Science of Meaning

There seem to be three basic levels of reality evident on planet Earth. For example, we can look at Bugs Bunny falling as a Physical object, with a given mass and velocity, or as a Life form, with an increased heart rate and adrenaline output, or as a Semantic titbit from the realms of humour. Three levels: Physical, Living and Meaning, (or as I sometimes like to think, Non Living, Living, and Really Living). And it is no surprise to see that this division is reflected in the way the Sciences themselves are divided. So the Physical Sciences are made up of Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Climatology and Astronomy; the Life Sciences are made up of Botany, Zoology and Medicine; and then there are the Social Sciences.... which have not yet come of age with the other two, but which include such subjects as Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology.

Now let's look at this tripartite division in another, more dramatic way - as the Three Ages of Planet Earth. I have in mind three great tablets of stone, standing at the entrance to three great galleries that together comprise the definitive Science Museum for this planet.

And inscribed on these 3 tablets, we see the following 3 inscriptions:

The First Age of the planet began around four and a half billion years ago. An age of alien and desolate beauty, it was the exclusive arena of the primal forces of Nature. A world of liquid rock and solid seas, bathed in fire, and encrusted in cold. A place where huge eruptions and upheavals were separated by vast periods where time stood still, with only the slow grind of geological and chemical process to mark the passing of the millenia. A theatre of war between the three states of matter, where huge seas crashed against gigantic land masses, each expanding to the loss of the other in a titanic series of collapse and renewal. For this was the birth of a planet and The Age Of The Elements, and the only unifying forces were the pull of gravity and the forces of molecular attraction.

The Second Age of the planet began around three and a half billion years ago. An epoch of global chemistry had pushed a range of simple replicators further and further up the scale of size, number and complexity to create an entirely new phenomenon – Life on Earth. Pushed to a point where these teeming billions had actually taken on a defining role in their own evolution - by creating a brand new environment in which they themselves had become the shaper of further generations. For a chain of life had wrapped its DNA around the planet, charging the atmosphere with its unearthly cries, and the myriad spores of its own fecundity. To create a web of beings catching sunlight - and each other - in an endless stream of transcription and phosphorylation. For this was The Age Of The Replicators, and it was these beings, sprouting green, with sap rising, and hatching brown, with blood spinning, eking out an existence in the pitifully thin zone between crust and void, that were to paint a wholly new reality on the surface of planet Earth.

The Third Age of the planet began around two million years ago - with the sound of laughter. Many times, intelligence had flickered, but this time it caught fire, and exploded into the conscious life of a new and powerful entity, the mind. And through its principal agent, the imagination, the mind came to challenge the strict logic that had, up to now, ruled the animal kingdom. For animals stick faithfully to the sensory present, and the genetic past, but the imagination takes this ‘animal grammar’ forward into the future, and into the ‘what might be’ of the subjunctive tense. Taking it to a dangerous place, where the old certainties are replaced by new and risky concerns about what is possible, and what could be. But the imagination also unleashes a creative force of great power. For by asking what could and might be, a whole vast new reality can emerge. A world of meaning, expressed in novel forms and constructions, where rich information and energy flows vie with bright new units of speed and transformation to create a habitat never before seen on planet Earth. A veritable reef of polymer, concrete, wood, steel and glass within which, as in some fantastic lagoon, weaves and darts a teeming rainbow of semantic forms: stories, games, laws, traditions, ideals, fashions, songs, jokes, styles, codes and cosmologies. Every one a product of this fundamentally creative force: the new super-power of shared intelligence. For this is the Age of Meaning, and already its principal agent, the human imagination, is reaching out towards the stars.

Well, that was fun. And now we have three dramatic declarations about the different levels of reality to be found here on planet Earth. But take note: although this may be fun, it is not half as much fun as it is fundamental. Meaning that this is a base triplet that really is a base triplet, as we shall see once we start tracking through the logic of humour. Because the primary distinction between the three realities is very much more than just an administrative convenience that divides up the sciences. Rather, it is as fundamental to the creation of meaning as the original triplet of organic bases is to the building of DNA. A bold claim, and one that I hope will gradually become both clearer and more justifiable the more this website develops… But for now, we should just say a little more about what this triplet represents in terms of Physical, Genetic and Social Space.

Physical space' is what we see when we gaze up at the night sky, experience an earthquake, or model the atomic nature of matter. The true scale of this domain is as vast, and as small, as reality gets. Within this space/time continuum, the particular identity of our own planet is, of course, just a miniscule detail. Yet, as astronomers are fond of saying these days, we humans are made of star stuff, (which sounds better than the common recognition that when we die we are merely ‘ashes to ashes, and dust to dust’). Well, star stuff we may be, and the universe the biggest show on, or off, the Earth for sure, but Physical Space has no wonder, beauty, worth or purpose without us being there to make it so. Indeed, in terms of meaning, the vastness of space and time, and the amazing spectrum of matter and energy evident in the universe, can be seen as merely that, and nothing more. Which is why it is better to describe Physical Space in the objective terms of science, where meaning is avoided. So, for our purpose here, we can define Physical Space as that part of the universe where there is no life, and no meaning. Which means we cannot describe it as either hostile or uncaring - because it is neither of these. Instead, it simply IS.

