The Meaning of Meaning

What causes the perspective of meaning?

We often have a mutual common acknowledgement of values and what is meaningful and significant in life, but what are the common directive concepts which cause this sense of meaning?

Perhaps the 1st step would be interpreting what the term “meaning’ means. Generically the term “meaning” seems to basically “mean”; explain the intent or purpose. That sentence itself was a good example. To extend this concept to this topic, the questionee at hand would be; the cause of the perspective of purpose or intent in general life, for people. 

In my last post; Momento of Memorability, I questioned the significance of memories, and considered that it seems from a likely common perspective, there is more significance in accessing memories which are relative to one another or circumstances. This seems to be true for specific conscious thoughts accessing memories of factors which are relative to one another through interaction and cause and effect, but also true for multiple overall conscious memories being accessed relative to other conscious memories or to practical circumstances. This perspective of significance, caused by combination of smaller portions which are relative to one another, seems to be the common concept in what gives us the sense of meaning.

From a naturalistic point of view, orderly combination may be appealing to us since it generally allows productiveness towards a goal, increasing the probability of survival. Consciousness causes orderly comprehension of how factors within any general circumstances cause and effect each other, allowing progress and survival through altering factors for an intended effect. It might make sense that we feel significance and meaning from order, since order is often what allows an intended purpose to be successful. 

Without order, there would be no stars or planets or galaxies, but a chaotic mess of elements. There would be no initial spark of life to continue to change, adapt and evolve into more orderly organisms. Without combination of smaller relative portions there would be no formation of letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, or paragraphs into topics. There would be no technology, society or progression. 

It seems very intuitive and acceptable that without order, there is no purpose. But on a deeper level, what does not seem naturalistically explainable, is what causes the order and counter-entropy. While the universe seems to be generally working towards entropy, its absolutely amazing that entropy has been counteracted progressively with negentropy to the degree that we exist as conscious beings to even question these concepts. In this world, it seems the less chaos and the more order, the more meaning there is, and perhaps its suiting that we work towards it.