The Separation of Fact and Meaning

Meaning and Purpose:
Jungian Archetypes
The Most Important Question
Fact and Meaning

One of the most natural questions to ask is, “What is the meaning of life?” Why are we here on this planet, existing as living beings with the abilities to have conscious experiences, learn about the Universe, and make choices about how to act in the world? What is the purpose of our existence? This question is near and dear to us because we are built to focus our lives around a purpose, and we have a primal craving for that purpose to be as worthwhile as possible.

When we speak of “meaning,” there are three possible definitions. The first has to do with communication. When one person wants to get an idea from their head to someone else’s, they use words or non-verbal signals, and we say that these signals carry meaning. I have imbued every sentence on this blog with this kind of meaning, with the hope that you will receive it when you read it. The second kind of meaning is the wake of physical signs that are left after an event or series of events. If you walk into a room and see balloons and streamers in disarray, tablecloths with stains, and paper plates with crumbs, it means there has just been a birthday party in this room, and no one has cleaned it up yet. This kind of meaning is what detectives look for at crime scenes, and what scientists look for in experiments and observatories.

The meaning we are interested in for this discussion is the third kind, the sense of meaning, which we get when we feel our choices and efforts are in line with a worthwhile purpose. At the center of our natures, what we humans want to do more than anything else is that which is meaningful. That’s why I sacrifice time that could have been spent playing video games to write blog posts and stories. Writing itself doesn’t give me much pleasure. In fact, coming up with the next words can be uncomfortable, or even painful if I really push myself. But when I get something finished and ready to present to the world, the sense of meaning it gives me is worth every moment that could have been spent on things that would have given me immediate gratification.

We humans have sought purpose and meaning from outside of ourselves for as long as we have been around. We have looked to the Earth, the Universe, and the metaphysical nature of Reality, in the hope that we can find some principle or message woven into the fabric of existence that will give us a purpose that is so noble that we will perpetually be driven toward it and our lives will be constantly awash in meaning. However, my thoughts on the matter have led me to conclude that when we do this, we are looking in the wrong place. Meaning of the third kind comes from acting in accordance to purposes that resonate with our own instinctual natures, and are not determined in any way by the facts of our environment or our world.

To support this claim, I argue that the sense of meaning is different from the first two kinds of meaning, both of which depend on external facts. First, we observe that simply acting as you are told does not necessarily give us a sense of meaning, whether the person we follow is a parent, a ruler, or even a God. You might say that if God writes our natures into us so that we find following his instructions to be meaningful, then the meaning of life is found in God’s commands, but this is not correct. Even in such a scenario, our sense of meaning still comes from our actions lining up with the purpose found within our nature, not from the content of God’s commands.

As for the second kind of meaning, following trails of evidence can teach us facts about the world, past events, or future possibilities, but we can always ask, “so what?” At the smallest level, the building block particles of reality behave somewhat like particles and somewhat like waves. So what? Gravity is the bending of space and time. So what? Dumping waste chemicals into rivers can kill fish and make people sick. So what? Facts by themselves don’t give us purpose, they only show us how effective our actions will be at furthering our purposes. Therefore our purpose-oriented sense of meaning cannot be the same as the second definition of “meaning.”

From this point on, when I use the word “meaning,” it is understood to be the third definition, the sense of meaning that comes from aligning one’s actions with one’s instinctually inspired purposes.

Some people say the Universe has no meaning. This is not correct; in fact, as they say, it is not even wrong. Meaning and fact are completely separate realms of existence, so trying to talk about the meaning of something that can only be described in factual terms is nonsense. Meaning exists within us, when the messages we hear resonate with us, giving us energy and driving us toward a noble purpose. This is what we mean when we talk about having a meaningful life.

The separation of fact and meaning leads to a very unfortunate dilemma regarding a very important word: truth. Most people take for granted that if something is true, it is both factual and meaningful. But we have just shown that fact and meaning are uncoupled, independent of one another, so there is no guarantee that what is factual will also be meaningful, or that what is meaningful will also be factual.