Genetic space was born entirely out of the substance of physical space. It is therefore a classic example of the principle that the whole can amount to something greater than the sum of its individual parts. For although organic life is entirely composed of inorganic components, its fauna and flora represents something genuinely new in the history of the planet. Almost as if (but of course not actually) a discontinuity in the fabric of physical reality had occurred three thousand million years ago. And to follow and understand the results of this jump, a whole new body of ideas and principles had to be created - what we now recognise as the language and theories of the biological sciences.

To appreciate this discontinuity, all we have to do is ask a physicist or a chemist to explain, in physical terms, a butterfly, or a more obviously physical event, like non cyclic photophosphorylation. What will they tell us? Well, if they keep to their very own physical and chemical armoury of ideas, then their explanations are bound to remain within the realm of physics and chemistry. Which means we will learn rather little about both the butterfly and the metabolic pathway as their real significance can only be understood through bio logic - based on the principles of evolution, genetics, physiology and so on. For example, neither physics nor chemistry explain where they came from, or how they maintain themselves as more than just objects or pathways, and for that we need Biology.

Physical space is as wide as the universe, and as small as a fundamental particle, with events ranging from periods smaller than a nanosecond, and larger than a millenium of geological time. Genetic space on the other hand, and I am thinking here particularly of the animal and plant life on planet Earth, is far, far more restricted. In terms of the universe, all it amounts to is a relatively small set of pigmented blots, scattered here and there within the vastness of space. (For life is a local thing). Yet within these restrictions of scale, life ranges through an impressive number of 'levels of organisation' (macromolecule, organelle, cell, tissue, organ, organism, mating pair, population, species, community and ecosystem). These units are never as small, nor indeed ever as large, as the components of physical space. But the organic world displays a fantastic variety of structures and behaviours, and what it loses in scale, it makes up for in levels of complexity and rates of change. For the beings that populate this level of reality have notched up the pace and diversity of existence by a furious margin, leading us to consider them as part of a whole new dimension in history, complete with a whole new standard of measurement: the timescale of biological evolution.

Then, at some point in the recent history of genetic space, a particular combination of structural and behavioural possiblities from the animal kingdom came together to make a new, and tertiary level of reality. Again, the combination derived entirely from the components of the previous level, and again, this created a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. It is convenient to call the result of this new combination of elements 'Social Space'.

In terms of scale, if Physical Space is the universe, and if Genetic Space is a series of pigmented blobs on a certain set of planets, then Social Space amounts to a very small number of entities within the ecosystems of a very small number of these pigmented blobs, on a very small number of planets within the vastness of space. Intelligent life, it seems, may be more complex than anything that precedes it, but it is also, to use that increasingly popular catchphrase, ‘vanishingly small’.

Which on planet Earth means that Social Space is to be found in only a single species and, more particularly, within the circumference of the human skull, and nowhere else. Nor should we be misled by the extensive bodies of information and material culture that social space has set up in the territories of physical and genetic space. For although the environment of our homes, gardens, transport and media is basic to our emergence from genetic space, and an essential part of our existence in social space, it is not living in the special sense that this term has for a level three reality. Rather, the physical outer shell of our material life is to the core of social space as a coral reef is to the polyp that creates it. The reef of material wealth is not, in itself, the living intelligent wreath of consciousness that so characterises social space, but rather the purpose built shell by which it pursues its needs and aims.

The fundamental unit of social space is the self. But because the self is housed in a body, it relates to other selves, and to other phenomena in physical, genetic and social space, through its senses and organs. It is particularly through the twin agency of the mouth and the hand that the self has its effect on the world outside. Through the mouth, the self sets up a network of communication that makes up the speech community within which it lives, and through the hand, the self sets up an extensive material culture within which it exercises its values in physical form. Together, this dual world of information and material form makes up the environment in which we live.

At its most literal, Social Space is what lies in the minds of a group of intelligent life forms, such as the human race. It must always have an extra somatic extension in Physical and Genetic Space, but this material reality can only be seen as ‘alive with meaning’ if there are minds around to appreciate its significance. Otherwise, it is merely a part of the physical world.

Personally, I like to think of Social Space as an invisible field of meaning, hanging at eye level within and between a host of human faces. I also find it useful to imagine this reality in other ways. For example, in Alice Through The Looking Glass, the landscape, (which is probably based on the checked pattern of fields in Beckley, just outside Oxford, where the author lived) is in the pattern of a chessboard, and of course Alice starts out as a pawn. Well, first of all this is a classic ‘landscape of the imagination’. But also, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon or indeed any cartoon, it is a good example of an inner world of fantasy that takes what it needs from physical space, and then goes down a rabbit hole, or through a mirror, or a wardrobe or a hobbit hole, or a tear in the fabric of reality to get to a Wonderland, Narnia, Middle Earth, or the worlds created by Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials trilogy. (All ‘Made in Oxford’ by the way).

One thing I find particularly interesting about our existence in social space is that we spend so much time looking inwards, rather than looking outwards at physical space. Our attention is largely within, and not without. Let us explore what that might mean... This will lead to an appreciation of the third level of reality on this planet - namely, Social Space.