Not Its Own Meaning: A Hermeneutic of the World

Humanities 6 (3) (2017)
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Abstract

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.

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Bernardo Kastrup
Radboud University (PhD)

Citations of this work

The Next Paradigm.Bernardo Kastrup - 2018 - Future Human Image 9:41-51.

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References found in this work

Physicalism.Daniel Stoljar - 2010 - New York: Routledge.
Physicalism.Daniel Stoljar - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.Eugene Wigner - 1960 - Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13:1-14.

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