The essay critically evaluates progress on the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence and robotics, remaining skeptical that deep neural networks or cognitive robotics fundamentally address it. It agrees with the enactive approach that things appear meaningful for living beings due to their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals, but notes this approach fails to explain how meaning could influence an agent's behavior. If life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, meaning cannot play a causal role. The authors argue this impotence of meaning can be resolved by revising the concept of nature so that the macroscopic scale of the living involves physical indeterminacy, and they consider implications for synthetic approaches.
Existential phenomenological psychotherapy (EPP) helps people with mood and anxiety disorders find meaning and purpose in life. This narrative review describes EPP's development from the works of Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss, and Frankl, its therapeutic methods, and evidence for its effectiveness. The authors argue that EPP can work synergistically with medication-based treatments for these disorders. They also discuss how neuroscience currently understands mood and anxiety disorders and propose a path to integrate meaning-centered psychotherapy with neuroscience, despite the two fields remaining polarized.
Human consciousness constantly shifts through time, yet each moment is experienced as "now." This duality, called "the standing-streaming now" in Husserlian phenomenology, can be precisely formalized using category theory: the structure of the "now" corresponds to a monoid, while viewing present moments as discrete points on a timeline corresponds to a coslice category. This mathematical framework clarifies differences between ordinary consciousness and meditative states, such as the "eternal now" described in early Buddhist scriptures (Pali Canon) and Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō, which remarkably reflect a monoid structure.