Posts tagged meaning

“Things don’t mean anything. Birds don’t mean anything. Trees don’t mean anything. Words mean something, yes. Because they point to something beyond themselves. They’re signs. But if you take words too seriously, you’re like a person who climbs a signpost instead of going where it points.”

–Alan Watts (viainthenoosphere)

“When meanings become unstable, inventiveness through exchange may be possible, and new habits may be made and laid down. But when reciprocity is refused or absent, then we are nothing but a chaos of broken relations. With that, we are in the presence of what the Estonian semiotician Ivar Puura called semiocide. Carelessness over meanings – in nature and in culture – is a symptom of relational sickness. This sickness can kill the systems it infects.”

–Wendy Wheeler. In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss. 

“Some say why waste your time believing in God when there is so much natural beauty and awesomeness around us. Some say that there is more beauty and wonder looking at a butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful things, but if you get a human being to look closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and get some more human beings to look at that butterfly so that there is a collective of people all peering intently at the butterfly they will ultimately fall to their knees and worship that butterfly. It’s the way humans are put together. I don’t think that makes them stupid. I think it’s kind of sweet. Until someone says well my butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not and flies a plane into the twin towers.”

via http://www.gq.com/story/the-love-and-terror-of-nick-cave

Badiou notes that the positive programme of Inventing the Future is organised around three points — full automation, universal basic income, and a “post-work” society — and that the first two of these points are really dependent on the third (automation as the means, UBI as the necessary consequence). He therefore addresses his critique to this nexus of ideas

via https://medium.com/@poetix/badious-four-objections-to-the-idea-of-a-post-work-future–80b3984b243d

Attribution of meaning and personal relevance is important for our everyday lives. In psychiatric disorders, the attribution of meaning is often altered, and the mechanisms causing this were unknown. LSD has also been shown to alter the attribution of meaning and personal relevance to the environment and our sense of self. However, the exact mechanism and brain structures had not been investigated yet. Therefore, LSD offered a unique opportunity to investigate these phenomena.

via https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/lsd-unlocks-how-our-brains-impart-meaningfulness