Continuation of previous post on creation of meaning

The making of life a creative act is not to deny the truth of experience or imply hidden reality behind subjective reality but rather that subjective reality generally and broadly accurately reflects the objective reality from which it is derived, the creative act is in the interpretation of experience and the conceptualization and categorization of raw experiential data into understanding. We are presented by our senses with information which our minds must sort and organize into useful form. We can do this by using the long established categories passed down for generations, and this is certainly a reasonable expedient and logical method of avoiding needless repetition of work. However this also has the potential of repeating past errors. It is also important to understand that choosing to use the categories established by others is still a choice and a creative act. We take in the world around us and filter it through our mental structures and concepts of what the external objective world most like is and create our mental subjective image of the objective world. We can (and should) choose to continually reexamine our assumptions and categories used to comprehend the world around us. This can become a social act when we compare our understanding with that of others and confirm or throw doubt upon our own understanding. By each person approaching the world as an individual and then individuals coming together to agree on that which is common across all experience, we begin to approach the social construction of reality. This socially constructed reality gives light to the political arm of my nihilist philosophy, and I realize how controversial it is to claim that word and I intend to defend that choice in the future, but as we recognize the socially constructed nature of the world around us we see that things in the world do not need to be as they are and can be changed by the simple will of people to change the world around us and the ways in which we address and understand it. This again is not to imply the non-existence of truth, there is certainly truth which is undeniable by and independent of human interaction with the world but this is merely the factual limitations of the world around us but the way in which we address these facts is entirely up to us.

The denial of inherent meaning in the universe amounts to a denial of all forms of idealism and an embrace of empiricism. We are not interacting merely with representations of a reality we cannot access but with the actuality directly. We cannot come to knowledge through abstract thought and logic alone but rather only through direct experience. Logic can tell us the constraints upon what we might expect to find through our experience but it cannot tell us conclusively that what we experience is or is not true. Obviously our experiences can mislead but this does not happen solely when they are no longer logical... we can be wrong but still logical...but when any of our senses are misleading we can fall back on other senses and on the senses of those around us to confirm or negate our own sense perception.

Creation of meaning and deriving ideas from Kurt Vonnegut

Day 6:

It is one of my core ideas, beliefs if I have to use that word, that there is no inherent meaning which pre-exists the individual instances which make up existence. This is an extension of the existence precedes essence of traditional existentialism. I say an extension because in most cases this was thought to be a unique aspect of human Being, whereas I take it to extend not only to the human condition but to the Being of all things. There is a ling which I have long thought I stole from Kurt Vonnegut but have never been able to pin down exactly where he said it, “All people, places, and events, real or imagined are purely coincidental.” I always took this to be his spin on the standard disclaimer at the beginning of many books regarding resemblances within the work, but also a profound truth about the universe. Another line of Vonnegut, this one I am sure is his, is “in the beginning was the thing and one thing led to another.” These two concepts I take as founding ideas of my understanding of the profoundly absurd meaninglessness of the universe around us. There was a state of affairs which came into being at the first moments of the universe, it could have been any of an infinite number of circumstances, and over the course of infinite time it has and will be all of them, but this one was such that it brought about the universe as it is today, and another circumstance would have brought about a profoundly different universe or no universe at all. It seems miraculous that things worked out so perfectly to create this universe but it only seems that way in retrospect, essentially the Goldilocks theory, that had things been different either no intelligence would have arisen to notice, or a different intelligence would have arisen equally resultant from the unique conditions of the universe in which it exists and equally amazed at how perfectly the universe was tuned so as to create it. A mistaking of cause and effect.

Taking this purely random universe as our starting point we have to ask ourselves how to live in such a universe. So much previous philosophy existed in the inaccurate belief in an inherently meaningful universe and sought to find the meaning inherent in the universe. Now that we realize the meaningless nature of the universe we can recognize the profound mistake in this approach, searching ceaselessly for that which never existed in the first place. What no one realized for centuries was that the real project of religion was not the revelation of meaning but the creation of meaning. Because we mistakenly thought that meaning which we were creating was meaning discovered we took it as absolute and unquestionable rather than the socially constructed meaning it was, revealed absolute meaning cannot be changed or questioned, but socially created meaning is always subject to social amendment. If the meaning we are using is not providing the outcomes we desire it is entirely within our power and right, but also responsibility to create new different and better concepts of meaning. It becomes the primary act of living to create the meaning of the life lived.

The other part of this is in the creation of meaning not only in our lives but in our understanding of the world around us. Our understanding of what makes up our reality and what value to place on the objects and events which surround us... This will be the subject of tomorrows 500 or so words...