Comments on “The puzzle of meaningness”

This is written by a 75 year old who suffered the consequences of his wife’s secret affair in his 30’s. The unfolding of the meaning of that experience revealed to me the very nature of consciousness and how self identity determines my perceived reality. The scientific hypothesis of how the complex of emotions, feelings and the awareness of feelings affects our conscious and unconscious identity I later found in Antonio Damasio’s “The Feeling of What Happens” and “Descartes’ Error.”

Originally my cognitive dissonance and depression coming from the unanticipated emotions, forced upon me in reaction to the loss of who I thought I was, forever changed my concepts of meaning. Throughout a long period of accepting the validity and necessity of being conscious of the relationship between feelings and concepts in order to just be, I dissolved the Cartesian illusion that had left me meaningless. I can now say after a meaningful life that my self identity is created in each conscious moment by the “co-naissance” of a feeling with an idea. I think and feel therefor I am meaningfully me. I well understand if you do not find this meaningful as I have been there too.

I’d think it’s pretty clearly wrong from the start, because the assumptions are based on faulty logic. You cannot assume you know your spouse so well as to make decisions on their behalf regarding your shared marriage contract. Denying your spouse the right of first refusal and failing to notify them of your lacking needs is a clear violation, regardless of how the issue is handled, eg: having an affair or not. The ethics/meaning of the affair itself is rather irrelevant, because it’s the meaning and ethics of the preceding events and choices that tell the fuller story. The desire to have an affair has well-documented meanings/causes. Perhaps speaking to others who have had affairs and those who have successfully avoided one would be more enlightening.

That is a rhetorical question, and I’d like to propose an ‘operationalist’ answer below. But first: if this question already addressed elsewhere on this site? I don’t recall tripping over it…

Onwards with the proposed answer. Let me start with some unfraught sentences involving the word “meaning”: “If the engine stalls under load, that means the power is inadequate”. This is of the form “If situation X, that means fact Y is true”. Another form is “If you perform X, that means Y will happen.”

Basic Darwinian survival “means” that humans, indeed all animals, must have an ability to asses this kind of operational, quotidian concept of meaning. Not all meaning is created equal: “If I stop to smell this rose, I will feel good” has a meaning subordinate to “If I stop to smell this rose, the bear who is chasing me will eat me.” Thus, one concludes that (almost) all animals have priority-ranking systems.

… Apparently, jellyfish don’t. They give equal weighting to eating, and fleeing predators. The evolution of bilateria provides the needed neural circuitry to make up one’s mind about this. (Ref Tony J. Prescott “Forced moves or good tricks in design space? Landmarks in the evolution of neural mechanisms for action selection” 2007)

Which brings me to the operationalist answer to the question. In the case of having an affair, one is engaging some very deep and old parts of the brain, dealing with mate selection and procreation. It’s vital to get these right, as the survival of the offspring is in question. Or rather, get this wrong, the offspring don’t survive, and such faulty behavior is bred out of the population.

Thus, having an affair triggers sustained activity in large parts of the brain. Basically, the brain is saying “Pay attention! What is happening right now is really important! Deal with it!” The various layers dealing with ‘quotidian’ meaning fall into action, trying to extract if-then relationships between perceptions and actions. Perhaps the meaning crisis arises from the fact that solving this particular problem is hard .. its effecitvely unsolvable. Faced with unsolved problems, we have brain circuitry that says “think harder, think more, your survival depends on this”, and we’re now stuck in a feedback loop of pondering the answer to an unsolvable problem.

Of course, this feels like a crisis: when the bear is chasing us, and we cannot find an answer to the problem, a feeling of crisis ensues, expressed variously as helplessness, hopelessness, fear, determination, sheer will-power, grasping-at-straws, try-anything, pray to God, …

I propose that the ‘meaning’ of the affair “feels” just like being chased by that bear, but in slow motion. By “feels”, I mean, the brain senses that this is important, the brain is demanding an answer to the predicament, an answer is not being found, crisis and loss of ‘meaning’ ensues. This is a deeply ingrained feedback loop in the brain, and once switched on, it is not easily switched off.

Indeed, resolutions to the meaning crisis seem to often involve demoting the importance of the original problem: the crisis often resolves when one convinces oneself that “ah, whatever, it didn’t really matter anyway. No need to feel miserable over it.”

The converse is also true: awakened at night, you find some issue has gained immense importance, and you are tortured, anxious, unable to sleep, as the issue has no solution. Usually the torment dissolves by the next day, but can linger on for days or months. My claim is that these are old, deep neural circuits trying to do the job they’ve evolve to do, and making your life a miniature hell along the way.

The reason that nihilism and eternalism is that they provide the missing answer to the question driving the crisis: with the answer in hand, the feedback loop is halted, one is relieved and can get back to ordinary life. (The bear is no longer chasing you; nihilism/eternalism resolved the crisis.) People are terrible in ‘rational’ reasoning, and don’t notice the inadequacy of nihilism/eternalism. And it mostly doesn’t matter: it not only resolves this crisis, its a cure-all for (almost) all crises: its a rock you can depend on (as the Christians call it).

So, it seems for me, that the crisis of meaning is the conflation of multiple forces: (a) old, deep brain structures that make you unhappy when you cannot find resolutions to ‘important’ problems, where ‘importance’ is ranked by other old, deep brain structures. (b) sloppy reasoning and intellectual laziness allows nihilism/eternalism to provide adequate answers, adequate guidance to shut down the feedback loops that are making you miserable. (c) this shutdown and relief from pain are so significant that the ‘answer’ of nihilism/eternalism is marked as ‘really good stuff’, and ‘generically useful’ and ‘apply whenever you feel bad’: these are perceived as cure-alls. (d) whenever there is some obvious social or political problem, one’s favorite personal cure-all is trotted out as the right solution for everyone else, too.

So, what you are doing here on meaningness is good stuff, but seems to be primarily focused on (d) and on the faulty reasoning of (b). My operationalist explanation here says that (a) is the root cause, the driving force, and that (c) is what short-circuits any more balanced or reasoned approach to meaning.