MEANING AS INTERPRETATION
Robleh Wais 9/8/08
Here are three questions I want to answer:
Have you ever thought about the nature of human existence versus what exists?
If you have considered this question, then do you conclude, as I have, that we interpret our existence in the world? I will explain exactly what is meant by the term interpret shortly.
Building on these two questions, I ask: Is there any objective meaning to existence?
Question 1.
I am asking why we have such notions about ourselves. How do we come to have these ideas? First, let me clarify what I mean by interpretation. I don't mean what we do when we translate one language into another, or when we render an opinion on a work of art or watch a play and explain its import. No, that's not the meaning of interpretation I'm after. By interpretation, I mean when we receive information through our sense organs, our brains process it, and then our minds create a coherent explanation of what we've sensed. This process goes on, all the time in our minds, and it's essential to being human. It is how we understand the world through our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and skin. The problem is trying to understand what we've experienced; more often than not, our interpretations are meaningless in the external world. Notice that interpretation is not perception, which is when we take in the external world through our senses. Nor is it judgment, that is, when we make decisions about our perceptions. Interpretation is most akin to understanding. However, it is not exactly that either. Let's look at interpretations that spring from two human perceptions: smell and hearing.
We find things that stink are offensive to our olfactory organs. A flatulent emission, a dead body, a gaseous vent, and a malodorous person are good examples. I ask why one smell should be offensive to us and another pleasing? It seems we are born with this negative or positive reaction to smells. A baby doesn't have to be taught not to like the smell of its waste products; the infant cries until changed after defecating. This is a profound statement. It means we are predisposed to interpretative processing from birth. Again, the infant reacts positively to the smell of its mother's breast milk, without having to learn this behavioral reaction. But there is nothing outside our interpretation of smells that would make our perceptions through our olfactory organs favor one and disfavor another. It must be related to our evolutionary heritage, you might respond. I agree, probably so. Yet, if we take smells unrelated to human beings, then the odor of sewerage, animal waste products, sweat, perfume, mother's milk, flowers, gas emissions, industrial pollution, ad infinitum, doesn't have any objective meaning. It is only our perception of smell that gives it the value of stink or aromatic. This example is at the heart of what I'm trying to express: We make the meaningfulness in our world; it is our perception of reality that we interpret that makes for meaning. The external world outside our sense organs has no evaluative judgment. As another example, let's look at sounds. During the summer, I walk to work as I live within blocks of my job, and a stroll to work is both healthy and sometimes invigorating. As I walk down the narrow side street to work, I hear seagulls that inhabit the area making, what to me are, the most cacophonous sounds. I sometimes scream at them:
I realized, closing in on the red brick structure at which I work, that this is another example of a human being interpreting an external objective event. To me, their calls sound bad, but if we take sounds in general, there is no objective reason why one sound is bad and another good. A fallacious argument could be made that some sounds are discordant, in the sense that their wave patterns cancel each other out and cause pain in the ear of a person hearing them. Not all cacophonous sounds cause physical pain to our sense of hearing. A singer with an off-key voice certainly doesn't hurt your ears. We can discount this argument. To repeat, if sound patterns are consonant, it has no more meaning than if they are dissonant. We must interpret these sounds for them to have that meaning. Music sounds pleasing, while the sound of a vehicle crashing into a lamppost sounds terrible. From the standpoint of events occurring in our everyday world, they have no such meaning. Just as the comets that crashed into Jupiter in 1997 were not cataclysmic events unless we applied that interpretation to it. This leads to my 2nd question.
Question 2.
We do interpret our realities. We, as a species, create meaning in the external world outside our minds. Things smell bad, or sounds are discordant, because we perceive and interpret them in this fashion. The experiences don't have meaning outside our minds. A song by my favorite artist, for instance, Jor Ben Jor, a Brazilian singer/guitarist, is no different from the quacking birds I hear every day while walking to work, unless I interpret it so. This seems like a trivial conclusion at first sight, but it's not. I added several examples here.
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We see beauty in our perceptions: the land, certain persons, ideas, music, art, etc. All of these are interpretations of real existing things and have no such attributions unless we attach them.
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We have moral conceptions such as cruelty, oppression, hate, etc, again that have no objective value at all. This class of interpretative behavior on the part of human beings is one step further in the wrong direction; it's judgmental interpreting.
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And most of all, we see ourselves as being at the center of knowledge, through science and analytic reasoning that most definitely has no meaning at all to the world outside us.