Some years back I attended a Meetup once or twice. Well not exactly a Meetup, similar. I was invited along to a group after making a comment on a blog. Even though I was never formally admitted into their sect I have the utmost regard for the people I met there. One of these meetings made a particular impression on me. I will try to paraphrase the gist of it below. Forgive me if there are glaring errors, no doubt there will be many, but hopefully I will be able to capture the reason my memory of the evening is so dear to me.
On this occasion another provisional member, another candidate, Jim, was petitioning ardently, seeking to confirm his admission into their affiliation. This, it turned out, would be his last interview. He was never invited back even though the group members shook his hand fervently at the meeting's conclusion While the discussion proceeded more fluently than I have rendered it, forgive me. I have gathered the participants contributions into monologues when in fact much of what was said was actually interwoven, woven together. It is the best that I can do.
The meeting took place around a large wooden table in a musky library in the old quarter of town. Jim boldly asked to lead the agenda. He is really a very gentle character despite his pompous turn of phrase!
Jim: Gentleman I would like to discuss materialism. Materialism, with its big bang, is the creation story preferred by atheists. It is also the default model of reality given by our education system. Materialism is usually presented via a grand domino toppling analogy. Qualia, like redness, are relegated to the status of epiphenomenon. The experience of colour is said to be produced by a sequence of dominoes, a faster or slower toppling of dominoes into the retina. Red itself is no thing, red is not a phenomenon. Thoughts about redness, or about wavelengths, are similarly no thing. There is no thinker, there is no mind. That of course is a description of materialism taken to its conclusion, uncomfortably far, further than most materialists are inclined. When talking with a materialist about such matters it has always struck me that for them it must be a coincidence that any sense comes out of their mouths at all. If they become animated, demonstrable, why so? Why so red in the face I ask? Why bother? Is there a domino stuck somewhere? Is it a coincidence that I think of pizza, dream of capricciosa, with all this domino talk? What glorious arrangement of dominoes must topple during a piano recital? Are there dominoes lying in wait on the paper, inside the sheet music, always at the ready? What causal chain has carried them across the centuries, through printers and ink?
It is an incredible edifice of thought that denies having been thought up. These dominoes seem overly Newtonian too. Quantum theory's insubstantiality has not been well incorporated unless like some we believe in the multiverse, in the plenitude of all possibilities being realities somewhere. What is science at all in the face of such speculation? Yet science has succeeded in unimaginable ways. But that's just it. Science has succeeded in unimaginable ways that were imagined. While science has not yet found a place for redness, science is a project of thought and I would hope that science will one day find a place for thinking in the world process that it seeks to understand.
First Member: Well said Jim. I see what you mean. You know there is a panpsychist revival afoot. Some atheists see the problems you are talking about and are moving back to panpsychism. A few. They hope to construct the mind from lots of little domino minds. Does this change the situation at all? Do these little minds have little eyes that can see the colour red? Can an aggregate of unit minds arrive at grand ideas like panpsychism? And why do our theories refuse to tackle the question of meaning? It strikes me that what is missing here is meaning, our meaning, human scale meaning.
Second Member: The ancients knew meaning. Science casts its gaze downwards at things so tiny that only our instruments can see them. The ancients always looked up.
The second member pauses and then begins to chant. The effect is really quite profound and the mood around the table deepens. The other members whisper along so Jim and I mumble too.
the Heavens
the Cosmos
the Constellations
the Signs
the Zodiac
the Ideas
the Gods
You see the ancients felt as though they were surrounded by meaning. They lived in a womb of meaning, a womb of universal meaning, and they took these meanings into themselves. As they evolved, through this feasting on meaning, the ancients eventually began to feel themselves constrained, tortured by language, and yearned to be free. They yearned for emancipation, for freedom from the Gods. Today we find this yearning for freedom in such things as materialism, relativism, nihilism. But these ideas do not make us free.
I think that this is a real problem for humanity, this fatigue of meaning. If we lack the energy to search for our own meanings - and I believe that this search will reconnect us with the Gods - if we fail to find earnest reasons to guide us then what distinguishes us from animals? A life lived with meaning is a biography, is a story. What is a life without meaning? And what is the search for meaning, the search for the spirit, if not an aesthetic search, if not a search for beauty? We need to surround science with meaning like the Earth of the ancients was surrounded by the Signs.
Third Member: And when do we humans do our best at expressing meaning? What is our finest instrument for capturing the multi-layered, entangled, crystalline beauty of our personal yet universal meanings? Poetry!
Jim, you are right. Our lives have become domino lives. We trudge through life submitting to the materialist ordering of things, abandoning any sense of true meaning and allowing our desires to overflow unconstrained by the question 'why'. Poetry. I am reminded of Arthur Stace, that humble, anonymous, humanitarian poet who scratched his poem onto Sydney pavements trying to awaken those grown drowsy to meaning. We need to surround our cities with meaning too. Eternity. I have sometimes thought of joining Arthur, of taking up chalk and writing poems on pavements, poems like ‘Beginningless’ or ‘Externality’. I look for signs of meaning in the graffiti of rebellious youths, and have sometimes found it there. Meaning, a rebellious act, a revolutionary act.
As you can see the conversation was far ranging. I haven't done it justice at all. It inspired me, it was inspiring. I've missed things, I couldn't quite receive it, nearly, not quite. I later tried to write a poem of my own. I tried, like I do here now, to understand what was said by writing about it. I worked for many months on my poem and while I can’t say that I was satisfied I had to take a rest from it and so I called it complete. I posted it online, even here at Steemit I have posted it, secretly hoping that one of their order might find it and that I might be invited back. Lately I have given up hope for such an invitation, or at least I no longer obsess about it. I also want to say that the group's meetings were not always so grandiose, se deep. They were often humorous, hysterical even. When it was time for me to leave them, when the day of my last invitation arrived, I begged to be admitted too. They said one day. They also said that if I needed them that they would find me. As reassuring as that is I believe it would be a failure on my part if I allowed myself to fall into a state in which they would need to come to my aid.
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