History, Science and Meaning‪.‬

Abstract: Recent developments in the natural sciences make a renewed dialogue with the humanities possible. Previously, humanists resisted adopting scientific paradigms, fearing materialism and determinism would deprive history of meaning and people of freedom. Scientists, meanwhile, were realizing that deterministic materialism made understanding emergent phenomena like life virtually impossible. Scientists also discovered that their methods interfered with their goals and that descriptions of nature at the subatomic level were essentially random. The latter development, Monod said, weakened the "Modern" paradigm sufficiently to make qualitative changes scientifically possible. To understand life, however, scientists had to grasp how information created through interactions reducing thermodynamic gradients is then stored in self-organized systems. The patterned processes by which a historical nature changes over time may apply in the human realm, where interactions can change people and created information can be stored in societies. The qualitatively new information stored in social systems includes Values, Ethics and Morals (VEMs). VEMs map the effects of actions on societies, demonstrating meaning arises naturally in history. Mapping what actions mean, VEMs script the behaviors structuring societies, which solves the problem of how sequences of events--chronicles--become causally linked narratives. Moreover, when societies compete, their relative performance tests system-structuring information in the same way the fate of organisms tests DNA. Thus, the succession of social systems suggests there is a meaning of history. The meaning of history need be no more transcendental or intended than Darwinian evolution. But if organs and traits can have biological value without implying design, socially constructed attributes like morality, consciousness, and freedom can be valued without supposing history has an ultimate or eternal purpose. Aspiring to show how the cacophony of historical events becomes a cosmos, a process in which actions become meaningful, this sketch suggests a new understanding of nature may provide a basis for ethics. Keywords: Consciousness; Ethics; Evolution; Meaning; Narrative; Social System