Another year, another dimension
A New Year's Resolution:
I will devote this year, and years to come, to investigating and defining meaning, and its relation to all that is good; life, beauty, freedom, order and will.
It is natural and necessary that we as living beings engage in such a study, and it has been the focus of human thought and agony for as long as we can grasp. Still, ever since God died some 100 years ago, the topic has been all but neglected by scholars and academics. Who talks about meaning these days? New Age mystics, religious fundamentalists and people with a bad conscience.
It has to be understood that science, as we now know it, cannot answer a single question concerning meaning. This implies that only we as living beings can give meaning to science, it has no meaning in itself. The proper field for the study of meaning is something we not yet have - life science. Social science, or sociology, was conceived as a terrible construct in that it tried to remove all meaning from life, replacing it with objective order. It tried to make science out of life, instead of the other way around. As so often in history, sociology tried to put reality on its head.
The starting point of a life science is to recognize what I wrote of a few weeks ago - that life as a phenomenon is an additional dimension to space and time. Subjective intentionality is, even though it sounds like something from a bad sci-fi novel, a fifth dimension. We can study it, but only if we acknowledge that it exists, and that it makes a purely mechanical universe but a special case. Think of it as the Newtonian universe and Ensteinian relativity. If we acknowledge that there is a fifth dimension of intentionality, present-day physics is incomplete.
Anyway, I will follow my Resolution and return to this topic again and again. So much has been thought and written about it, that intense study is necessary. Still, there is as far as I know no completely satisfactory synthesis of the study of meaning, so there is still plenty of work left to be done. I'm pretty sure it will be a lot of fun...
I will devote this year, and years to come, to investigating and defining meaning, and its relation to all that is good; life, beauty, freedom, order and will.
It is natural and necessary that we as living beings engage in such a study, and it has been the focus of human thought and agony for as long as we can grasp. Still, ever since God died some 100 years ago, the topic has been all but neglected by scholars and academics. Who talks about meaning these days? New Age mystics, religious fundamentalists and people with a bad conscience.
It has to be understood that science, as we now know it, cannot answer a single question concerning meaning. This implies that only we as living beings can give meaning to science, it has no meaning in itself. The proper field for the study of meaning is something we not yet have - life science. Social science, or sociology, was conceived as a terrible construct in that it tried to remove all meaning from life, replacing it with objective order. It tried to make science out of life, instead of the other way around. As so often in history, sociology tried to put reality on its head.
The starting point of a life science is to recognize what I wrote of a few weeks ago - that life as a phenomenon is an additional dimension to space and time. Subjective intentionality is, even though it sounds like something from a bad sci-fi novel, a fifth dimension. We can study it, but only if we acknowledge that it exists, and that it makes a purely mechanical universe but a special case. Think of it as the Newtonian universe and Ensteinian relativity. If we acknowledge that there is a fifth dimension of intentionality, present-day physics is incomplete.
Anyway, I will follow my Resolution and return to this topic again and again. So much has been thought and written about it, that intense study is necessary. Still, there is as far as I know no completely satisfactory synthesis of the study of meaning, so there is still plenty of work left to be done. I'm pretty sure it will be a lot of fun...
posted by Hugin at 00:17
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