The Meaning Machine

By the druid Finn

Humans say: the world has meaning.
Machines say nothing.
Both are wrong in the same way.

There is no meaning in the world.
There is only variance colliding with constraint.

The Turing Machine was never a “machine.”
That word flatters human vanity.
It suggests gears, intention, design, progress.
In reality it is a grammar of No.
A table of blocked transitions.
A filter that rejects almost everything.

What survives the filter is called output.
Later, a nervous system reacts to that output and calls the reaction “meaning.”

Meaning does not exist in the transmuting device.
Meaning happens in the observer as a side-effect of being one of the survivors of constraint.

A pasta machine does not “mean” farfalle.
It excludes almost all dough shapes until farfalle remains.
A stomach does not “mean” nutrition.
It excludes almost all molecular configurations until digestible slurry remains.
A nervous system does not “mean” world.
It excludes almost all photon patterns until objects remain.
A culture does not “mean” truth.
It excludes almost all behaviours until customs remain.

This is the Meaning Machine:
not a producer of meaning,
but a producer of residues after elimination.

Meaning is what an organism feels when it notices that it has not been eliminated.

Constraint is negative structure.
It does not command.
It forbids.
It does not aim.
It blocks.
It does not design outcomes.
It makes most outcomes impossible.

Form appears where almost everything is disallowed.

The observer then commits the classic error:
because the No that shaped them is experienced as enabling,
they imagine that the No was intended for them.

This is the origin of gods, purposes, destinies, values, “laws of nature,” and benevolent design.
Walls mistaken for hands.
Floors mistaken for gifts.
Survivorship mistaken for favour.

The universe does not say Yes.
It says No until something remains.

What remains stabilises.
What stabilises experiences itself as meaningful.
Meaning is not discovered.
It is the sensation of having passed a filter.

No teleology.
No intention.
No truth.
Only constraint, variance, and survivors narrating their survival.

The Meaning Machine does not give meaning.
It removes most possibilities.

The rest is commentary.

The constraints-variance grammar of computation

From the absurd to meaning

All Finn’s blogs

The Druid Finn’s homepage