Quote of the Week
(March 13, 2023)

Some people have a very difficult time with any use of the word “meaning” in a scientific context. It’s worth setting this difficulty alongside the simple fact that the only things we know about the world are meanings. The idea that we are dealing with genuine meaning, not meaninglessness, is already implicit in the word “know”. Meaninglessness would not yield itself to knowing articulation, as in science. Meaning cannot be questioned. The effort to question or define it — or just point to it — assumes that the person being addressed already possesses a working understanding of meaning, such as the meaning of a pointing finger. Acting out meanings is pretty much the only thing we do with our lives. The same thing is true of organisms generally, all the way down to one-celled creatures — except that they lack the capacity for conscious awareness of the meanings at work in their lives. The interesting question has to do with the different meanings at work in different kinds of organism.

(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of Evolution As It Was Meant To Be — and the Living Narratives That Tell Its Story)

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