Non-Dual Awareness Does Not Dissolve Meaning, Only Neurotic Attachment to It

A persistent objection to non-dual or no-self accounts of awakening runs through the cognitive science of meaning: if meaning is generated by Relevance realization — the ongoing process by which a situated self determines what matters for its persistence and flourishing — then dissolving the self-construct should collapse the entire meaning-generating apparatus. Awareness without valence, without the good-for-me/bad-for-me discrimination engine, would be functionally nihilistic. This is not a strawman; it follows directly from 4E cognitive frameworks that ground normativity in organismic self-maintenance.

Rob Scott's response draws a critical distinction between two modes of meaning. The first is meaning-as-survival-calculus: the self-referential loop in which every experience is assessed for its implications for the ongoing self-narrative. The second is meaning-as-direct-aesthetic-participation: an unmediated encounter with the qualitative texture of experience — beauty, weight, flavor — prior to representational elaboration. What the fundamental shift dissolves is not the capacity for care but the egoic Scaffolding around care — the need for outcomes to confirm the self-story, the anxiety that accompanies attachment to how things should go.

This reframing has real philosophical teeth. It suggests that Relevance realization has layers, and that the deepest layer — the one that makes you buckle the baby's seatbelt — does not require the narrative self-model to operate. What Rob calls fundamental okayness is not affective flattening but the removal of a defensive filter that actually distorts valuation. Care intensifies precisely because it is no longer competing with the metabolically expensive project of self-Justification. Acceptance, on this account, is not resignation but a less defended, more complete form of presence.