The origins of meaning: Objective reality, the unconscious mind, and awareness

Abstract

In this chapter, we seek to deepen our understanding of the felt presence of meaning by exploring its origins. Drawing on Gibson's ecological approach to perception, we will argue that the experience of meaning has, at its foundation, the encounter between a lawful physical world and unconscious primitive mechanisms that are capable of detecting the invariants of that world. We propose that the world makes sense and that the subjective feeling of this sense, when noticed by awareness, is the experience of meaning. For our purposes, then, meaning is a fundamental aspect of awareness associated with the detection of lawfulness, regularity, and pattern. We posit that, although unconscious processes have the capacity to detect the presence of sense, the experience of meaning is a phenomenological state that necessarily implicates awareness.