A quest for the meaning in an imagined meaningless world, in a world that oozes meaning recursively!

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A Quest for Meaning in an Imagined Meaningless World

He began with the reasonable assumption that the world was meaningless.

It seemed the safest position.

Meaning, after all, was suspicious stuff. People found it in tea leaves, stock markets, bird migrations, telephone numbers, dreams, accidents, marriages, wars, stains on ceilings, and the peculiar way a stranger looked at them while getting off a bus. Given enough time, a human being could extract a metaphysics from a grocery receipt.

So he sat down with a notebook and decided to investigate meaninglessness scientifically.

On the first page he wrote:

THERE IS NO MEANING.

Immediately the sentence became meaningful.

This irritated him.

He crossed it out.

The crossing-out looked like a road.

The road reminded him of a dream in which he had walked through a city that did not exist. The city reminded him of a painting. The painting reminded him of a woman. The woman reminded him of an owl. The owl reminded him of Athena, which reminded him of Greece, which reminded him of Plato, who had caused enough trouble already.

He closed the notebook.

Outside, a bird landed on the windowsill.

“Don’t start,” he told it.

The bird tilted its head.

That was worse.

Soon the entire world began oozing significance.

A red circle became the sun, an eye, a target, a wound, a planet seen from the wrong end of a telescope. A doorway became birth and death simultaneously. Two people standing beneath a streetlamp became loneliness. Three became society. Four became a conspiracy.

Even randomness behaved suspiciously.

He tried throwing coins.

Heads, tails, tails, heads.

Pattern.

He rolled dice.

3, 1, 4, 1, 5.

Pi.

“Goddammit.”

He began to suspect that meaning was not something hidden inside the world at all.

Perhaps the mind secreted meaning the way spiders secreted silk.

But then came the disturbing question:

Who taught the spider geometry?

He wandered deeper.

Every explanation opened another explanation behind it. Every symbol pointed toward another symbol. Every memory contained smaller memories. Every answer became a door, and behind every door stood a man holding another door.

Meaning had become recursive.

The observer interpreted the world, but the observer was part of the world being interpreted. The eye looked at the universe while the universe, having produced the eye, looked back at itself.

Eventually he reached the last page of his notebook.

He expected revelation.

Instead he found a doodle he had made months earlier: a small black bird standing beside a red circle.

He stared at it.

The bird stared back.

Suddenly he laughed.

Perhaps the great mistake had been imagining two possibilities: a meaningful universe or a meaningless one.

Maybe existence was neither.

Maybe it was an inexhaustible machine for making meaning—meaning producing more meaning, interpretations breeding interpretations, worlds nesting inside worlds, turtles without the inconvenience of a final turtle.

He wrote one final sentence:

The world may be meaningless, but it cannot stop meaning.

Then he crossed it out.

Naturally, that meant something too.