Meaning Crisis

Contextual Quote

"Nihilism scales. We all know a sense of meaninglessness can drive a person to engage in unhealthy, self-destructive behavior (like addiction to drugs, alcohol and pornography; carelessness about relationships and breach of ethical responsibilities; apathetic lethargy, or the endless risky chasing of ephemeral highs). But when that sense of meaninglessness affects an entire society, the self-destructive symptoms manifest proportionally. The civic fabric frays; community hygiene deteriorates; the future holds no purchase on the present generation. Not just our relationships, but our institutions erode; not just our backyard, but Nature herself is left trashed. Our collective prospects dim—not singly, but en masse; not from without, but from the dark within."

- Brendan Graham Dempsey [1]

There is no meaning crisis: "Reality as Organic Process"

"Whitehead presents what he calls a cell theory of actuality. Reality, the universe, grows like a developing embryo—it starts as a whole, and the parts are differentiations from that whole. This contrasts with the materialist, reductionist orientation where everything begins as separate parts that somehow arrange themselves into something more complicated. Whitehead's organic approach sees reality beginning as a whole, like a fertilized egg, differentiating through a process of division.

There's no ontological gap between physics, chemistry, and biology in Whitehead's view—it's all continuous. When we reach multicellular animals like ourselves who create models for how cognition works, we're capable of such high degrees of abstraction that we can imagine we need to add our minds and consciousness back to the universe, as if we've been parachuted into it from another dimension. But actually, we grew out of this universe. Our cognition doesn't need to reconstruct an internal picture of it to be in direct contact with it. We are an expression of it—cells in a larger organism.

This vision lends itself to a radically different approach to cognitive science, aligned with what's called the enactivist, embodied, embedded, extended paradigm. But Whitehead goes deeper, showing that biological cognition is an example of experience that goes all the way down. Even atoms are sense-makers. Stars and galaxies are species of organism interpreting experience in very different ways at very different spatio-temporal scales. Biological life is not somehow special—it's an extreme example of something fundamental. When humans evolved on this planet, we didn't come from nowhere. We emerged from a universe that already could support us."

- Matthew Seagall [2]

More information

• Meaning

• John Vervaeke, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto, has made repeated reference to this survey (e.g., in an article written with Christopher Mastropietro,"Diagnosing the Current Age: A Symptomology of the Meaning Crisis," [3]. The survey in question was performed by Yakult UK, a purveyor of products and services concerned with health and wellbeing, in a poll of 1,500 Brits. The findings were first published in The Sun on August 1, 2019: [4].

• Talk by John Vervaeke: "The Meaning Crisis, Religio, and Religion in the 21st Century," available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0JxL-acvuM

* Book: Meaningness. By David Chapman.

URL = https://meaningness.com/

"David Chapman:

"meaning is real (and cannot be denied), but is fluid (so it cannot be fixed). It is neither objective (given by God) nor subjective (chosen by individuals).

The book offers resolutions to problems of meaning that avoid denial, fixation, and the impossibility of total self-determination. These resolutions are non-obvious, and sometimes unattractive; but they are workable in ways the alternatives are not."

(https://meaningness.com/an-appetizer-purpose)