In the face of this dilemma, some people use “truth” to describe that which is factual, and not necessarily meaningful. Many scientists and science-enthusiasts hold this view. The problem with this is that “truth” has a feeling to it, a ring of purity. Truth is supposed to be a good thing, supposed to set you free. In a fact-only view of truth, there are many things that are true, but knowing them would only bring suffering.

Others use “truth” to mean that which is meaningful, and not necessarily factual. Professor Jordan Peterson, whom I look up to as a role model in many ways, is one of them. The problem with this view is that it can be used as an excuse to declare things to be true without much justification. When two people with sizable followings declare contradictory “truths” in this manner, it can create conflict, which, in the more extreme cases, can become violent.

Others simply refuse to separate fact and meaning. This leads to problems, because they prioritize intuition over evidence, and it can lead to rejecting important, well-supported facts, like that humans are influencing the Earth’s climate, and that we are part of the same tree of Evolution as all other living things on Earth. What these people fail to realize is that these facts do not dictate what our purpose should be, rather they inform us how best to live in accordance with our purpose. In denying well-supported facts, they sabotage their own purpose, making it harder for them and those around them to live meaningfully.

Still others decide to throw out the word altogether, claiming there is no truth, which, as you may imagine, does not sit well with anyone who holds a different view. My own tongue strains with derision toward these people, so I will decline to comment further about this view today.

My own way of dealing with the fact-meaning gap is to simply say there are two kinds of truth, that which is factual and that which is meaningful. We can call these literal truth and metaphorical truth. “Most snakes have fangs” is a literal truth, whereas “we are filled with snakes” is a metaphorical truth, signifying the side of human nature that runs counter to our nobler purposes. If we understand that there are two kinds of truth, it is not very hard to figure out from the context which is which.

There is a good chance that you do not like the conclusion that fact and meaning are separate. I know I don’t. Deep inside of ourselves, we want facts to be meaningful. After all, one of the most powerful ways to show meaning is by telling stories, which come in the form of a bunch of fact-like statements. But as any good storyteller knows, there is a reason why scientific papers are boring, but science fiction novels are gripping, even if they explain the same facts. That reason is because well-written stories tickle our senses of beauty, empathy, and archetypal resonance. We wish the same thing were true for reality, but we do not have to look very hard to see that Reality is not like stories. Tragedy strikes with no bright side. Patterns seem to appear and lead us nowhere. Ultimately Reality behaves exactly as we would expect if it were governed by clockwork mechanics and probability, not by human archetypes.

Meaning exists. It is not found in the facts of science, but in our own actions. As living beings, we are driven to do things, to devote our lives to projects and responsibility. Some life projects are extremely meaningful, others less so. What determines this is not the nature of the Universe, or how we have come to be as we are, but how well our actions resonate with our internal unconscious drives. The more our actions and drives are in harmony, the nobler we perceive our purpose to be. On the other hand, we find ourselves in a world made of facts, which put conditions and constraints on how we can go about our purposes. Meaning and fact are separate, but they are both important. Our sense of meaning points us toward purposes worth pursuing, and facts tell us how best to pursue our purposes.

Resolutions of Truth

In his Ted Talk, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman talks about how he and his associates did many simulation experiments where they created a variety of virtual worlds and creatures to inhabit them, and ran them forward using Evolutionary algorithms. They found that, with natural selection, the trait of seeing the world as it was went extinct, and fitness won out every time. Hoffman suggests that we see our world like a computer desktop, an interface full of icons that help us interact with the world, but are completely different from the objective parts of reality they represent.

Life evolves to see the world in ways that are useful, not in ways that are true.

We already know that the Universe is different from how we see it. The Earth looks flat, but it is really more like a sphere. Solid objects seem like continuous matter, but really they are made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Planets seem to follow Newton’s idea of gravity as a force, but as Einstein discovered, objects in space really take as close to a straight path as possible in curved space-time. Hoffman’s idea, however, is more like what I discussed in Representational Realism, where reality-in-itself is fundamentally different from anything we can imagine, because the act of constructing a picture in our minds is automatically at least one step removed from reality itself.

