, an act of change in a certain direction. Examples of directed certainty are the evolution of living beings and the evolution of meanings. Humans process information (certainty) into meaning (mediated, that is, directed certainty) by matching information with needs. The unit of meaning is the cultural bit—not just “1” or “0,” but also “+” or “–.” Meaning is information in human action that reproduces the patterns of the world.
“The orderly structures and patterns of which we are most immediately aware are those within our own minds, bodies, and behavior, but virtually all human beings have a strong conviction that corresponding to these patterns of mind and body are similar patterns in what might be called the ‘real world’” (Boulding 1985, p. 9).
At the same time, meaning is not limited to a mental act that operates with abstraction. Thinking in itself is not an interaction with meanings as with some “supramundane” entities. Meaning is a material action and the result of an action. When we compare meanings with each other, we can distinguish between their general and particular properties. A clock is a device for measuring time. But this general property of being a clock does not exist in itself. It exists in the context of human activities related to clocks. The abstraction of a clock only makes sense in action, for example when you read and think about what is written in this book.
Is the watchmaker blind, is culture left to chance?
In his book The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (1986), Richard Dawkins cited 18th-century theologian William Paley’s argument that if we find an object as precise and complex as a clock on a heath, we can assume that it did not come into being spontaneously, but was designed. Paley applied this argument to nature to prove the existence of God. Dawkins believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided an answer to Paley’s argument:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (Dawkins 1996, p. 5).
Dawkins argued that natural selection could have created the animal world even without the will of God, and Donald Campbell argued that cultural selection could have created knowledge and civilization even without the will of man. In his works of the 1950s and 60s, Campbell put forward the theory of “blind variation and selective retention,” according to which man creates cultural variations randomly, without foreseeing the future course of events, and these variations are then subjected to selection in which only those variations that have proven useful are stored and passed on through learning. Learning is “the retention of adaptive response patterns for subsequent utilization, thus abbreviating the trial and error process” (Campbell 1959, p. 158). Taking Dawkins and Campbell’s argument further, we can conclude that man is not a subject of culture at all, that culture does not need human design, that meanings develop on their own: they arise randomly and are passed on through involuntary learning. However, some people feel uneasy with this assumption:
