Meaning

It is desirable to bear in mind—when dealing with the human maker at any rate—that his chosen way of revelation is through his works. To persist in asking, as so many of us do, “What did you mean by this book?” is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.

Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.

What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.

Intro to Augmenting Human Intellect by Douglas Engelbart semantically embedded and plotted in space.

Cool visualization, but much more interesting when feeding a song into it [like] Instant Crush by Daft Punk. You can actually see the chorus! Notice the overlapping lines.

The squiggly bit in the middle are the rest of the lyrics.

The lyrics color-mapped to the same rainbow gradient on image 2.

AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.

…Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.

Lynch puts forward five primitive elements: paths (e.g. streets); edges (e.g. uncrossable rivers); districts; nodes (e.g. street corners); landmarks (e.g. a recognisable building). Each element has an intuitive way to sketch it, as if on the back of a napkin.

...Lynch’s five primitives comprise a notation.

It’s composable. A small number of simple elements can be combined, according to their own grammar, for more complex descriptions. There’s no cap on complexity; this isn’t paint by numbers. The city map can be infinitely large.

Compositions are shareable. And what’s more, they’re degradable: a partial map still functions as a map; one re-drawn from memory on a whiteboard still carries the gist. So shareable, and pragmatically shareable.

Not only are maps in this notation functional for communication, but it’s possible to look at a sketched city map and deconstruct it into its primitive elements (without knowing Lynch’s system) and see how to use those elements to extend or correct the map, or create a whole new one. So the notation is learnable.

Mr. Serra’s most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials.

This was something new in sculpture; a flowing, circling geometry that had to be moved through and around to be fully experienced. Mr. Serra said his work required a lot of “walking and looking,” or “peripatetic perception.” It was, he said, “viewer centered”: Its meanings were to be arrived at by individual exploration and reflection.

We need to get some freedom from context so that we're not stuck repeating a single performance, without ending up so free that we have no idea what the music is supposed to sound like. This is the space where notation comes in.

There are two different vocabularies I like for thinking about this tension. One is Brian Cantwell Smith's idea of "the middle distance" in On the Origin of Objects, which I wrote about here. Useful notation is somewhere in the middle distance between the spectrogram and the cat, not rigidly causally linked and not completely unrelated either.

The other is super obscure. I got it from this paper by Gordon Bearn that I fished up from Google Scholar. Bearn talks about how representations must broach the possibility of meaning, by providing some link at all to the thing they represent (this is what the cat fails at). At the same time they must also breach their context by getting some distance from it (this is what the spectrogram fails at).

Here’s the proposal, which I suspect many will reflexively condemn as heresy, but which I promise to unpack if given the chance: Those, like me, who believe that “ordinary meaning” is the foundational rule for the evaluation of legal texts should consider—consider—whether and how AI-powered large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude might—might—inform the interpretive analysis. There, having thought the unthinkable, I’ve said the unsayable.

Now let me explain myself.

The entry for “Contrary” is several paragraphs long. My eyes glaze, not over, but above — to the entry for “contrarian.”

That’s a word that usually has a negative connotation, right? “Oh, he’s just being contrarian.”

But let’s read the definition, anyways.

“con-trar-i-an n. an investor who makes decisions that contradict prevailing wisdom, as in buying securities that are unpopular at the time.”

Contrarian as investor?

Oh, I like this idea.

I don’t want to oppose the status quo just to oppose it — I was to invest in what I think is undervalued at the moment. (Like paper dictionaries.)

Now, I’m thinking about word that “prevailing.” That’s an interesting word. Let’s look that up.

Cool, cool, what I thought, but OOOH look a picture of a PRETZEL.

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

There are words we use to describe this quality:

alive
whole
comfortable
free
exact
egoless
eternal

But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.

(non-)user events is a collaged interface that navigates personal internet experiences by quoting and close-knitting HTML elements from Polina’s browsing history. These elements, gathered from sites she visited in June 2024, are entangled in a grid-like structure, searching for areas of friction and excess, inviting viewers to move beyond seamless user experiences into poetic space where new meanings are possible.

People who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit

...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words they’re in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be.

The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul.

...I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And…

We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors!

At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?

The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically.

To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."

Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half.

A cat        Incomplete:
without          A chair
a chair:         without
Incomplete.       a cat.

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today they buy their paints, and design posters for the Underground; they did many things in between. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realize that Art with a capital A has no existence. For Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish. You may crush an artist by telling him that what he has just done may be quite good in its own way, only it is not 'Art'. And you may confound anyone enjoying a picture by declaring that what he liked in it was not the Art but something different.

When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner, but is just outer. And they, these people who understand that, finally say: “you mean it’s just sounds?” — thinking for something to be just being a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological, I don’t want sound to pretend it’s a bucket or that it is president or that it is in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.

And I’m not so stupid either. There was a German philosopher who is very well known, Immanuel Kant. And he said: there are two things that don’t have to mean anything: one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything, that is, in order to give us very deep pleasure.

The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. And the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart you see that they’re always the same. But if you listen to traffic you see it’s always different.

If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.

Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.

"But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?"

Yes.

And the last, and most elusive [motivation for extreme feats of endurance], is the sense of meaning that can be found after surviving extreme conditions and perhaps even cheating death. We only truly appreciate a warm bed after trying to sleep in a bivvy bag on a cliff ledge; we value time with friends and family all the more when reminded of the fragility of life.

Self-signalling, goal completion, mastery and meaning: it’s not a particularly counterintuitive list, but it is a challenging one for economists and social scientists more broadly, because it is clear that these drives are not unique to explorers and ultramarathoners. Who among us does not value the satisfaction of achieving a goal, or finding ourselves the equal of a testing challenge?

