Notes on science, creativity and meaning
creativity
Some phenomenological truths lie beyond science’s current reach, and they provide meaning to life
- Meaning is not an objective feature of the universe.
- Meaning arises within human experience — consciousness, sensation, feelings and emotion, language, art and culture, relationships.
- To truly understand your own meaning, you must explore human experience in its richness.
- Science enriches our understanding of the universe by revealing objective structures and causal regularities.
- In doing so it brackets the first-person experience, because feelings, values, and meanings don’t lend themselves to replicable measurement.
- Relying only on the third-person lens of science leaves out fundamental dimensions of the human experience—sensation, purpose, ethical value—that require creative or contemplative inquiry.
- None of this diminishes science’s correctness or implies the supernatural; it simply recognizes that some phenomenological truths lie beyond science’s current reach.
Phenomenology is a big word for paying close attention to how things feel and look to you—like the taste of ice cream or the sound of rain. It’s all about noticing what the world is like from your point of view, the stuff that happens inside your head. It’s real, but not in a material sense.