Meaning emerges as people interact with the macroscopic world. Sometimes we struggle to see the meaning in subjects like particle physics and cosmology because they delve into abstract topics that are separated from our everyday experience. To provide some examples, in particle physics we have a hard time conceptualizing what subatomic particles might look like because to do so we have to relate them to common objects that have a stable volume, appearance and geometry. We want to make these kinds of analogies with subatomic particles because we understand macroscopic objects and we clearly know what is meant by the term object. Otherwise how else could would you conceptualize subatomic particles? They are technically things that behave like objects and they have the properties of objects. But we also know that they are not quite like the objects we are familiar with, yet we cannot conceptualize them differently from the mundane objects we are familiar with. If we try to do so, we end up a very ambiguous and meaningless model. In other words we can only conceptually define subatomic particles in a meaningful way when we relate them to every day object, unless we use other kinds of definitions, such as mathematical definitions. The same applies to cosmology arguments, we see the universe as either an entity with intrinsic meaning (one that was made by a creator) or a meaningless entity, a universe that is not driven by a higher intelligence. But note that this either/or definition of the universe is once again something that we have borrowed from our daily experience and generalized to the rest of the cosmos. In our everyday experience things either have some kind of meaning or they are meaningless, this is the only way we know how to think about the universe. If the universe is not driven by an intelligence then it is meaningless by default, why? Because in our every day experience things that are not driven by intelligence are deemed meaningless. This is how we have learned to perceive meaning or we can say this is how our cognition has developed to perceive meaning since what we find meaningful is not always consciously learned. We cant see things in any other way because we cant form an alternative thought process that is completely separate from how we perceive meaning in our mundane existence.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 03:25:00 +0000
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