Meaning Making: Making neurological sense of the daily firehose of data.
“Information is indeed conceptual. But meaning it not - it is perception.” — Drucker 1988
This rather crude diagram (and the puzzle pieces below) represent one way of explaining how we make meaning of the ‘fire hose’ of information that bombards us daily.
It combines the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant, the business writing of Ikujiro Nonaka, the academic research of Donald Schon - plus about 20 years of thinking on this subject.
Kant: Sensations
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from the late 1700’s who is a central figure in modern philosophy.
In ‘A critique of pure reason’ 1781, Kant attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics of that day.
‘Reason’ tackled two fundamental questions:
“What do we know?” and, “How do we know it?”
Will Durant's synthesizing of some of Kant’s key thoughts around his objections at the time of how the brain functions is what really caught my attention.
[Maybe a reason I was attracted to Kant’s writing is I posited these same two questions during my post-master’s research in 2015. Three years before I read Kant.]
Durrant summarizing Kant wrote: “Left to themselves [sensations] remain a rabble of chaotic manifold, pitifully impotent -> waiting to be ordered into meaning and purpose and power.”
In essence, everything starts as raw data or what Kant called ‘sensations’.