Groundwork for a Metanarrative of Meaning

“Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?”
“Perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention. We don’t want any invention. We want the straight facts.”
“Isn’t telling about something – using words – already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something on an invention? The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it. And in understanding something, we bring something to it. Doesn’t that make life a story?” – Life of Pi

I must start with story, instead of word or language, because I can’t claim “words don’t work that way”, I must say “it is not healthy, effective or satisfying to say words work that way” and to be able to say that I need to start from a position where healthy, effective and satisfying are the judges and stories about words are the subjects of our judgement.

Eventually I would like to discuss how language specifically and representation generally works. However, such a discussion involves recursive complexity – I have to use language to talk about language, so any conclusions reached at the end of the discussion, must be applicable to the beginning. Beyond this initial recursive complexity of using language to talk about language, the most satisfying, healthy and effective explanation I have found for how language works drives me towards a particular understanding of how discussions/explanations work. Which means that I will be composing an explanation in language, about how language, and, by extension, explanations. This would seem to require at a minimum that my own use of language and construction of this explanation be an application of my conclusions.

“Here’s another story”:

All men are, by nature, storytellers. We tell ourselves and each other many different stories. It is raining. I love you. Mass can be converted into energy in a predictable proportion. I’ll be able to sell this house for a profit before my first real mortgage payment comes due. If only I had a space heater handcrafted by an Amish carpenter, then I would be happy. Treat others as you would have them treat you. And they lived happily ever after.

The stories we tell matter. They explain what is, what could be and what we can do with what is. They tell us who we are, who we ought to be, what things are available to be desired and how to get what we want. Stories tell us who they are, why we don’t like them and what we ought to do to them. They tell us what we are doing, what we did and why. Stories explain what things matter.[^Just as this story I am telling is saying that stories matter.] Stories describe our lives and guide, perhaps determine, how we will live our lives going forward. It makes sense, then, to care about which stories we tell and to want to tell the right stories.

Surely there are not many right stories. Surely there is but one right story – the True story. Perhaps, but I neither know this story, nor can I conceive what form such a story could take. A theorist, having spent all day pondering the labyrinth of mathematical formulae which compose quantum physics, has no qualms going home to love her husband and help her son with his astronomy homework, even though the story of quantum physics has no place for homework, husbands, sons or planets. What form could the true story take in order to both make accurate predictions of the behavior of particle accelerators, and satisfyingly explain families?

Tell hypothetical story (materialist’s dream) where quantum physics expands to explain husbands. Show as unsatisfactory. “Who cares if it is satisfactory, it’s right”. It’s true? It works? How do you know? It works the best? There couldn’t be a story that works better? What if it leads to nihilism? What if it is incoherent? Be careful not to go off on a tangent in material that is better included in the section specifically dealing with referential theories.

Let us attempt to grant the materialist’s dream. We dig down through the layers of explanation from fathers to sons to heredity and evolution to genetics and chromosomes to proteins to molecules to atoms to protons to quarks all the way down to the fundamental waveform/energy/force/particle/string/function/?/unit. These fundamental units and their known, calculable interactions fill the explanatory space of science. What we have heretofore described as quarks, we now explain as the emergent behavior of 2^32 units when measured in the observation chamber of a particle accelerator of sufficient size. Likewise for protons, atoms, genes, sons, fathers, spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism. Indeed the story of units has such explanatory power that we now, as a matter of course, capture what we once called neutrinos in generators the size of AA batteries each one of which produces electricity in controlled quantities equivalent to decades of global energy consumption.

How do you know the unit is fundamental? Where is morality, meaning?