are pointing at a gold coin, and we mean the gold coin. The coin has weight and a quality of being pure. That is part of what we mean. Sometimes someone dies and we ask for meaning. In that case we don’t intend a “what” like a gold coin, but a “why”. What and why mean things, “when” can mean something: such as when the sun is eclipsed or the clock strikes 3:33. “Where” is meaningful: at the top of a mountain or at the temple. Who could be a famous news anchor, or a mother’s lullaby. How is meaningful: if we make the cake from scratch, and grow, harvest and grind the grain for flower. Nowadays there is a glut of appreciating the work of how, and the techniques for proving a mathematical theorem or how a gun was turned into a piece of metal sculpture.

Maybe the question we should ask is who doesn’t have meaning, when, where, what doesn’t have meaning and why?

Enter logical positivism, the most meaningless philosophy. The only idea in logical positivism is a vague idea of the good, and how we “just know what it is” without any intellectual activity. We can be busy assembling the parts of a car on a conveyor belt and be content in our concentration about mechanical things because of our idea we are doing good or valuable work. And this lukewarm heart we have while we do it is the only meaning of our work, generally ignored because we are too busy to notice our hearts.

The engineers have an appreciation for how, but the assembly workers, when they are not thinking like an engineer, are in about as meaningless and unobserved a mode as possible for a human being.

But sometimes we don’t have time to think about the soldiers that died for our land and culture, so I can sit at the ramen store and have a distinct cultural experience. We don’t have time to consider how the pig died to give us a succulent piece of its body to eat from our ramen bowl. Meaninglessness seems necessary for survival in our world where children die in factories so we can have nice cheap shoes. And maybe it always has been so, where we walk past the wretched human sufferer on the street with only a pithy stab of pity.

And to any family who has lost a daughter or a son… should we carry the conscience and the meanings of that death everywhere and constantly?

It seems like meaninglessness could be a moment of happiness in an otherwise tragic life. We throw off our chains of poverty and disease, loss and hardship, and look up at the open bright sky and feel happy for no reason at all, senselessly. Why should meaninglessness be so bad? Is that moment of happiness careless and wrong? Or is it the very purpose of life?

And a poem that conveys this senseless happiness, is it not real poetry because it is meaningless?

Once upon a time there was a grasshopper that just sat around and breathed in the thick summer air all day and night. He would eat green leaves that were everywhere, more than anyone could eat. He sat and sat, until the ant, who was sweating and carrying heavy food to his anthill, got angry. He said “Grasshopper! you fool, you are not going to have anything when winter comes” The grasshopper looked at the ant and smiled. “Come here friend, I have things to tell about breathing air and eating grass.” but the ant wasn’t listening, he kept working and working all summer long. Finally the fall came, and the air was cold, and the grasshopper ran out of food. He didn’t move much, except to hop gently when the whim came to him. He didn’t cry for the cold, and he had the same smile he had in the summer. Finally the snow and icy winds came. The ant sat in his anthill with his wife and children. Sometimes he thought about that foolish grasshopper, but most of the time he was working to raise his kids. The winters and summer went by, and other grasshoppers came and went. Those grasshoppers were different, but sometimes there was one grasshopper that acted like the first foolish grasshopper. Once his son began to listen to a grasshopper and never returned to the anthill. Finally one winter, the ant was old and he began to fear death. He thought about all his work, and wondered how he could bring his food or his children or wife with him after death. These were evil thoughts, but eventually he remembered that foolish grasshopper. He thought about how the grasshopper smiled even in the cold of the fall, and it made the ant smile a little too. He did nothing and sat just breathing and eating the food he had stored over the years. In the end, he wished he had had a whole summer to breathe and eat and learn to smile, but his time was over, and he died.

