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xssve -> RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? (6/25/2011 6:21:34 AM)
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Have kinda gone around with this with Kirata previously, there's not enough data and what there is doesn't pass the razor test for "extra-biological" consciousness, although he used a different phrase for it.
Anyway, meaning: define "meaning" - again, there are four kinds of reality: objective reality, subjective reality, objective consensus reality and subjective consensus reality - meaning, as far as I know, is subjective, it's a matter of perception, so it really depends on who you ask, because it's assigned, like value, to which it's very similar, might even be termed a subset of value.
An individual may assign value or meaning to something - a bank note will typically be assigned value, and additionally, meaning, by an individual - the value of the note may be recognized by in consensus reality, i.e., a dollar bill is a dollar bill, regardless of who is looking at it, the monetary value is stable and established by consensus - but if it's your first dollar, it may have sentimental or additional symbolic value, meaning, and that meaning is confined to the person assigning it.
It's a form of subjective reality, which others can theoretically share, but it's going to require an explanation - but, at that point, it becomes a matter of consensus reality, albeit, perhaps a narrow consensus.
Thus, in objective consensus reality, a thing may have several layers value: it has it's explicit symbolic monetary value, it has value as a physical object, the paper, the ink, etc., and any explicit or implicit symbolic values attached to it, other than it's monetary value (as art, for example) can also be theoretically recorded or conjectured.
Happens all the time with archeological artifacts, i.e., we speculate on what a given object may have meant to it's owner, based on where it's found, a funerary cache, for example, what objects objects it's surrounded by, wear patterns, etc.
Non material things have value assigned as well, an idea has hypothetical value, a philosophy, a scientific or economic theory, etc., even and opinion may be assigned value, and therefore meaning.
It occurs to me there to look at the relationship between meaning and value again: a thing may have meaning without necessarily having material value, thus it may be that value is a subset of meaning rather than the other way around, reversing the conclusion in the preceding paragraph: once assigned meaning, a thing or idea axiomatically acquires value, even if that value is subjective and hermetic, dependent on it's meaning.
A Confederate bank note, for example, may have subjective, sentimental value to one person, collectable value for another, historical value for a Third, but nothing more than convenient tinder for a Fourth - and it's value is largely dependent on it's subjective meaning to each of the Four.
In objective reality, the state of all energy in the universe (or hypothetical multiverse) at any given moment, it has no meaning, since meaning is subjective, subjectivity requires and observer, and the entire set of conscious beings is the hypothetical observer of objective reality, from which the other forms or reality emerge, so a thing theoretically has all it's objective material attributes, plus all subjective attributes assigned to it, as long as they exist in the form of energy somewhere - i.e., as energy , even thought has existence, and theoretically, as energy, interacts with other energy, thus consequence, it's part of a chain of cause and effect, and in science, that is meaningful.
Of course thinking about that too much can lead to paranoid schizophrenia. [8|]
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