>>24772404
Nothing we can get a grasp of.

>>24772404
A delusion's delusion.
A butterfly justifies its existence by existing. Thought is a survival tactic not a metaphysical force, that we imagine a distinction between what we do and what the butterfly does is the desperate mortal struggle of ego. Its job is to keep you from getting your skull split open, not justify your existence.

>>24772404
To mean

it is if you say it is and it is not if you do not

What is art? Are we art or is art art?
*pushes glasses up nose*
I am so deep.

>>24772404
Do you mean why we give value to something? The reason for the reason?

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>>24772404
Meaning is only really meaningful when it has formed a dense web of fine thread-like connections with all the deep unconscious layers of your experience, with all the culture - high and low - you've been shaped by, with the brief glimpses you've known of lost or possible worlds, and with the physical environment you sense pulsing around you.

Another (and a famous) metaphor for this is that meaning is like a clearing in a forest. The clearing is what it visibly is only because of the invisible depths of the obscure wood all around it.

So I think that's what meaning means. Meaning is a meeting point for all sorts of psychic and cultural and natural forces in you and your world and your community, all of which are somehow transformed in this encounter. They discover a secret affinity, or a secret antagonism, or a secret creative potential, which is crystallised in the particular meaningful object.

This is yet another reminder of how tragic and catastrophic AI will be.

AI serves up instantly, vending-machine style, any sort of meaning you could care to want. It can boil down any book to a bitesized abstract, it can turn any stray thought of yours into something that has the outward shape of a poem. But you can't train an algorithm to generate that patiently constructed web of human experience and collective cultural practice, that forest rustling at the edge of your perception. Those things can't be aimed at directly, because they emerge through a rich human life in a rich collective world, a life that disappears when you try to optimise it into calculable packets of data.

AI will spit out for us any meaning we want, and everything it spits out will be meaningless, like those pre-AI slop videos of people cutting into slime or jumping through Minecraft obstacle courses - strangely worldless images, as meaningful as rocks floating past the edge of the galaxy. Its output don't add to any context we could meaningfully live and participate in. We get 1 Hour AI ASMR Cozy Cabin Sounds To Fall Asleep To, and we lose the world. That's the art of the deal baby.