| THE ONTOLOGICAL MEANINGLESSNESS OF OBJECTS |
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| Musée du Louvre/Photo by Raphaël Chipault. |
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This Mesopotamian Inscribed Scientific Tablet
is in The Musée du Louvre/Raphaël. The inscribed terracotta tablet is an example
of the application of Mesopotamian lexical
literature to the field of science, which
often manifested itself in the form of scholarly
catalogues that worked on a simple level
as lists of genres or species of plants or
substances. They were also used as more elaborate
lists of symptoms of disease. However this
artefact is an example of a list of substances.
http://heritage-key.com/
Whether you can read cuniform or not - ontologically speaking
this ancient object exists with no intrinsic
meaning in the same way that it has no intrinsic
value. Any meaning of the inscription or
value of the object is attributed to it as
a modality of the neurology of the human
attributant or valuer. It is the human assignee
who observes and attributes meaning or value
that exists - not the clay tablet itself
nor the writing upon it. Ontologically
speaking words in the form of combinations
of particles of dried ink, the incisions
in the clay of the ancient tablet, or the
arrangements of pixels to form words or graphics
on your computer screen do not exist per
se as meaningful symbols. It is the meaning-attributing human
writers, engravers and computor-savvy communicators
and meaning-extracting human wordifiers like
you that actually exist.
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The point I am making about the words not
existing as meaningful symbols refers to
the ontological view that objects themselves
(the residue of dried ink marks in certain
forms, the chisel-form inscisions in the
baked mud of the tablet, or the arrangement
of pixels on a screen) have no meaning in
themselves - the term meaning is a reification. Meaning is that which is attributed to objects (letters,
numbers, signs, etc.) by the neurology of
the writer, mathematician or artist who generates
them. The brain of whichever human or humans
then visually observe or auditorily perceives
and conceptually mirrors the fleshy electro-chemical
configurations of human brain
of the originator.
Human neurologised meaning as instantiated
in the various dynamical configurations of
synapsal connections and the entailment of
the string of sentential significations it
involves is exclusive to the denoting human
addressor. He or she employs the mutually
acknowledged signs of the addressee-language
community to whom the communication
is directed or expressed or signified. What
the string of signs describe is the ideational
manner in which the addressor existed at
the time that the communication and the ideational
modality of the recipient addressee.
When Aristotle's or Plato's [or their amanuensis'
or copier's] meaningless Greek squiggles
are translated and rendered into English
or Italian, people read them and instantiate
or recover their writer's meaning, by gaining
diachronic proxy access to Aristotle's or
Plato's thinking processes. The intentional
human meaning of the ink symbols or the wooden
toy train is by the visual contemplation
of them. I suggest to you that when we read
human words or observe any object created
by man [including statuary, works of art,
poetry, artefacts and music we are in fact
retrieving information from a semiological
storage device and ideationally restituting
the creator's neurological activity concerning
the meaning of that representation for its
original creator.
 Traffic lights convey (not inherently contain)
a public 'social [legal] meaning' by use of the colours they display. But
if a Teddy bear, or a toy train and the traffic
lights, together with the written words of
Aristotle, and the Teddy bear and
the toy train lay discarded in some dripping
jungle clearing deep in the forests of Brazil
then perhaps the natives of some
isolated tribe forrest tribe would
have no idea as to their significance, and
assuming that the Teddy Bear had
some spiritual implication and might well
erect the village traffic lights as a totem
to accompany its worship and assume that
the ancient parchment rolls containing Aristotle's
words were for wiping the body following
defecation?
The point I am making is that 'meaning' like any other abstraction, lies not in
the human artefact itself - but in the eyes
of the beholder, or listener, or toucher,
or more specifically in the patterns of his
or her neuronal configurations, for which
the human sensorium acts as a provider and diseminator
of symbolically derived information. The
value of a tree does not lurk within the
wood like some ancient spirit of worth.
Fortunately, we do have the other important
symbolic artefacts in addition to the various
contemporary writings, which allow us further
insights into the world in which the Greeks
lived.
Of course, the communicative codes [words]
that we leave behind are very important as
kinds of archaeological artefacts too - an
excavated Egyptian artefact that semiotically
tranfers hieroglyphic information as to what
the originator meant, who are the characters
depicted, the date etc. - is much more interesting
than an artefact bereft of word-symbols don't
you agree?
But what in my opinion sets humans apart
from the animals is that we supplement the
obvious utility and function of the objects
we create, with oral or written accounts
of their use and meaning in our world, whereas
the beaver does not have the ability to describe
his dam, nor the eagle the wit to explain
why his sparse cuddle of twigs is the most
sensible design for his version of a treetop
or cliffside home.
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