Science of Meaning

What Does A ‘Science Of Meaning' Mean?   

Hard Science tells two Creation stories. One about the emergence of Space and Planet Earth (Let there be Light); the other about the emergence of Animals and Plants (Let there be Life). But Science has a third Creation story to tell - about the emergence of meaning itself (Let there be Creation Stories). And this is a story that has never been told.

The world inside our head is a place we know in intimate detail - it is where we live. Yet the sciences have so far failed to chart the contours of its landscape and tell its story. Perhaps it is easy to see why. ‘Meaning’ is about ‘What Matters’. And although what matters to us humans is of little interest to the rest of the universe, it is, to us, and I don’t exaggerate, Everything.

How can Science map meaning? Where do we start when the challenge is as big as ‘Everything’? Because this is a domain that ranges from the most apparently trivial issues (such as ‘What Makes Us Laugh?’) to the most profound, (such as ‘What Is The Point Of Existence?’) Well, it usually pays to start off small, so in this case, we begin with what makes us laugh. And here’s why.

Imagine hovering over the forests of Earth, back in the distant past, searching for signs of intelligent life. Suddenly, in the clearing far below, you hear the sound of laughter. Almost at once, the search is over. Why? Because laughter is all the sign you need that Ape has changed to Man. As if the sparks from the glowing embers of our animal past have ignited into something new and revolutionary: the flames of the human imagination.

The sound of laughter in the forest clearing is a powerful image of the dawn of human intelligence. Actually, it gives us an excellent alternative to the ‘Let there be Creation Stories’ of the first paragraph. Instead, we can say ‘Let There Be Laughter’. This is an excellent alternative not only because humour symbolises the human spirit better than just about any other human attribute, but also because it begins with an ‘L’. So another way of referring to the three levels of ‘creation’ under discussion here is:

 Let there be Light - Let there be Life - Let there be Laughter

Fine - the echo of the alliterative ‘L’ is now in place. But pleasing ‘base triplets’ and images of our evolution apart, why, really, should we start our declared quest to chart the landscape of meaning by looking at laughter? After all, jokes are notoriously indefinable; the basic code of the joke is a mystery; and taking on a jester as a guide is surely asking for trouble. Well, the answer lies in the way jokes work.

Humour is special. We all know that. But the most exciting thing about humour is not its importance or indeed the challenge that it represents in its own right, but the fact that it is a ‘science’ of the human mind.  Or, to put it more accurately, humour is an intuitively-inspired, colloquially expressed, but highly analytical precursor to the sciences of psychology and sociology. And it is for this reason that it must be accorded the full attention of any science that attempts to analyse meaning.  However, this special feature of humour only becomes obvious when the nature of the joke and its action is considered more closely.

Jokes attack the boundaries and contour lines of the human landscape, momentarily twisting our cherished perceptions of the physical and social spaces that we live in.  They coax the objects and values of this combined experience into unfamiliar postures, positions and alliances.  The 'twists' that form the nucleus of this attack shadow the logic of human thought itself; consequently they can be used as a pointer to our most hidden perceptions, furnishing the investigator with a clear and high-powered focus into the underlying logic of the human condition.

It is as if man has been studying himself from the very start, using many of the best creative minds in each generation to seek out and express the findings in thousands of neat recognisable units of simple language and design that together comprise the biggest, most objective, body of material on the workings of the human brain in existence.  It is as if, long before the development of the social sciences, an intuitively-inspired and colloquially-expressed science of the way we think had been in action; and that, because of its apparent frivolity, nobody (at least at the intellectual level) had ever taken it seriously.  Yet, throughout our history, humour has been assessing human values, beliefs, and perceptions with an objectivity that blasts away the rules and conventions of existence with all the power of laughter, and with all the subtle force of the smile, freeing us, even if only for a moment, from the fixity of the human condition.

Interestingly, it is probably the triviality of the joke that enables it to pursue this commitment to truth unchallenged by the interests it so often attacks.  It is because humour is so entirely devoid of practical directives and unity (it is too fragmented to look like a movement) that it has never been seen as a real threat to the established power structures of society.  The surface shimmer of inconsequence that is such an obvious characteristic of humour, has allowed it to survive without major constraint, and as a result, it has become an important outlet for human objectivity.

Jokes pluck at the contours of our internal landscape of meaning, as if they were the strings of a musical instrument (creating the resonant effect we call laughter). And it is precisely this action that reveals, at least for the moment of the joke, the nature of human meaning. Which is why this quest into meaning takes on humour as its guide, and why much of this website is concerned with the nature and logic of jokes.

All we have to do is break the secret code of the joke (this has never been done before), and the underlying logic of this colourful place will be revealed. That is, as long as we avoid the traps set by our jester guide along the way. And we do have to break that code...