Are their interactions meaningful in any metaphysical sense, or does physical experience constitute meaning in itself?
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity by Charles Taylor (Harvard) The eminent Canadian philosopher argues that language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience.
In fact, we might want to go so far as to say that satisfying the conditions above constitutes meaning conjunction.
Instead of asking for the facts that constitute meaning, it is argued, we should consider the role of meaning statements in our socio-linguistic practices.
Is there a promising reason for thinking that fulfilling God's (as opposed to any human's) purpose is what constitutes meaning in life?
The most promising reason seems to be one that takes us beyond the simple version of soul-centered theory to the more complex view that both God and a soul constitute meaning.
Among those who believe that a significant existence can be had in a purely physical world as known by science, there is debate about two things: the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings.
The former take some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) to constitute meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance).
The narrative logic through which this linking happens contains and constitutes meaning [ 46, 47].
Thus, cognitive and social systems are both characterized by processes of self-organization (see next subsection) in terms of autopoiesis (i.e., self-creation and self-maintenance of systems; see Maturana & Varela, 1980), both have to handle complexity, and both make an effort to constitute meaning out of the information coming from their environments (Kimmerle, Moskaliuk, Cress, & Thiel, 2011).
