Scientific Explanation of Loss of Meaning

1. Science has a hard time proving anything about Meaning because:

   How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society. But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe, these crises?  

   A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications.” The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism?” Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt — either consciously or not — the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities.

   A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions the sciences are forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the “hard” sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be “above” philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies.” 

   “Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.” A regrounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and — necessarily — a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails [6]. 

   ead more about it?

   This project is inspired by a very old technique – the steel ball technique – famously used by Edison to gain insights into his inventions. Our work, which both formalizes and extends the scope and capability of this technique, is impossible without past work investigating possibilities of influencing dreams in the neuroscience lab. This work includes that conducted by scientists like Stephen LaBerge and Benjamin Baird, who do wonderful work on later-stage lucid dreaming, focusing on the REM state. Scientists like Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler have done work on mind-wandering and creativity, inspiring our idea that fluid thinking outside of executive control in hypnagogia (like mind-wandering) could augment creativity. Work by Deirdre Barrett compiling moments of inspiration found in sleep, and work by Robert Stickgold and Tore Nielsen on microdream phenomenology, all encouraged and informed us. Andreas Mavromatis wrote a whole thesis on hypnagogia, and his writing gave us a sense of the poetry and practical applications of this state (as did Nabokov, Oliver Sacks, Yoga Nidra practitioners, and Edgar Allen Poe writing on hypnagogia). Our sense of this vast work was given to us by the three advisors who have helped us most throughout this work, in and out of the classroom—Professors Pattie Maes, Ed Pace-Schott and Robert Stickgold.