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Consider a car as an analogy....You get into a car and drive it, you are operating the car. You are not your car, you are the driver of the car.

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
grand leaps over tall buildings.
you only need on living human to give meaning.  has nothing to with a social context.
try again.

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ORIGINAL: Tristan

In regards to the original post, I think we humans manufacture meaning just as bees manufacture honey.  We enjoy meaning.  We are good at making predictions about the natural world.  Those predictions help us survive.  I suspect all living beings enjoy what they are good at doing.  I suspect birds enjoy flying as much as we enjoy creating meaning.

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Consider a car as an analogy....You get into a car and drive it, you are operating the car. You are not your car, you are the driver of the car.

I've often wondered where conscienceness resides. Is it in the neurons?  The synapses?  The atoms?  The matter?  Many believe the soul is somehow connected to the body, but I tend to think conscienceness is a property of matter and the universe. 

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Not wishing to sound snotty, tweak, but postmodernism is an art movement that's migrated from architecture into other branches of the arts. While the question of whether it actually has any inherent merit of its own, or is just a retreat from everything that was worthwhile about modernism is an interesting one, it doesn't have anything to say about philosophy, or the sciences.

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ORIGINAL: rawtape

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
grand leaps over tall buildings.
you only need on living human to give meaning.  has nothing to with a social context.
try again.

Ah yes, the pithy one-(well, three)-liner.

welllllllll thank you 

And delivered with what I'm sure the poster genuinely believes is a charming touch of insouciance and arrogance. If only I hadn't seen this every other year from first-year grad students... before they came to the belated realization that they actually had to defend and justify their answers.

you were doin good but you cant have it in 10 directions at once.  May want to sort that mess out.

But, just out of curiosity, can I take your assertion to mean that a human being, reared completely in isolation after birth, will have, or be able to ascribe, meanings for social constructs (which is what TB and I were talking about)?

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Yes I agree that "culture and communication are prerequisites for establishing meaning,".

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
There seems to me to be a number of 'conditions of possibility' that must be present (or pre-exist if you prefer) before this emergent property can develop. We could list a brain of a certain complexity, a culture of a certain degree of sophistication/development, the existence of a language or efficient communication code among them. I'd like to posit the need of cultures and social structures to reproduce and perpetuate themselves as part of that mix.

If this suggestion is valid, it redirects our attention on the operations of power and to a certain extent vindicates Nietzsche's ideas on power, language and morality. In this view, the act of creating, attributing or defining meaning is seen as operation/avenue to power. Is this one of the "selective pressures" you had in mind?

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania
Tweaky is about the best educated person on this topic on this site, and I deduce this from her use of the nomenclature related to these topics.

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
You are compounding and aggregating unrelated abstractions that leap to social dependencies lacking adequate substantive argument to validate primary cause and effect.

meaning is not dependent on society nor ones ability to communicate such meaning to a society nor any requirement with society to agree with a chosen meaning by any means such as the implication of your conversation.

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ORIGINAL: rawtape

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
You are compounding and aggregating unrelated abstractions that leap to social dependencies lacking adequate substantive argument to validate primary cause and effect.

meaning is not dependent on society nor ones ability to communicate such meaning to a society nor any requirement with society to agree with a chosen meaning by any means such as the implication of your conversation.

RO, you did see me mention that TB and I were talking about social constructs, didn't you? And if you'd followed the thread upstream, that we'd already raised the issue of "brute facts" but were focusing on social constructs now. Are you saying that a social construct like baseball's "balls and strikes" have meaning to someone reared in isolation?

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne

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ORIGINAL: rawtape
RO, you did see me mention that TB and I were talking about social constructs, didn't you? And if you'd followed the thread upstream, that we'd already raised the issue of "brute facts" but were focusing on social constructs now. Are you saying that a social construct like baseball's "balls and strikes" have meaning to someone reared in isolation?

Yes and it appears that I may know more about what you are doing than you do, or than you would like to admit.

You know or should know full well that raising an issue and resolving an issue are quite unrelated in their "meaning".

So how about we go for a few "pleasant gentle" truths?

I would make the same claim regarding someone reared in society suckling the public education system vs one alone given the same material.

get my drift?  

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ORIGINAL: Moonhead

Not wishing to sound snotty, tweak, but postmodernism is an art movement that's migrated from architecture into other branches of the arts. While the question of whether it actually has any inherent merit of its own, or is just a retreat from everything that was worthwhile about modernism is an interesting one, it doesn't have anything to say about philosophy, or the sciences. (In fact, there's a lot of cultural critics who feel that postmodernism's main defining characteristic is that it's incapable of saying anything as it's primarily a distancing stance auteurs can hide behind if they don't want to be held responsible for anything they might say...)

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The philosophical stream resists accurate definition. As I understand it, a useful way of looking at it is; it's a series of perspectives that take, as their starting point, the impossibility of Truth. There is a particular emphasis on the philosophy of language (eg. 'discourse analysis' and 'deconstructionism') and the Language/Knowledge/Power nexus. This is unsurprising as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are often credited as the primary sources of the stream of thought that has evolved into 'post-modernist philosophy'. Among its more notable and influential figures one might list Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Rorty, Lacan, de Lueze, Guattari and Beaudrillard. There are many others.

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ORIGINAL: rawtape

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne

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ORIGINAL: rawtape
RO, you did see me mention that TB and I were talking about social constructs, didn't you? And if you'd followed the thread upstream, that we'd already raised the issue of "brute facts" but were focusing on social constructs now. Are you saying that a social construct like baseball's "balls and strikes" have meaning to someone reared in isolation?

Yes and it appears that I may know more about what you are doing than you do, or than you would like to admit.

You know or should know full well that raising an issue and resolving an issue are quite unrelated in their "meaning".

So how about we go for a few "pleasant gentle" truths?

I would make the same claim regarding someone reared in society suckling the public education system vs one alone given the same material.

get my drift?  

No.
But I'm quite willing to hear you elaborate/explain.

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

My question is basically do you think that human consciousness is a meaningful thing? Or do you think that human beings just create meaning out of nothing? If we create meaning, isn't that somehow meaningful in and of itself?

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Postmodernism, as 'singular' movement has many streams ranging from architecture, the arts and literary theory through to politics, the human 'sciences' and philosophy.

For those interested there is a brief account of post modern philosophy here

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne

ok just touching hilites in a non-in-depth wiki style quicky...

The root of meaningful is basically to resolve, understand and the like,  saving all other variations. 

Minimally only 1 wo/man is required to create, construct, derive and signify assign meaning.

To accomplish this the wo/man requires the ability to sense hence ultimately experience the world outside the body, hence the requirement of the senses.

Should the wo/man kick an alligator s/he comes to the immediate conclusion and meaning that kicking an alligator can be very painful.

If the alligator took off her/his foot a secondary observation is that loss of a foot suxs.

This single body known as the wo/man has derived and created meaning where no meaning was before.  (this assumes for this example that no one has ever encountered an alley gator before)

Finally the construct "do not kick ally gator or one will be in pain and be without foot and that sux".

from consciousness to meaningful; to the conveyance of that meaning socially is waaaaaaaay down the road from the level at which JO brought it in her OP.

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ORIGINAL: ThatDamnedPanda

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

My question is basically do you think that human consciousness is a meaningful thing? Or do you think that human beings just create meaning out of nothing? If we create meaning, isn't that somehow meaningful in and of itself?

I think, therefore I am.

I am, therefore I have meaning.