What Is Meaning

Ask someone whether their work means anything and watch what the question assumes. It assumes meaning is a stuff — present in some lives and absent from others, held by certain jobs and not by others, capable of running out. People say they have lost it, or are searching for it, or that a thing gave it to them. The grammar is the grammar of a possession.

I want to say first that this is not a silly picture and the people using it are not confused about their own lives. Someone who says none of this means anything is reporting something accurate about their situation. The report is good. The theory attached to it is the part I think is wrong.

What the substance picture commits you to

Take it seriously and three problems arrive quickly.

It cannot be located. Describe an act completely — every physical fact about it — and the meaning is not in the description. Two people perform the same act to the letter and it means something in one case and nothing in the other. A substance that survives no description of its bearer is a strange substance.

It does not behave like a quantity. You cannot bank it, transfer it, or exchange a small amount of one kind for a large amount of another. People do not, in my experience, accept trades of that shape — reported, not measured — and the reason does not look like squeamishness.

Its most popular form cancels itself. The consoling sentence is everything matters. But a predicate that holds of everything distinguishes nothing, and a word that distinguishes nothing has stopped working. Said to a person in a bad week, everything matters is a kindness. Said as a theory, it is the sentence that empties the word it was offered in defence of.

Where I go instead

My foundation has a compass in it, and the compass is not a metaphor. Two axes taken as independent, four poles. The real axis measures ordering: is rank present, and is it permitted to stand? Its poles are hierarchy and fairness — opposite answers to one question, which is how meritocratic fairness can produce rank without changing axis. Both interrogate ordering; they orient oppositely. The imaginary axis measures something else: distinguishability. Does anything stand out? Its poles are symmetry and significance.

Meaning is a word people use for at least two different readings, and they sit in different places on this compass. I am going to take them one at a time, because running them together is where most of the trouble comes from.

Figure 01

The two axes, and the question each one asks

First reading: no significance without a broken symmetry

Take the imaginary axis seriously. If it measures whether anything stands out, then its two poles are not two values competing for your loyalty. They are two answers to one question, the way fairness and hierarchy are two answers to the question about rank.

Which gives a result that follows straight from the axis: a symmetry is not significant. Where nothing is distinguished, there is nothing that stands out to be read as standing out. Significance requires the breaking of a symmetry — it is not something added on top of one.

Notice what that does to the consoling sentence. Everything matters describes a perfectly uniform field and then requires you to read significance off it. The field is exactly the condition under which the reading returns nothing. The sentence is not too generous. It is self-cancelling, and it fails for structural reasons rather than because the world is harsh.

And notice what it does to the location problem from a moment ago. Meaning could not be found inside the description of an act because a difference is not a property of one thing. On the compass, distinguishability is a reading taken across a difference: a distinction needs at least two, and it is read in the relation between them. You were looking in the object for something that is only ever read between objects.

Second reading: to matter is to leave a mark

The other thing people ask under the word meaning is whether their life counted. And here the ordinary English carries the answer already, in a pun that turns out to be load-bearing: to matter is to leave matter. A mark. Something that is here afterward.

My foundation separates two things that get run together. An act is a process. An artifact is a mark. Some acts generate an artifact and some do not, and an act that leaves no mark leaves nothing to read.

I am not going to soften that. Much of what anyone does leaves nothing. The afternoon is spent, the effort was genuinely made, and no mark results. On this account that is not a mark of low quality — it is not a mark at all, and there is nothing to read.

That is a claim about what enters a record. It is not a verdict on what a life was worth living, and I have a section further down about the difference, because the two get confused in exactly the moments when the confusion does the most damage.

The two readings meet in one value

An artifact in my system carries a complex value: z = σe^(iφ). The magnitude σ is surprisal — how far the actual departed from what was predicted, which is the same quantity my Reality Equation reads as surprise. The phase φ is which condition the mark serves.

Now hold that against the compass, and be careful about types, because this is where it would be easy to cheat. Significance is a direction — a pole on the circle, a value of φ. Surprisal is a magnitude. They are not the same kind of thing and I am not going to pretend they are.

