Meaning Part 2: ‘Flow’ and ‘Fitted-ness’

In retrospect this question of awareness, experience and meaning (part 1) has been exceptionally difficult to parse and navigate. It was my intention to associate the experiential happiness of ‘flow’ and ‘play’ with the happiness of the numinous (relationship) experience, however there is a larger gap between these than I initially thought.

The ‘problem’ (mostly) is that I still (mostly) view meaning as arising from the ‘fitted-ness’ of any particular experience (thought, symbol, etc.) to one’s interior mental framework. On one hand, I think this ‘meaning as fitted-ness’ theory somewhat relegates meaning to an epiphenomenal side-effect in much the same way some people treat (rather scientistically) consciousness as (merely) an emergent property of biological complexity. I do not think I am being scientistic to think this way about meaning, because I am sticking to what I experience rather than what I believe about my experience. Indeed, the benefit I have by thinking of meaning this way (as emergent of framework ‘fitted-ness’) is that it has more explanatory power for my personal experience: things have (great) meaning, to me, when they fit (really well) what I already understand.

Yet on the other hand, the fact is I take the meaning I garner from how an experience (though, symbol, etc.) fits into my mental framework and what I already understand and I believe it and function as if it is meaningful for more than just me – that is I function as if those things are meaningful of themselves and (at least potentially) meaningful to everyone, not simply meaningful to me, as if it were (ojectively) real.

Although it is possible (likely even) both could be true to some extent, without understanding the mechanism of meaning I don’t think I can have it both ways: either (all) meaning is an emergent property of mental frameworks (a sort of translation of our experiences, etc.), or (all) meaning is (functionally) innate, indigenous and germane to the object associated.

Regardless (and back to my awareness of happiness problem), this ‘fitted-ness theory of meaning’ means that meaning is retrospective, and any happiness derived from the ‘fitted-ness’ of meaning (I think) is therefore also retrospective and not based on ‘flow’ and ‘play’, which are experientially based rather than retrospective. I do think we need both things, mind you, experiential and retrospective, but the mechanism of their functional integration still eludes me.