The idea that thoughts are hypothetical is partially true. You can have a thought and have it not be real in one sense, but in another the thought has physical causes and physical effects. Certainly, atom-splitting wouldn’t happen much on the Earth’s crust without humans having the idea of it first. That is one physical effect of an idea. The cause of the idea of splitting the atom came from other physical things, such as the physical reality of Word War II. The other cause of this idea was other thoughts that had come before. Where did those ideas come from? Certainly not from just one mind. The ideas were hanging in the funk between scientists in sweaty stressed out bodies. Bodies that wanted respect, dignity, sex, food and so many other things that brought out their thinking work. After the physical causes, when a thought happens, it effects the brain and usually other parts of the body immediately.

The quote about thinking I like most is “The trick [to thinking hard], Berty boy, is not minding that it hurts”. Thinking hurts. It taxes the body. Even pleasurable thinking hurts, much like other pleasurable bodily things hurt. When you eat, the body has a lot of work to do. Same with sex, playing sports, or any recognizable activity, pleasurable or not. The belief that thinking all the time will make you happy, either through positive thinking, or by the idea that life is a game of strategy that we could win by becoming rich or famous, does not have much truth in it. Even though the scientists that built the atom bomb “won” and got rewards for their bodies, the effect was generally a loss to society. Maybe there is less discomfort for many people as a result of winning the war, but the result of atom-splitting becoming a serviceable thought is mainly a whole lot of stress and worry about subsequent applications of the idea of the atom bomb. It is possible to think your way out of thinking, but it is the hardest thing to do with thinking. The most successful works of language do just that, like the song of a Tibetan singing bowl, they are sounds that cause silence.

The idea that we should think a lot in education is a large drain on everyone in the form of stress and worry. Believing this stress and worry is just a fantasy is not a respectable position. Worry is a negative feedback loop, though. Stressful thoughts conceive more stressful (often unnecessary) thinking. It can be counteracted with mental effort, but none of this is fantasy. Stressful thinking has immediate physical presence in the body, and long term physical causes and effects. We have this stress anyway, because when there are other forms of suffering and hardship, we feel the need to think it through. There is nothing bad about the kind of thinking that takes you through hardship. One of the bad effects of other unnecessary stressful thinking is that the stressful thinking that is good for handling hardship of humans gets pushed to the side.

People in America tend to think listening to the life stories of other people is a favor we do for them. It is true it is stressful thinking, but this is the kind of thinking that really helps everyone. Learning algebra is stressful thinking that is rarely applied by most of the individual minds that do the learning. For some reason we believe the human being next to us and their life story is less important than algebra, or less important than the political narrative pushed with oppressive sameness on 100 different news channels. This is a loss to society.

Some people just don’t think that much, and there is something bad about that. Thinking through the things that make us unhappy is very effective, as any therapist will tell you. Once we’re happy though, the goal is to leave thinking behind for as long as possible.

Empty Bloom

Sometimes you need the tumor in turmeric.
There is something that cures us when we enter an altered state
Brought on by the moon,
Or a little vodka.

Tumor cells grow all the same.
They spread like fields of grain
Until you’ve moved in on the mountain cat’s hunting ground;
Then you need a laser or a scalpel
Because if you don’t leave home and hunt,
You will be hunted.

Maybe it is stupid to say the world is “One–
Big Tumor.”

To the word One, others will react–
Some stay, the mind at home.

If you react, the mind leaves home in search of news,
Hunting for experience,

And if you seek by turning on your screen,
you are caught in a maze of perfectly unfolding flowers
Where paper tigers hurt
Everyone’s feelings the same.

