I feel that every thing is meaningful and meaningless at the point of
validation by each
individual or groups of individuals. The same goes for beauty and
ugly etc..
mando
On Aug 28, 2008, at 3:29 PM, William Conger wrote:
Meaning is always in a mind. What constitutes a mind? What about
animals like dogs and cats, do they experience meaning? Birds.
fish? Where do we draw the line and say that there might be a
conscious brain but no mind? Let's go further. What about trees?
Some scientists say trees "communicate" to one another. If meaning
is always in a mind, we'd better be clear as to what a mind is, and
if its physical dimension as a brain or something like it,
determines were meaning is.
The more Cheerskep toots a one note horn about meaning the more I
suspect something we call meaning has slipped away while we're
distracted by the din.
I'm wondering if consciousness entails a kind of merging with
other, the objective. The merging transplants meaning. We can't
notice anything without doing that. So the only way for Cheerskep
to say that the object does not contain meaning is for him to
remain unconscious of it.
WC
--- On Thu, 8/28/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "Meaning" is always in a mind, never in an object."
To: [email protected]
Date: Thursday, August 28, 2008, 12:15 PM
I infer frm the abrupt mid-sentence termination of my last
posting that my
garrulity overtaxed the host computer's patience.
Here's how it continued and ends:
"Nor does the somebody coming along
necessarily place the same meaning in the object at
different times,large or
small."
That's right. My view of John Edwards is different from
what it was a while
ago. I should report that my mind replaces Kate's
phrase "place the same
meaning in the object" with something like "finds
different associations with the
object arising". A strict reading of "place a
meaning in" suggest all sorts of
notion I can't agree with -- e.g. that a
"meaning" somehow resides IN the
object after it is "placed" there.
"However, within a culture, in a general sense,
someones coming along do
tend to place the same sort of meaning in objects,
whether natural or
made, and that meaning placed is modified by the
someone's
experience,education,whether their feet hurt, etc."
I agree with the spirit of this.
"This placement of meaning is imperfect only if one
expects communication to be a mirror of what was intended
by the author, and
there seems to be something strange about that ideal,maybe
even sublime."
Again, I'll address this as though it were saying
something like, "It's a
mistake if you ever expect to somehow convey an exact
replica of your notion to
someone else's mind (Though such an effort is often
serviceably successful."
I'll take Kate's line here as talking about
"placing" a notion in someone else's
mind. I'll go along with that. I can never go along
with the idea that it
is in some way "placed in" the object.
-- Cheerskep
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