...There is a lesson here for those pulling the levers of public policy, taxing and subsidising and regulating in an attempt to make the world a better place, and for corporations setting “compensation” packages. People want money and pleasure, but also to challenge themselves, to feel a sense of meaning and enjoy a sense of mastering their craft. Policymakers and managers ignore such desires at their peril. In each of us, there is a tiny spark of Jasmin Paris.

This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages never put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise. Lau Tzu himself, with his quaint humor, says, "If people of inferior intelligence hear of the Tao, they laugh immensely. It would not be the Tao unless they laughed at it."

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Cummings biographer Richard S. Kennedy calls the poem "the most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings ever created".

In analyzing the poem, Robert DiYanni notes that the image of a single falling leaf is a common symbol for loneliness, and that this sense of loneliness is enhanced by the structure of the poem. He writes that the fragmentation of the words "illustrates visually the separation that is the primary cause of loneliness". The fragmentation of the word loneliness is especially significant, since it highlights the fact that that word contains the word one. In addition, the isolated letter l can initially appear to be the numeral one. It creates the effect that the leaf is still one, or "oneliness" whole within itself, even after it is isolated from the tree. Robert Scott Root-Bernstein observes that the overall shape of the poem resembles a 1.

A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which the author proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role mainly by the characteristics of the medium rather than the content. The book is considered a pioneering study in media theory.

Melodies are worth considering because there aren’t that many musical notes in total, and likewise not many valid ways (relative to invalid ways) you can configure a sequence of notes, especially when the set of possible melodies is compressed under the operation of key transposition. It’s not that uncommon for musicians to come up with a tune, only to find out that it’s already part of some other song. In other words, the smaller the symbol alphabet—along with, moreover, rules about what symbols are allowed to follow others—the more likely it is that longer sequences of symbols will collide.

How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?

Variable names fall along a spectrum of how generally useful the thing you're labelling is. At one end of the spectrum you have pragmatic labels that refer to some one-off thing that you need to track in the problem in front of you. At the other end of the spectrum you have labels for things that come up again and again in multiple problems.

I'm going to call the first type handles because they are simple one-time attachments to a particular thing in the world.

In contrast, the second type of variable name has been used so much to refer to a particular thing that a strong association with the thing has accreted around the variable itself. I think of these as sigils because they've been charged with meaning through repeated use.

Recently, I've been thinking that I needed to empty the backpack, before I knew what to put back in it.

I myself am neither a descriptivist nor a prescriptivist. I think it’s a false binary, a classic case of academics over-taxonomizing.

...I want to simply lay out two basic points about the fundamental tensions within a purely descriptivist stance.

The first is that descriptivism is always meta-discursively prescriptivist...[and the second is] any accurate descriptive account of real language use must admit to the fact that many people and institutions are prescriptivists.

Zach Hershey called to my attention a phenomenon about the relationship between speech and writing (and meaning) that I long suspected might well be true, and I even collected plentiful evidence in support of it, but I was never absolutely certain that it was true, namely, that in many cases speakers of Sinitic languages have in mind sounds over characters.

...Maybe this happens more than I know, but I immediately thought that it was fascinating that, in their minds, they like the sound of the name, but haven't put a meaning, much less characters, to the sound yet.

Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.

More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.

These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)

Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning.

Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.

At the dawn of digitization in 1995, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed, “Words move quicker than meaning.”

Now with the advent of AI, words, images, and video are created quicker than their meaning.

What happens to us when all of this information is created and proliferated faster than anyone can really make sense of it?

There will be only one thing left to automate: meaning. The last task of the computer is to give our lives meaning.

Her poems, she says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

I think, 'What about those chickens?' and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés.

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.

Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand ‘felt’ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that ‘jerk’ and ‘twerp’ and ‘punk’ and ‘nitwit’ and ‘dork’ and ‘ass’ and ‘goon’ and ‘twit’ and ‘dodo’ and ‘bum’ and ‘nerd’ and ‘dunce’ and ‘turd’ and ‘boob’ and ‘chump’ and ‘bitch’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘prude’ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add ‘turkey’ and ‘squirrel’ as well?

For a long time, I’ve culti­vated a personal theory of naming. It goes like this:

When you name something, you label the thing; frame it. This is an important job, before anyone has actually encoun­tered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. The thing’s specific char­ac­ter­is­tics and its performance — its great success, we hope — fill the vessel of its name, which was pretty empty all along. Instead of the name defining the thing, the thing (re)defines the name. This happens with companies, with works of art, with people themselves.

So, when naming something, while it’s important to choose an appealing label, it’s probably more important to choose a vessel of sufficient capacity.

If one says “Red” (the name of a color)
and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning.
You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains,
Which means that while you were reading,
All those millions of words passed by
Without teaching you how to make sentences.

The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words.

“It is demonstrably true that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose.” — Professor Pangloss

In the ordinary world, things just are what they are. Sticks are just sticks, stones are just stones. In ritual world, things stand for things. Stones, arranged a certain way might become the boundary marker for a soccer game, or maybe a monument. In ritual, things mean something. We give them meaning.

Rituals are how we make meaning, personally and together.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”

It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call ‘inherent meaning’ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is ‘Is-ness’ meaning. Inherent meaning is a word’s identity, and reference merely its resumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. ‘Is-ness’ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing – the word – appear to be many things – its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.

The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.

People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.”

In building connections, [articulation work] builds meaning and identity, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it's a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stuff, arthritic, unworkable.

Albert says that people have “free will.” Barry says that people don’t have “free will.” Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by “free will,” on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase “free will” at all.

"Do you understand all the symbolism?"

"Not really, besides its being Venus and Cupid."

"I didn't even know that, so you're one up on me. I wish I'd read more about ancient mythology," she continued. "But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean."

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:

That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.