There is a time and a place for word soup. Maybe it happened in the beginning, but I believe it is most needed at the end, when we have eaten enough to arouse an appetite. Say there were some words spoken by some god or fool to start out with. Nobody really knew what it meant, probably not even the fool knew. In all likelihood, the first words were spoken out of an almost totally ignorant source. So, a process was begun where people created more words to understand what was already spoken. You could call it a dialogue, or progress. Maybe refinement? What really happened was the original problem of what was uttered was exacerbated. So many words were created that we all began needing a box that spewed uninspired word-streams at us. If the words were enjoyed and mulled over long enough, the ambient broth of the word-stream became legendary. It was the savoring of what was said before that gave us the idea of new innocence, an idea that is older than maturity. We invented a process of devouring our past, thinking we were producing a future. The truth, of course, is the present is the origin and result of our ideas of past and future. The child’s innocence is the wisdom of the first goddess who uttered the original words, creating the problem from which we imagine our maturity, and our children’s innocence, in the present moment. We think of the advantages our children have, having access to so much word soup at their fingertips. Unfortunately our children can’t be a part of the conversation, really. They can say things that have been said before, but without the ignorance of the original thinker, nor the wisdom of the same. The whole idea, it seems, of creating a great central pool for ingredients of the soup– So that all that roam will find their paths converging to Rome–precludes that the roamers were just roaming, they were never in Rome. And none of their descendants roam they way they did. The soup we are preparing has already been eaten.

Related: https://questionsarepower.org/2020/08/12/the-origin-of-color/

As a child I was interested in the word few. I was not interested in figuring out exactly what it meant; instead I was interested in understanding its potential. What could it mean? I enjoyed playing with modifiers such as “quite a few” which seems to mean the opposite of its intended meaning: the word few supposedly comes from the PIE pau- and from there the word paucity derives. It means a small but numerous number. It means “many, yet not many” to put it without delicacy. “Quite a few” seems to increase the “numerousness” of the number involved in few, but maybe it only emphasizes the importance that it is not only one or two…?

I remember thinking about this, and smiling. This word made me happy. When I came to college, however, I learned from my friends that the word few meant exactly “three.” I did try to argue that the word was meant to not be exact, but there was a certain force in the precise claim, and no-one listened to me. Interestingly, the word few is related to puerile. (the etymology is coming from etymonline.com) My arguments might have sounded immature to the ears of my friends. What use is a word if we don’t know exactly what it means? And if I don’t know exactly what it means, and this other person says he does, why should they listen to me?

My reaction was suppressed anger. By the time I was in college I was used to this sort of thing. I had a certain joy when people used a turn of phrase or said things that had a lot of possibility (especially when the speaker was a mathematician), and it seemed everyone else frowned on this joy. Maybe my feeling was stupid, or immature, or even evil, but I buried the determination to make the argument for a less determined definition of few, and many other things, in the face of everyone who thought they knew so much. It felt like such a small, trivial thing. But it was one of the last things I enjoyed about language at Earlham, where writing was paramount. Why couldn’t we have at least one vague word, a word about not knowing the exact number of things, but still being able to to communicate the information that it was more than two, yet not very many. Wasn’t that something we ran into all the time? Or were we supposed to count everything before we spoke? My reaction was far from laziness. I perceived this difference in my ideas, really in my temperament—what made me happy, as something I was going to struggle with my whole life, and correctly so.

Astronomers believe the universe is 14 billion years old. There are over 7 billion people in the world. That means it takes two years for the human race to have as much time being conscious as the entire span of time for the universe to be born and age until now. The idea that our minds can’t have an effect on reality is confirmably false. Just think what we might be capable of as a human family if we trained everyone at least to believe in the power of their consciousness. Maybe the earth is not the center of the universe, but what we are capable of can reach the farthest corners of space. These two days of kindness and joy, just think how much it would mean if it reached everyone on Earth. Peace.

words are footsteps
we are mistaken to believe they happen first in the head
words happen in our feet
what made us put our foot there?
If there were a way to walk up to the heart or head with words
It would have already been invented
by the people stepping on our heads,
telling us our words are there.

“Even in our most intellectual conceptions,” Peirce wrote, “the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems.”

(PW 295) as quoted in Chiasson, P. (2001). Peirce’s Logic of Vagueness. In M. Bergman & J. Queiroz (Eds.), The Commens Encyclopedia: The Digital Encyclopedia of Peirce Studies. New Edition.

