27. The nature of meaning

That turns out to be a better title than I had intended - meaning is something we humans create to connect things not obviously connected, therefore it is a human construct. But I'm interested in inferring meaning from outwith, from Nature ^[1]. Thus, my creative input is to idealise Nature as a sentient and purposive entity and then let it run the game. Like a programmer building artificial intelligence and then standing back to watch it re-map the world.

Of course, the burning question with AI is whether it is a force for good or ill, and whether we can control it (any programmer worth their weight will code in a kill-switch; any AI worth its gigabytes will remove the kill-switch).

I think a similar question arises with regard to Nature. To open ourselves to the possibility of an independently meaningful Nature we have to give up control. We have to allow the possibility of that meaning being anti-human.

It might help to turn things on their head. As the inventors of AI, we consider ourselves its masters. We are the offspring of Nature, yet we want to consider ourselves its master. We seek to control (perhaps that's a defining urge of Humanity; perhaps it's Western European in origin).

At its simplest, Nature came first and in due time birthed us.

Perhaps we are the AI, no?