Definitions trap us in an infinite regress of words defining words
“Water”, its definition, and the words that definition needs defined in turn: words defining words, winding in, never reaching the centre.
While definitions trap us in an infinite regress of words defining words, failing to ever reach a satisfying conclusion, meaning is the direct, pre-conceptual embodied resonance unique to each individual’s experience.
At best, communication based on words is an invitation to embodied co-experience, but it can never be some kind of true transfer of meaning.
This article makes that case through three short sections: Birth of a Word, Definition is Not Meaning, and Meaning is Not Definition.
Birth of a Word shows how words appear and work.
Definition is Not Meaning shows how definitions work.
Meaning is Not Definition points to how meaning works.
Birth of a Word
Words are based on vowels and consonants, and vowels and consonants are based on sound. New words occur all the time; thousands of new words are added to English language every year.
Every word has its origin in the thought process. In the case of a word that has never previously occurred, it initially occurs as a thought. In the case of a word that is already well-established, it keeps occurring in the thought process. Sometimes thoughts are simultaneously spoken or otherwise communicated, and sometimes not, but words always occur as thought.
When you think of the word “water”, the activation that shows up in a brain scan is more or less the same regardless if you just think about the word, or if you also say it out loud. Moreover, sensitive electrodes placed on the throat can detect muscle activations — micromovements — in the voice box and tongue, even if it’s just thought.
In the case of thinking, there is an inhibitory signal sent by the prefrontal cortex that cancels the motor command coming from your brain’s language centre, Broca’s area, leaving behind a faint echo rather than audible speech.
Once a new word occur in the thought process, it always has some sense of experience co-occuring with it. That is meaning. Meaning is foundational for words. What can happen next is, that familiar words are used to add a narrative for the new word. That is definition, and it’s a second-order matter with words.
Meaning is connected with experience.
Definition is connected with concepts and narratives.
When a baby learns to say “water”, it goes through experiening hundreds of events in which water somehow plays a role. Somebody says “water”, or water has some presence in the immediacy of the baby’s experience, or itself making sounds that eventually mature as “water”. The baby experiences water and develops meaning for it long before being able to say “water” or have any definition for it.
Every word is sound shaped by thought and steeped in experience.
Definition is not Meaning
If you ask Oxford dictionary, what is the definition of the word “water”, you get the following:
“a liquid without colour, smell or taste that falls as rain, is in lakes, rivers and seas, and is used for drinking, washing, etc.”
Definitions, such as the one above, consist of words used for defining words. In a sense, it is words talking about words. Essentially, language is a system based on infinite recursion of words, every word always depending on other words.
For every definition you get, you have to get definitions for each of its words, and for every word in those definitions…ad infinitum. This is called symbol grounding problem.
Yet, considering definition to be meaning is extremely common in modern discourse. We all say things like “this literally means” and “the real meaning” in an effort to imply that definitions are meaning or that meaning can be precisely defined.
Superficially, definitions appear coherent and based on something concrete. The symbol grounding problem demonstrates how it’s just words chasing after other words, forever. Therefore, definitions correspond with mind in general, and with the thought process specifically.
When it comes to meaning, it is embodied, it relates with the entire human system: body, energy, and mind.
Meaning is not Definition
Whereas, defining words leads to semantic regress, a kind of a vertigo, meaning is nothing like that. Meaning is less related with the thought process, and more with direct experience. Basically, meaning is how one’s neurophysiology resonates with respect to a particular appearance, for example, the word “water” spoken out by someone.
Simply by hearing the word “water”, there is an immediate neurophysiological response. In the first instance, maybe around 100 milliseconds, a state shift can be experienced. It can be a very subtle, or very gross, sensation of state change. For example, a sense of energy moving upwards the torso. Immediately after, in around 200–300 milliseconds later, gross conceptuality kicks in with a narration of the situation. This narration, definition, is riding the thought process, and the thought process is riding the neurophysiology.
The neurophysiology itself, is in the shape of the meaning. The shape of the neurophysiology, is in itself meaning. It is the neurophysiology that is experience, and it is the experience that is meaning.
Therefore, there is a very clear and important difference between meaning and definition. All definitions are based on words, and all words are based on thoughts. Meaning is direct resonant experience. Thoughts may or may not be part of direct experience, depending if they occur or not.
What is meant by resonance here then? When we say hearing the word “water”, what we are talking about is sound, and in the particular context of human communication, that sound arise and is processed through the neurophysiology of an individual.
That neurophysiology has a particular “shape”, the way in which it is arranged. The macrostructure is the gross shape of the whole biological mass, and its appearance is similar in all humans. The macrostructure is the substrate that makes it possible for highly individualised microstructures to appear. The microstructure is the substrate that makes it possible for highly individualised sense of meaning to appear.
The shape of the microstructure is highly refined by one’s experience, genetics, and other factors. The neurophysiological microstructure is entirely unique for each individual.
Because two neurophysiologies can never be the same, and even for a single individual their neurophysiology is in constant flux, and because meaning is neurophysiology, meaning can never be the same for two individuals. Meaning can’t be expressed through words.
Meaning is experienced individually, within one’s body, energy, and mind.
Turtles All the Way Down
If you observe your own thought process, you find that it is a kind of a narrative that is always working to define things, it’s always working to define itself. The thought process is a kind of a commentary, that adds context to things.
Even if thought process goes on forever justifying its definitions with other definitions, it will never reach the end of it, it will never land on the ground truth. It’s just words chasing words in a fantastical metalinguistic construct, kind of a matrix.
As mere direct self-apparent experience, meaning is radically different. True meaning is the ground truth, it is what is without anything added or removed.