Language is the tool that differentiates the chaos of existence into articulated order. The language of physics gave us insight into the structure and essence of matter; and we gained power over it. I believe that language of meaning could give us insight into the structure and essence of meaning, and that we can gain power over it in a similar way.
At present, meaning is an elusive substance, but so was the material world until we learned to model it symbolically. Thousands of years ago, matter must have seemed vague, opaque, mysterious. Most physical phenomena had a simple explanatory theory: “God”. It’s only through a meaningful system of categories (forces, masses, inertia, etc.) that we could begin to glimpse the underlying structure and order. Through this abstract understanding we learned to channel the forces of nature for our purposes, and essentially produce miracles.
We humans we subsist on meaning as much as on material substance. If there’s a way to understand it through mathematics, we could open up a new dimension of reality that would come with possibilities that we can’t easily conceive yet
I’ll admit that math is a weakness of mine compared to language.
Language is the tool that differentiates the chaos of existence into articulated order. The language of physics gave us insight into the structure and essence of matter; and we gained power over it. I believe that language of meaning could give us insight into the structure and essence of meaning, and that we can gain power over it in a similar way.
Thanks for sharing the video. I haven’t studied semiotics before. Anything in specific that reminded you of this framework? I found this part relevant in that nowadays the meaning of signs is floating haphazardly on the shifting cultural seas.
There’s often a deep politics to why one thing might come to mean another, as well as the fact that, in an increasingly mediated age, we often see a growing gap between a sign and the thing that it’s referring to. And, by extension, this leads to an increasing number of possible ways of decoding the same sign depending on what culture we were brought up in or what our specific context is. Understanding signs, then, is fundamental for understanding how and why meaning gets made the way it does
In computer software this isn’t a problem. Even though the technological landscape has shifted ten times in the last 50 years we’re still able to run games from the 70s by running them inside emulators.
Computers have a unit of information, but we don’t have a “unit of meaning” that would allow us to represent meaning, and pass it down to the future anthropologists in the 23rd century. If we’re able to construct meaning from first principles, then we’re also able to understand it from first principles.
Apologies for being several months late to the party…
This is a very interesting concept and approach. I skimmed your two posts, but they deserve more attention. As with your example of Boole, I am intrigued by people inventing new domains in science or math, seemingly out of thin air. A good current example would be David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto’s creation of constructor theory. I am currently reading her book ‘The Science of Can and Can’t’. You may appreciate the subtitle, which mentions counterfactuals (though I suspect in a slightly different context from your usage).
In the mean time, I wonder if you are familiar with category theory, sometimes described as “the mathematics of mathematics.” If not, you might be interested in these sources, the first two from Quanta Magazine, a more “newsy” version of Scientific American.
A Quanta columnist’s subjective evaluation of where the subject might be going:
A Quanta article with a title that begins “Where does meaning live in a sentence?”
