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What the hell, let's do one more thread today. I want to talk about the concept of "meaning". What is meaning? What _is_ semantics? How does it work? Is meaning a meaningful idea, or an abstract term around a vaguely defined space? I have an opinion about this.
Pavlov had this great idea. Every time he gave a dog food, he first rang a bell. Eventually, the sound of the bell ringing - even in the complete absence of food - was enough to make the dog start salivating as if food was there. We took the wrong lesson from this.
We generally talk about this as operant conditioning, aka a process whereby you can force an association between two things in the world in order to inform or even control a subject's behavior. But I think this is actually a special case of a broader subject: making meaning.
To that dog, after enough repetition the sound of the bell "means" it's time to eat. That's at the core of all of this. A "meaning" is an association between (1) a subject and (2) two or more arbitrary things. In this case, a dog associates a bell with food.
Not that the associations are parameterized. The dog doesn't actually know about a bell, he's got a somatic subjective experience (hearing a bell) that he's associated with an expectation (getting fed). But the "things" being related don't have to be physical. This recurses!
And then that means I have this meaning: |-(thinks about concept)-> "Math" me | |-(relationally defined by set)-> "Multiplication", "Addition"...etc If I think about a girl I had a crush on in Math class, "Math" connects to "Crush" and etc. Infinite possibilities.
Don't worry so much about the specific examples and think about this core notion until it makes sense (and let me know if it doesn't): Meaning is a shape made out of other shapes. Some of those other shapes are meanings, some are somatic experiences, some are abstractions.
But when I say that to me, the word "Delta" means both "calculus" and "that puppy I had". That relation exists inside my head, and it probably doesn't exist inside of yours - until you read this, at which point, even if briefly, it does.
Some meanings can be horrific - to me, "disagreement" means "punishment" under certain circumstances. If I find myself disagreeing with someone I care about about something that's important to them I can enter a severely triggered state. This meaning haunts me.
That requirement that meaning always has to have a subject as part of the relation? "Come On Up to the House" doesn't mean the same thing to you as it does to me, right? It could come close, if I found some way to communicate that to you and you internalized it. But differently.
Society is what happens when you have a bunch of people each of whom is filled with personal meanings but now they have to interact. Language, for instance, works this way - we agree that certain sounds "mean" certain concepts.
But language has always been a pretty lossy mechanism for coordinating around meanings. As an autistic person I am especially aware of just how useless language can be at allowing me to express some complex meaning of mine to someone else via linear transmission.
This is why we tell stories. When we share particularly complex meanings with each other we need some way to encode causal relations, or third party emotional states, or etc. Instead of sharing meaning "shapes" directly, we imply the meaning narratively. It's even lossier!
But the stories we tell each other define the reality that we share. The more meanings I have in common with another person the closer I feel to that person. The easier it is for us to communicate, to understand each other, to connect.
Here's my galaxy brain take on all of this: eventually, I think, there will be a semantic calculus. We'll be able to reason about the geometry of meanings, and we'll be able to share _exact_ lossless meanings for coordination. Language will go the way of theater and paper books.
So yeah. Stories are how we share complex semantic graphs with each other. These graphs are used for everything from personal relationships to conceptions of the divine. Truth doesn't exist, only relational coherence. (this is where Spirituality lives: https://t.co/ENG4wjMnO4)
TLDR: our brains connect our experiences using tiny associations that reference things in meaningful ways. Such an association is a unit of meaning. Meaning is fractal and recursive, can be made of other meanings. Language and narrative are for exchanging units of meaning. :)