What is the meaning of meaning? And Nature.

 Nice SRH question to start the day. A question which must have an immediate answer. Obviously you must know what meaning is to understand the question to answer it so we must all know. There are 2 types of meaning however and we can write blogs without being able necessarily to tell someone how it all works.

Anyway not point of post. I picked up some terse notes just now from months ago and I can't understand what they refer to.

I need some memory of what was "topical" at the time in order to decode them. Its this working memory or context (or stack frame in computing) which we must load alongside the "notes" for them to make sense.

A point made famous by Structuralist philosophy but interesting to see it actually happening in daily life. Once we "forget" the context then things have no meaning.

So this blog post actually has no meaning to a vast number of people because it depends upon quite a specific context.

Its an interesting thing then to ponder the phenomenon of "viral content" or "fame." Like a fire, a spark is needed but it must occur in the right environment, or under the right conditions. In the rain no chance. Next to some dry tinder you may well get a fire. Equally the existence of memes and viral content depends more upon the context than the spark. When Darwin published "Origin of Species" that was the spark but the conditions were also right. He was living in a world awaking to the idea of geological history and processes, of the immense periods of time and gradual change that rocks went through and so it was much easier to imagine organisms doing the same. It was also the end of Religious Certainty and Church Power. A century of Capitalism and Technological progress was shifting power towards a competitive and free market. I studied Zoology and all the models of biological models are taken from finance and accounting. Darwin's idea is really the idea of free-markets applied to animals. The idea of Competitive Exclusion ripped directly from Capitalist ideology, and the idea that companies are forced to adapt and improve through competition started in Capitalism and went to Biology. This mirrors the origins of maths itself in the market place. Algebra and the "=" sign just a symbolic drawing of the traders scales.

I find this understanding very important because as the world shifted from Monarchy to Capitalism ideas of Nature shifted from God to Evolution. We find meaning and relevance for Nature within the context and terms of our current society. But Nature of course is far greater, it is the origin of everything and its good to understand that our attitudes to it will forever change as we reflect ourselves and our society into it.