In their public conversation, Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson discussed Hoffman’s interpretation of an icon-based perception of the world. They disagreed slightly with his interpretation, because our perceptions and mental pictures inform us to some degree of what will happen when we interact with them. Thus, it is not correct to say that the icons we see are nothing like reality, but they are versions of the truth at a low-resolution.

This fits with my own experience, and I presume the experiences of most people as they progress through life. In our quest for nobler purpose and deeper truth, we keep finding that the truth as we see it is not entirely correct, and that some nuance at the edges of it speak of something more complex. We continually find ourselves looking closer at things we thought we understood, only to find new insights about them that cause them to make even more sense and explain things more thoroughly.

As reality pertains to the human experience, the lowest resolution is one of stories. We see how the patterns in the world and our lives line up with the archetypes buried in our unconscious minds—or how they deviate in tragic or amusing ways. At a slightly higher resolution, the world is made of agents of choice,* people with free will who craft the future through effort and action. At a higher resolution, we find deterministic biology and physics, with organs, neurons, and fluid systems performing their tasks like clockwork. And at the highest resolution known to humankind, we find probabilistic quantum physics, where two systems that start out exactly the same can end up differently, but with well-defined probabilities for each. That might be the highest resolution, or there might be more layers hidden beneath it. No one knows.

You might wonder, as we come to understand higher and higher resolutions of truth, if there is any reason to look at the world in the lower resolution pictures. Shouldn’t we just go with the clearest, most in-depth understanding of reality, and throw out the naive views we had before? I’ll answer that question with another question: is it better to look at a map of the world, to walk along a beach, or to examine a handful of sand? All of the layers are important, because every time we peer closer, we lose a little of the big picture. What I’m saying is that reality comes in layers. At one level, physics is probabilistic, but at a large enough scale, it behaves deterministically. At one level, human beings have free will and the power to make the future, and at another level we act out our archetypal instincts like actors on a stage. All of these pictures are true, and we find the richest, fullest understanding and engagement with the human experience by taking all of them seriously.

*I am actually not sure what order free will and archetypes come in. It may be that free will is sandwiched between telling stories at a lower resolution, and acting out archetypal instincts at a higher resolution. I left the main text as it is, though, because its lower-resolution explanation gets my point across nicely, while this higher-resolution explanation in the footnote would bog it down.

Why does Anything Exist?

We have talked a lot on this blog about the nature of reality, about how real things exist objectively, and have natures by the mere fact of their existence. But there is a question we have yet to touch upon, and that is why there is a reality in the first place. Why is there a Universe and people and furry critters and chocolate fondues, instead of nothing at all?

When we speak of “nothing,” there are three definitions we have to keep track of. The first refers to the lack of something expected, such as when a parent asks their child, “what are you doing,” and the child replies, “nothing.” We are not interested in this type of nothing today. The second type of nothing people think of is empty space. There is no air or other matter, just the void. Those who are thorough in their thinking will say that it does not count unless no light is passing through it either.

We, however, will go a step even beyond that. To get a true State of Nothing, we must eliminate even time and space. No matter, no energy, no particles, no space, and no time. When we ask, “why does anything exist rather than Nothing?” this is what we mean.

Figure 1: This is an empty rectangle. It is not Nothing.








Figure 2: This is not even an empty rectangle. It is Nothing.

