On the big school bus back to the Jiangning campus, I was lucky: I got the single seat beside the driver, with a huge glass windscreen in front of me, practically a panorama.

There were specks of grime on the glass, but it was clear enough for the driver to drive steadily, and clear enough for me to peer out at Nanjing in the early-winter night.

If not for this chance, I don't know when I would ever have spent several dozen minutes on something so meaningless. Speaking of meaning, what is "meaning", anyway? If I hadn't caught the last seat on this bus, if night hadn't fallen, I don't know when I would have spent several dozen minutes watching streams of neon fade along the way, with the silhouettes of crowds moving through them; watching countless orange halos of street lamps flicker on and off, half hidden by overpasses and road signs; watching two rows of street lamps wind away along the road. Nor do I know when I would have come to feel this: however solid a thing is, you can always find somewhere in it an abstract beauty; however fixed and unchanging a thing is, you can always find an angle from which it has a flowing beauty.

Lately I've been playing an indie game called Eufloria (its Chinese name means "Fungus World"). It is like an abstraction of reality: it pulls out the basic elements of how life arises, develops and struggles, and rebuilds them simply. Simple, but never dull. Good roots and a good trunk give a tree the nourishment it needs, and it will always grow the most magnificent branches and leaves, then flower and bear fruit. Mathematical modelling, sand-table simulations, building systems of knowledge: the principle is much the same. From one to the ten thousand things, from the infinitely small to the infinitely vast.

And the relation between the fixed and the flowing is one of the most basic questions in philosophy; no need to say more.

Back to where we were: what, after all, is meaning? The question seems too hard to answer, or perhaps you can first add some qualifiers to narrow the discussion, such as the meaning of life (life in the general sense, as distinct from a human life), or the meaning of a human life? That qualifier still seems too broad, so if we add "journey", does that sound more practical? Still too broad; then let's make it the meaning of the journey "on the big Jiangning-campus school bus, I was lucky: I got the single seat beside the driver, with a huge glass windscreen in front of me, practically a panorama". How about that?

Hang on, didn't I say earlier that this was a meaningless thing to do? But if we can't even work out what "meaning" itself is, how can we use it to describe a property of anything else? All right then, tell me: what is "meaning"? It seems we overlooked something. If you don't know the most general sense of a word, then however you restrict it you still can't know it, because the word is the only thing at the centre of your attention; narrowing the range only snips off part of that centre. Tell me: if the whole leopard isn't in front of you, how can you glimpse one of its spots through a tube?

So approaching the question head-on seems hopeless. Why not come at it from the other side? If we can rule out as many wrong answers as possible, we can at least get a little closer to the truth. So what is not meaning? Though you and I are always going on about things being "meaningless", meaningless and not-meaning seem to be two different things; we can't use meaningless things to stand for "not meaning". More discouraging still, at root we can't say anything has no meaning at all, because whatever exists is reasonable, so it always has some meaning. And what is not meaning? You'll find, oh no, that from the other side things are even worse. If you want to prove that a thing is that thing, how can you list, one by one, everything that isn't it? Even if you can name some, you can't carry this approximation through, because the things that are "not it" are infinite in number, and cannot be enumerated.

Well, if you haven't given up reading by now, it seems it's time our questioning gave up. We've thought a great muddle of things and seem to have got not a single (what?) thing out of it, but here at least we haven't copied our maths teachers, who would stare at the word "meaning" for a few seconds and then say, "A definition is a definition, there's no reasoning to it, so don't split hairs." Doesn't doing things differently like this make a new kind of "meaning"?

After going round in so many circles, we find that although we can't really grasp it in our hands, all through the process we could in fact dimly sense what "meaning" means. This really is a marvellous thing. Could this be what is called ideology, a form of consciousness that is the plainest kind of knowing and understanding of everything in the world?

Perhaps this is the chaotic nature of the "real". In physics we keep raising the precision of measurement through methods, instruments and even theory; in daily life we use cameras with ever more pixels to take pictures ever closer to reality; probability theory tells us that repeating something under the same conditions brings us closer to some true value... We are always searching for the real, closing in on it, yet in fact, after hundreds and thousands of years of science, we still can't do this seemingly simple thing, and instead sigh more and more over how elusive the real is. The "real" seems to lie on an asymptote of our journey: we can get closer and closer, a tiny bit at a time, but never arrive. Einstein once said something to the effect that any single leaf drifting down outside the window is enough to make humanity sigh at how powerless science is. So at last we understand why, in a classic science-fiction story, humans fear and revere a stone slab that, however far human technology advances, always measures exactly the same length (the only difference being an ever longer string of "0"s at the end of the number). It gives them the illusion that the civilization that vanished long ago is itself "the real"; this fear comes not from an accumulation of quantity but from an ultimate gap in quality. Fortunately, if quantum theory, which already exists in reality and is still developing, is really correct, we can say with confidence that if the humans in the story could keep their science developing without end, then one day that string of zeros would be ended by some digit from 1 to 9, because the "real" does not in fact exist.

Actually I'm more inclined to say that the real exists only within chaos; what keeps us from touching it is only the nature of chaos, and we can't say it doesn't exist just because we can't see it or grasp it. By now I've more or less explained "chaos" as I understand it. And why talk about "chaos" at all? What is it meant to explain?

The most incredible thing within chaos: "order".

It is chaos's natural enemy, and yet it exists within chaos: a flower that should never have been able to exist in the black turbulence. But it does exist, and that's why I call it a flower, because it is too beautiful a miracle, blooming in this uncertain world.

So let's go back to the last sentence of the third paragraph: "...From one to the ten thousand things, from the infinitely small to the infinitely vast." If the universe is chaotic, its total entropy can only rise, and space-time always tends towards disorder, then doesn't local negative entropy appear for no reason at all? Perhaps you can still explain it with "chaos": since it is chaos, even "chaos" itself is disordered, and anything can happen.

We keep talking about "self-organization": self-organization in physics, self-organization in chemistry... In the end we find that life is the most marvellous self-organization of all, because it is not only material. From the chaotic real arise finite steady states; then these finite steady-state bodies turn out, in the end, to be able to perceive themselves, to perceive an existence of infinite depth, and to build bridges, create radiance, step by step approaching the limit in the dark of chaos, even trying to rebuild nature's fractals out of finite constructions. From doing it without knowing it can't be done, to doing it knowing full well it can't be done. Is this the most ultimate explanation of "meaning"?

What shouldn't happen, happens: we call it a "miracle".

The orange street lamps along the way flowed and changed endlessly through the dark of space and time, as if finite things were turning into the infinite "real". Reality glinted in the crack between stability and turmoil, and the night was so beautiful that humble little I could not breathe.

2011.11