Science of Meaning

The world inside our head is a place we know well - it is where we live. Yet science has failed to chart the contours of this landscape, and failed tell the story of the creation of meaning. And perhaps it is easy to see why. After all, ‘Meaning’ is about ‘What Matters’ to us, 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.

Firstly, we have to be clear about one thing. Mapping the brain is not at all our interest here. Our aim is rather the mapping of meaning itself, and that is quite another matter. And the question is, how can science map meaning when the challenge amounts to an area as breathtakingly large as ‘Everything’? Because this is a challenge 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?’). We have to ask ourselves where, in all of this hugely complex, varied and vast landscape, where can we possibly make a start? Well, given that it usually makes sense to start off small and colourful, let's begin with what makes us laugh. And here’s why.

Imagine hovering over the forests of Earth, back in the distant past, and searching for signs of intelligent life. Suddenly, in the forest clearing below, we hear the sound of laughter. Instantly, we recognise this as the vital sign we've been looking for. Because laughter IS the sound of intelligence. And it is all we need to hear, to know that Ape has changed to Man. As if, more than anything else, it is humour that marks the point where the sparks from the glowing embers of our animal past have ignited into that new, bright and flaming power of intelligence - the human imagination.

The sound of laughter in the forest clearing makes for a powerful image of the dawn of intelligence. More to the point, it also offers us an excellent alternative to the ‘Let there be Creation stories’ in our opening paragraph. Instead, we can choose to put ‘Let there be Laughter’ in its place. Which works well, not only because humour symbolises the human spirit at its best, but also because it begins with a letter ‘L’, allowing us a measure of alliteration. So now we have a different way of summarising the three levels of reality on planet Earth:

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

Now the echo of the alliterative ‘L’ is all very well, but pleasing ‘base triplets’ and powerful images apart, we still have to answer the basic question: Why should we start our quest to chart the landscape of meaning by enlisting the help of humour? After all, jokes are notoriously indefinable; the basic code of the joke is a mystery, and taking on a jester as guide is surely asking for trouble? Well, the answer to these questions lies in the way jokes work.

Humour is special. We all know that. However, the most exciting thing about humour is not its importance as entertainment, or indeed the challenge that it poses to our understanding, but the fact that it is a ‘science’ of the human mind in its own right. Or, to put it more accurately, humour is an intuitively inspired, colloquially expressed, and yet highly analytical precursor to the sciences of psychology and sociology. It is for this reason that it deserves the full attention of any scientific attempt to analyse meaning. However, this really only become clear when the nature of the joke and its action are considered more closely.

Jokes attack the boundaries and contour lines of the human landscape, momentarily twisting our cherished perceptions of the physical and social realities 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. This means joke logic 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 we humans have been studying ourselves 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 mind in existence. In addition, it is the triviality of the joke that enables it to pursue this commitment unchallenged by the interests it so often attacks. Humour is devoid of both practical directives and unity of identity (it is too fragmented to look like a movement), and has never been seen as a real threat to the power structures of society. Simply put, its surface shimmer of inconsequence has allowed it to survive without major constraint. And as a result, humour has become an important outlet for objectivity.

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

So. All we have to do is break the secret code of the joke (this has never been done before), and the underlying logic of the colourful domain of meaning 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…