Meaning – Layers of association between experience and feedback from joy and suffering
Where does meaning come from? Whether it’s meaning in our lives or the meaning of a word, we might assume that meaning comes from some purpose. But what if we suddenly found out what the purpose to life was? What if the Brain Box Earth was real, and the aliens eventually told us that they’d created the simulated Earth to achieve some goal we couldn’t even understand, or was completely trivial? Maybe they really like superhero movies, or they love watching giant pandas. Would people suddenly find new meaning in their lives now that they knew the “real” purpose of everything? I don’t think so, and that’s because meaning creates purpose and not vice versa.
Consciousness is required for meaning. When we’re asleep, or dead, things don’t matter to us anymore. And what’s interesting about consciousness is that almost everything that we’re consciously aware of is an experience that’s a duplicate of something that exists in the world. Colors, sounds, and shapes exist in the world, and our experience of them exists in our consciousness. Which means for almost all our experiences, there’s no new information created. An apple reflects certain wavelengths of light and we experience redness, but the light and the experience carry the same information. In all of this duplicated information there’s no meaning—we can’t observe meaning; we have no way to sense it. Meaning is something that we create. Because we’re conscious we can experience pain and pleasure, or joy and suffering if the feelings are more abstract—those feelings are unique because they carry information that doesn’t exist in the world outside our consciousness. We add them as another layer to our conscious experience, and that’s where meaning comes from.
If I prick my finger, I haven’t created pain. I’ve created an electrical signal which travels through my nervous system, a signal that’s completely the same as any other electrical pulse traveling along a nerve. It doesn’t become a feeling of pain until it gets to my brain and becomes part of my conscious experience. Then, in addition to all the other information about the world, there’s a new sensation and new information that now exists. And these new sensations of pain and pleasure carry new information: about the outside world, about our bodies, or even about our mental states. They are like tags that can identify some experiences as good and others as bad, and they add a new layer of depth to the world and our view of ourselves.
Can you imagine what it would be like if you were born without the ability to feel good or bad about anything? There’d be no pain let you know to avoid burning yourself in a fire or falling down. In fact, some people are born without the ability to feel pain like that, but they can still feel good and bad about their experiences. What if even that wasn’t possible? Being hungry or sick wouldn’t feel bad, it would just be different. There’d be nothing inherently good about petting a dog or bad about petting a porcupine. The world would just be information without any depth or direction to anything. There wouldn’t be the basic building blocks of feelings of good and bad about simple things, and without those how could we get to the more complex feelings?
Fortunately, we do experience pain and pleasure/joy and suffering, and so we can build up complex layers of meaning on top of even the simplest experiences. We can associate the smell of a flower with a person and further associate the smell with all the good feelings in all of our memories of that person. Or we can connect cooking with family, fun, and good times. There are layers on layers of meaning built up from tiny little sensations of good and bad that we’ve experienced over and over again. Ultimately, these feelings create meaning, and that meaning is like a map that can give our life purpose. And we can attach this meaning and purpose to the way we use words. The meanings of words are built upon simpler and simpler ideas and experience that we associate with them, giving us a way to describe the meaning in our lives.
Ultimately, this is the key reason why consciousness is important. It’s not the experience of colors, smells, or sounds. It’s the ability to take all those experiences and add another layer on top of them—it lets us know that some experiences are positive and should be pursued while others are negative and should be avoided. Having this feedback makes learning and emotions possible and adds another dimension to intelligent thoughts and memories. As we define the different parts of human cognition and how they work together, this is the idea that it all rests on: because we’re conscious we can experience positive or negative feedback about the world and ourselves, and that allows us to create complex behaviors and learn. This is why the idea of a definition makes any sense at all.