Wisdom and Meaning

There is a meme about the philosopher who goes to a party and is asked what they do for a living, and when they answer "I am a philosopher," invariably the response is either "So, what is the meaning of life?" or "You must be very wise!" Philosophers dread this because parties are not great for in-depth conversation, and, generally, we don't really know what the meaning of life is, and we are not terribly wise either.However, philosophy is indeed about meaning and wisdom, which this chapter will focus on.This is appropriate because back in chapter 1, and at vari ous places throughout the book, I have promised that self-evidencing can be shown to matter for everyday experience, and the search for wisdom and meaning is a part of what makes our everyday experience what it is.This is not to say that it is easy to lead meaningful lives and to be wise-these notions can seem nebulous and perhaps appear to be the exclusive province of gurus and sages.I will explore whether self-evidencing can contribute something valuable to our understanding of meaning and wisdom.Philosophers are fairly certain that wisdom and meaning matter to our well-being, and it is good to be wise and to lead a meaningful life.Psychologists, contemplatives, and therapists, and, I suspect, people of many walks of life broadly agree-although few of us have explicit, fully worked-out conceptions of these notions ready at hand.To make the task tractable, I will help myself to some functional and operational definitions of these concepts that have emerged at the intersection of philosophy and psy chol ogy.This will leave out much of the rich and impor tant philosophical debate.But it will help provide a concrete starting point for connecting self-evidencing's analy sis of existence and active inference's circular causality with notions of existence and autonomy in the meaning of life and wisdom lit er a ture.