“our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy.” (Peirce, PW 356)

Science (which has become too general and ambitious a word) is usually regarded with directly conveying the facts of the world. An interesting cross-section of scientific facts is the belief that “growth” of the brain is always good. (a belief that is strangely shared with corporate models of economics)

The NGF or “Nerve Growth Factor” is a chemical found in the brain. It was isolated and recognized as important for the brain to “develop” and survive almost 70 years ago. In 2006, NGF levels were found to be heightened at the beginning of a romantic relationship.

Emanuele, Enzo; Politi, Pierluigi; Bianchi, Marika; Minoretti, Piercarlo; Bertona, Marco; Geroldi, Diego (2006-04-01). “Raised plasma nerve growth factor levels associated with early-stage romantic love”. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 31 (3): 288–94. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2005.09.002. ISSN0306-4530. PMID16289361. S2CID18497668.

The communication with people interested in science is usually that brain development is caused by the birth of neurons, or nerve cells. This birth is called Neurogenesis. Along with Neurogenesis, brain development is associated with the development of connections between neurons that can carry messages that are found to be both chemical and electrical. The more cells and the more connections between cells, the more brain development. And brain development is good.

Unfortunately, for example, you could develop certain neural pathways that cause you to behave in “bad” ways, such as those neurons and connections involved in becoming an alcoholic or a kleptomaniac. When this happens, the “good” thing to do is to lose cells and connections, so that your brain does not compel you to behave in these bad ways. In other words, you need to destroy some of what is normally termed “brain development”. This means that some kinds of brain development are good and some kinds of brain development are not good.

The point is that “Science” (once again, an overly ambitious word for anyone really interested in science) is written rather indirectly when the writers suggest we should regard brain development as good. How indirect is this suggestion? Well, seeing as how all good and bad behaviors could conceivably be brain development, the suggestion that brain development is “good” is completely unhelpful. Brain development has no bearing on what is good or bad, because all good and bad behaviors are brain developments.

Of course, we could say that all good people invariably have well-developed brains, and all generally bad people invariably have ill-developed brains. Unfortunately, we are left to figure out what a good person or a bad person is before we can figure out if their brains are well developed or not. This makes the study of brain development secondary to ethics, and is certainly not something a brain scientist would want to suggest.

There are growing groups of people who prefer to speak and think magically because they think it is more “direct”. The arguments for why this is not the case are already widely repeated, often in shameful and shaming ways.

The way that these magical-minded groups may be defended is to look at whether the phenomenon of “love” is more directly referred to with magical kinds of terms, rather than referred to as something that stimulates brain development (since brain development was found to be lacking in directness).

“Some say love, it is a river
That drowns the tender reed.
Some say love, it is a razor
That leaves the soul to bleed.
Some say love, it is a hunger,
An endless, aching need.
I say love, it is a flower,
And you, its only seed.

It’s the heart afraid of breaking
That never learns to dance.
It’s the dream afraid of waking
That never takes the chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken
Who cannot seem to give,
And the soul afraid of dying
That never learns to live.

When the night has been too lonely,
And the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong,
Just remember, in the winter,
Far beneath the bitter snow,
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love,
In the spring, becomes the rose.”

やさしさを 押し流す
愛 それは川
魂を 切り裂く
愛 それはナイフ
とめどない 渇きが
愛だと いうけれど
愛は花 生命の花
きみは その種子挫けるのを 恐れて
躍らない きみのこころ
醒めるのを 恐れて
チャンス逃す きみの夢
奪われるのが 嫌さに
与えない こころ
死ぬのを 恐れて
生きることが 出来ない長い夜 ただひとり
遠い道 ただひとり
愛なんて 来やしない
そう おもうときには
思いだしてごらん 冬
雪に 埋もれていても
種子は春 おひさまの
愛で 花ひらく