Heroes Not Zombies

Human beings are sensing, feeling, thinking, meaning-seeking creatures. We are probably the only species of life on Earth to function this way. Consciousness is that strange phenomenon which allows us to be aware of all these functions, and it’s consciousness which has enabled us to develop language which allows us to communicate the inner experiences of our lives.

How do you know what another person senses, feels or thinks? Through the sharing of stories. Our key tool in organising all these elements and conveying these experiences to others is narrative. We put things together in our heads in the form of stories. Remember, a story is created by telling of the present as it is emerging from the past in the light of future possibilities. Stories are dynamic. They move, they grow, they develop. And every story is unique, because every human being is unique. We feel less alone when we find connections with others through the stories we share. We use the imaginative facility of empathy to try to understand what another person is experiencing.

These experiences of our lives are made up of the sensations we become aware of, the feelings which develop inside us, and the thoughts which allow us to put it all together. All of this is framed inside what sense we make of it all. Two people can have very similar experiences but understand those experiences differently because sense each one makes of it is different.

Owen Flanagan, the philosopher, describes this very well in his book, “The Really Hard Problem”. He points out that there are many different ways of making sense of experience and these different ways lead to very different perceptions and understandings of the world. He describes the idea of “spaces of meaning”. A “space of meaning” is what a person lives in and through which he or she experiences the world. A “space of meaning” is publically available.

He describes six such spaces – art, science, technology, ethics, politics and spirituality.

Each of these six spaces of meaning names, or gestures in the direction of, a large domain of life. Art includes painting, poetry, literature, music and popular culture. Science includes all the sciences, as well as whatever synthetic philosophical picture of persons (or reality) is thought to emerge from the sciences. Politics includes the relevant local and/or nation-state form of government as wel as the legal and economic structures it rests on and/or engenders. Spirituality includes multifarious religious practices and institutions, theologies, and such non-theistic spiritual conceptions as ethical naturalism, secular humanism, pagan shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Stoicism.

If we want to understand how some person or group self-conceives, and what kind of worldview they have, then we can consider how they make sense of their experience in relation to these “spaces of meaning”. There are as many different “worldviews” as there are people. If we are to understand each other and communicate then we need to grasp something of our own and the other’s worldview. For some people, one of these “spaces of meaning” will be pre-eminent – for example, there are some who think that only the scientific worldview is the “right” view and that all others are flawed. Others think the same of a particular religious or political view of life. We connect with those who inhabit the same spaces as we do. Most people don’t inhabit only one of these spaces. We each have our unique cluster, but some people seem almost incapable of seeing the world in any way other than through one particular space.

One of the points Flanagan is making is that there is no single “right” worldview. Those who cannot see that fail to connect with others who make sense of their lives very differently.

I think we can all learn something from a bit of self-reflection. Which of these “spaces of meaning” resonate most strongly with you? What does that tell you about the way you make sense of the world?