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The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me. - Historum - History Forums
The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
In school I would ask Sister (I was raised as a Catholic and was taught by nuns) what does this word mean and she would give me the dictionary definition of the word.
Until a few years ago the word meaning had only one meaning and that was the dictionary definition.
What has changed in my world is that I have begun studying cognitive science, which has led me down many different intellectual paths in search for answers to many questions that has arisen as a result of my studies.
SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) as described in Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson, details a new paradigm for cognitive science.
This new paradigm for cognitive science might be called the embodied mind.
This new paradigm constructs a world view based upon the empirical evidence that there is no duality of mind/body but that we are in fact an embodied mind.
The foundation of SGCS cognitive science rests on the concept of meaning.
The concept of understanding rests on meaning, and the concepts of truth, created reality, knowledge, objectivity, and subjectivity follows as a result of our understanding.
I did a Google search for Quote: s about meaning and I will share a few of these with you.
http://thinkexist.com/quotations/meaning/
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself.
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Hermann Hess
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anais Nin Quote: s (French born American Author of novels and short stories, 1903-1977)
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Gustav Jung Quote: s (Swiss psychiatrist, Psychologist and Founder of the Analytic Psychology, 1875-1961)
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
Alfred Adler Quote: s (Austrian psychiatrist whose influential system of individual psychology introduced the term)
Old friends pass away, new friends appear.
It is just like the days.
An old day passes, a new day arrives.
The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.
Dalai Lama Quote: s
The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.
Meaning is not what you start with, but what you end up with
Peter Elbow Quote: s
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life
Elie Wiesel Quote: s (Romanian born American Writer.
Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986.
B.1928)
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
What we see depends upon what is meaningful to us.
John Lubbock
Meaning is what touches us in a fundamental way
coberst
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself.
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Hermann Hesse
Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.
Chuck Palahniuk Quote: s (American freelance Journalist, Satirist and Novelist.
B.1961)
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it
Isadora Duncan Quote: s (American Dancer, best known as one of the founders of modern dance.
1877-1927)
I miss the meaning of my own part in the play of life because I know not the parts that others play
Rabindranath Tagore Quote: s (Indian Poet, Playwright and Essayist, Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, 1861-1941)
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it [is] he who is asked.
Viktor Frankl Quote: s (Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
1905-1997)
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Quote: : Coberst, I actually enjoyed this one.
Nice job sticking your Quote: in there with the rest, though!
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Hey coberst, they're making a movie out of Palahniuk's Choke.
"I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is." - GK Chesterton, Uses of Diversity
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
I agree with Crenfinkle here, coberst, this is an interesting post.
The interesting part is the paradigm that you call the embodied mind, but you don't tell us very much about it.
Could you tell us a little more about the empirical evidence upon which this monist theory is based?
I have nothing to challenge you here, I'm just interested!
(I have even resisted the temptation to ask you the meaning of your post!!)
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Quote: :
Cognitive science has introduced a new way of viewing the world and our self by declaring a new paradigm which I call the embodied mind.
The primary focus is upon the fact that there is no mind/body duality but that there is indeed an integrated mind and body.
The mind and body are as integrated as is the heart and the body.
The human thought process is dominated by the characteristic of our integrated body.
The sensorimotor neural network is an integral part of our mind.
The neural network that makes movement and perception possible is the same network that processes our thinking.
The unconscious categories that guide our human response to the world are constructed in the same way as are the categories that make it possible of other animals to survive in the world.
We form categories both consciously and unconsciously.
Why do we feel that both our consciously created and unconsciously created categories fit the world?
Our consciously formed concepts fit the world, more or less, because we consciously examine the world with our senses and our reason and classify that world into these concepts we call categories.
Our unconsciously formed categories are a different matter.
Our unconsciously formed categories fit our world because these basic-level categories have evolved to form at least one important class of categories that optimally fit our bodily experiences of entities and certain extremely important differences in the natural environment.
Our perceptual system has little difficulty distinguishing between dogs and cows or rats and squirrels.
Investigation of this matter makes clear that we distinguish most readily those folk versions of biological genera, i.e.
Those that have evolved significantly distinct shapes so as to take advantage of different features of their environment.
If we move down to subordinate levels of the biological hierarchy we find the distinguishing ability deteriorates quickly.
It is more difficult to distinguish one species of elephant from another than from distinguishing an elephant from a buffalo.
It is easy to distinguish a boat from a car but more difficult distinguishing one type of car from another.
Consider the categories chair and car which are in the middle of the category hierarchies furniturechairrocking chair and vehiclecarsports car.
In the mid-1970s, Brent Berlin, Eleanor Rosch, Carolyn Mervis, and their coworkers discovered that such mid-level categories are cogently basici.e.
They have a kind of cognitive priority, as contrasted with superordinate categories like furniture and vehicle and with subordinate categories like rocking chair and sports car (Berlin et al 1974 Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification;
Mervis and Rosch 1981 Categorization of Natural Objects, Annual Review of Psychology 32: 89-115))
The differences between basic-level and non basic-level categories is based upon bodily characteristics.
The basic-level categories are dependent upon gestalt perception, sensorimotor programs, and mental images.
Because of this, classical metaphysical realism cannot be true, since the properties of categories are mediated by the body rather than determined directly by a mind-independent reality
In humans basic level categories are developed primarily based upon our bodily configuration and its interrelationship with the environment.
For other animals almost all, if not all, categories are basic-level categories.
Quote: s from "Philosophy in the Flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Quote: : Alright then, being a bit of a 'thicko' when it comes to philosophy, I have to admit to finding this all a bit confusing - perhaps a little too confusing for it's own good.
If I am to understand you aright, you are basically saying that because we create categories as a means of identification (both consciously and subconsciously) we assume that mind and body are separate entities - two distinct things?
Is it that straightforward?
If so, then everything that you have written above (which I did read albeit with a little difficulty (sorry I usually read history!!)) basically boils down to a evolved form of Gilbert Ryle's work on category mistakes, right?
Then we see mind and body as separate entities (or objects?) simply because we have different names for them and this is a category mistake.
Okay, I can go with that!
Thanks.
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Coberst:
If I follow your categories correctly, meaning understanding them, then the logical conclusion I must come to is that God is a reference librarian.
Which wouldn't bother me at all.
If there is a heaven it has to be one big library.
But I must go with Avon on this one.
Ryle has certainly, (in my mind lol) exorcised Decartes 'ghost in the machine'.
I'll never forget the time I first read of his dissolving this duality by focusing attention on items of experience less tractable than visual sense-data.
For example Twinges, Prickles, and Throbs.
It is a sense-datum that I cherish even tho coming to terms with it meant I had to give it up.
More can be found in his aptly named book A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking.
p.s.
You had nuns for teachers?
Shoot... I had Jesuit brothers.
Yikes.
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Quote: : 'The Great Reference Library in the Sky!' now that's paradise!
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Quote: : Only if it had hot librarians who catered to every need.
Reference need, that is.
When will Coberst post something about hot chicks and/or sex?
Perhaps "How I Self-Actualized in my Pants."
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Re: The word meaning has only recently become meaningful for me.
Oh, my ribs!!!
You do realise that all the time your self-actualizing in your pants, democracy is declining!!
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