One possible reason reality exists is because there is an eternal God who has the ability to will things into existence. With this kind of God, creatio ex nihilo, or “creation from nothing,” is possible. If you look carefully though, this does not answer the question, but shifts it to “why is there a God rather than nothing?” A common response to this is that God is exempt because he is eternal, whereas the Universe had a beginning. This is unsatisfactory on two accounts, the first being that the claim that something exists eternally does not, in fact, explain why it exists in the first place. Secondly, we don’t know for sure that the Universe is not eternal. Perhaps a parent universe gave birth to our universe, in which case the Greater Universe might have an infinite sequence of past events. There is also the issue that time behaves in ways not well-understood in extreme cases like the big bang, and future scientific discoveries might reveal that concepts like “beginning of time” and “past-eternal” are naive, like the belief that all matter is made of air, water, fire, and earth. Alternatively, it may be that God is ontologically necessary, that is, it is impossible for him not to exist. But the justifications for this claim, the Ontological Arguments, are circular in their logic.

Another common response to the question of why anything exists is to reverse it and ask, “why should we expect there to be Nothing rather than a Universe?” It is a fair question, but not an answer in itself, and we have to be careful not to use it as an excuse to stop thinking about the topic.

Two common philosophical ideas about Nothing are of interest to us. The first, is ex nihilo, nihil fit, which means, “from nothing, nothing comes,” or, “nothing comes from nothing.” It seems like common sense that if nothing exists, nothing can come from it. After all, we don’t see random things popping into existence out of nowhere. However, “out of nowhere” is an example of the first kind of “nothing” that we said at the beginning of the discussion that we were not talking about. It is different from out State of Nothing, because in our everyday experience the Universe is already there, and the Universe is not Nothing. Still, it may not seem a stretch to assume that nothing can come from a State of Nothing either.

The second philosophical idea about Nothing is that in order to be a true State of Nothing, not only must it have no matter or energy or space or time, but no laws of physics may apply to it either. In this view, a law of physics would count as something, and such a law would itself need an explanation as to why it exists.

Let’s take a look at what happens when we try to apply ex nihilo, nihil fit and “no laws of physics may apply” at the same time. As we talked about last time in the Nature of Reality series, a law of physics is a representation, often written as a mathematical equation, of a physical state’s nature. If Nothing’s nature is that nothing comes from it, we can write that as a mathematical equation, dQ = 0, where Q is a vector of all possible quantities that can change, and d represents any change that happens to those quantities. Translated into English, the equation means, “the change in anything that can be changed is zero,” or, “nothing changes.” Thus, if nothing comes from Nothing, then that in itself is a law of physics that applies to a State of Nothing.

What we have just shown is that the claims, “nothing comes from nothing,” and “no laws of physics apply to a State of Nothing” contradict each other. This means that at least one of them is not true. Either at least some law of physics applies to a State of Nothing, or a State of Nothing would be unstable, and instantly create something.

If we accept that at least some law of physics applies to a State of Nothing, we cannot yet answer why anything exists, because that law could easily be “nothing comes from nothing.” However, it could also be something like String Theory or some as yet unknown Theory of Everything, which would predict universes coming into existence. Either way, we run into the question of why that law of physics exists rather than Nothing. The only solution I can think of is that, since mathematics and logic are transcendentally true, there is something buried deep within their uncharted depths that makes the ultimate law of physics ontologically necessary.

On the other hand, if we accept that Nothing has no laws of physics that apply to it, then something must come from it. As there is no limitation on what pops into being from this state, we might expect not only to get the Universe from it, but an infinite number of universes, where everything that is logically possible happens. These universes would be completely separate spacetime continua, so we would never be able to observe them, and it does not make sense to think of them as being in any direction from us, or before our universe or after.

Ultimately, I cannot answer the question of why anything exists rather than Nothing. We can, however, propose some possibilities. Perhaps, emergent from pure logic and mathematics, there is a law of physics which, when acting upon a State of Nothing, causes a universe to be created. Perhaps Nothing is not bound by any law, and so from it all things that are logically and mathematically possible spring forth into existence, each in its own universe. Perhaps there is a middle-man, like a God or a Force or a cosmic automated factory that is brought into eternal being by pure logic, and from which universes are created. Or perhaps the Universe merely exists because it exists, and the State of Nothing is a meaningless construct. Regardless, the Universe does exist, so let’s get out there and make the most of it.