What connects them is narrower, and it is worth stating exactly. Surprisal measures departure from an expectation, and an expectation is a symmetry in the sense that matters here: a state in which nothing further is distinguished, because everything arriving is already accounted for. A mark that departs from nothing has a σ near nothing — and a mark that is not distinguished from the field it joined cannot be read at any pole at all.

Taken that way, the two questions people ask under one word are two coordinates of one value. Did anything stand out? is a question about σ. What was it for? is a question about φ. The two coordinates are independent, and that is the whole practical consequence: growing one of them does not move the other.

The part that costs something: φ is not yours

Phase is relational. It is fixed by which idea has the actualizer — not by the mark, and not by the maker. If φ were something the maker set, the maker would be conferring the meaning of his own work by declaration, which is the ownership error my foundation rules out on other grounds: ideas have people, people do not have ideas.

Which retires both of the popular answers, and retires them for the same reason.

Find your meaning treats it as a hidden object at a location. There is no object; there is a reading, and readings are not buried.

Create your own meaning treats it as something the host confers by decision. That one is more sophisticated and fails harder, because it puts φ under the control of the one party who cannot set it.

And there is a second cost, which lands on exactly the people who think they are safe. A large σ in the wrong phase is not more meaningful. Rotate φ by π and you have the inverse artifact: the same magnitude, serving the antipode. My foundation has a name for that drift — corruption, which is phase drift: the artifact coming under the government of the actualizer’s interest while the description of what he is doing stays the same.

So the person with the enormous impact may have made an enormous miss. Size is not the measure. The evaluative question is fidelity, and every artifact is a miss to some degree, so the honest form of the question is what kind of miss this was.

Figure 02

One mark, two coordinates — and its inverse

What I do not know, said plainly

Three things this piece runs up against and does not settle.

Does an act that changes only another person’s expectation leave a mark? It is the case people will raise, because it is the case that matters most to them — the word said to somebody once, that nothing recorded. My foundation distinguishes acts from artifacts and does not tell me on which side that falls. It is not currently on my published list of open problems either; I am logging it as a candidate for the next amendment rather than settling it here. I would rather leave the gap visible than improvise a comforting ruling and have it quoted back at me as doctrine.

Are conditions abstract objects? The honest answer is that my system has no published position. So when someone reads this and asks whether meaning has just been relocated into my head, I do not have a settled reply today.

The phase account is circular as a definition. The idea fixes φ, and φ determines which idea is readable. That works as a dynamical system and does not work as a definition, and it is on my list of open problems rather than resolved by anything above.

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If the question is arriving with weight

I want to be careful here, because nothing means anything is a sentence that shows up in two very different rooms. In one it is a philosophical position. In the other it arrives at three in the morning with a lot of weight behind it, and the person saying it is not looking for a compass.

If that is the room you are in, this essay is not the right tool, and I would rather say that than let a diagram stand in for something it cannot do. Understanding a mechanism does not stop it running. There is no schedule for this and nothing above sets one. A metaphysics can sometimes take the shame off a mechanism — it cannot treat a mind that is grinding, and it should not be offered as though it could. Talk to someone: a person who knows you, or a professional. That is not a lesser move than reading further, and nothing in this piece is an argument against it.

What it is for on a Tuesday

Here is what actually changes. Is this meaningful is a substance question, and substance questions about meaning do not have answers — which is why it can be asked all night without resolving. Not because the asking is foolish. Because the question is not shaped like something that has an answer. The asking is doing a real job; it just cannot finish. Two questions that can finish:

Neither question requires you to feel anything in particular, which is the point. Feeling meaningful and being in phase are not the same measurement. Fidelity is the one you can actually inspect.

Four things to carry

1. Meaning is not a substance. It is a reading, and readings are relational. Nothing in the description of an act contains it, and no amount of looking harder at the act will produce it.
2. Significance requires broken symmetry. Which is why everything matters is self-cancelling rather than merely optimistic, and why fairness — a reading on the other axis — neither supplies significance nor removes it.
3. To matter is to leave a mark. Acts are processes, artifacts are marks, and an act that leaves no mark leaves nothing to read. That is a claim about what enters a record, not about what a life was worth living.
4. Magnitude is not phase. A large mark in the wrong phase serves the antipode at full strength. Growing σ does not rotate φ, and almost all the available advice is about growing σ.

And one line to keep, if the rest of it goes: