[marshfarm]

The idea of meaning is contradictory, it's not strictly an illusion. There's a huge difference. State changes mean differences, they don't ensure meaning. This is an obvious criteria. We have tasks and the demands are variable. We can assign meaning, but where is the credibility? Is it ever objectively understood? No. That's contradictory.

You have to look at mental events and grasp not only what they are, both material and process, how the come to happen, they're both prior and post-hoc, etc.

I study meaning in the brain. We are nit sure if it exists and the meaning we see in events and tasks are at a massive load. Any one event can have 100s even 1000s of meaningful changes to self, environment and others. That's contradictory. Searle is not even scratching the surface of the problem.

https://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/1811/1811.06825v2.pdf

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39282373/

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

[fellowniusmonk]

What does ensure meaning? Interpretation?

If that's your position, that's where we disagree, state changes in isolation and state changes in sequence are all meaning.

State change is the primitive of meaning, starting at the fermion, there is no such thing as meaninglessness, just uncomplex, non-cohered meaning primitives, the moment they start to be associated through natural processes you have increasing complex meaning sequences and structures through coherence.

We move up the meaning ladder, high entropy meaning (rng) is decohered primitives, low entropy meaning is maximally cohered meaning like human speech or dna.

Meaning interactions (quantum field interactions) creates particles and information. Meaning is upstream, not downstream.

Now people hate when you point out semantic/structural meaning is meaning, but it's the only non fuzzy definition I've ever seen, and with complexity measures we can reproducably examine emissions objectively for semantinc complexity across all emitter types.

The reason everyone has such crappy and contradictory interpretations of meaning is because they are trying to turn a primitive into something that is derive or emergent and it's just simply not, and you can observe the chain of low to high complexity without having to look at human structures.

This meaning predates consciousness, even if you are a dualist you have to recognize that dna and rna bootstrap each "brain reciever" structure.

Meaning exists without an interpreter, the reason so many people get caught up in the definition is because they can't let go of anthropocentric views of meaning, meaning comes before consciousness, logic, rationality, in the same way the atom comes before the arrangement of atoms rockwise.

Even RNG, the rng emissions from stars lets say, which is maximally decohered meaning, has been made meaningful to the point of extreme utility by humans via encryption.

Now, you may be a dualist, and that's fine, the physical reality of state change doesn't preclude dualism, it sets a physical empirical floor, not an interpretive ceiling.

Even some very odd complaints about human interpretation, like still images being interpreted as movement some how being a problem, in the viewing frame you are 100% seeing state changes and all you need for meaning are state changes, each frame is still but the photon stream carried to our eyeballs is varying, and that's all you need.

Anyway, you make meaning, you are a unqiue write head in the generation of meaning, we can't ex ante calculate how important you are for our causal survival because the future stretches out for an indeterminate time, and we haven't yet ruled out that entropy can be reversed in some sense, so you are an important meaning generator that needs to be preserved, our very species, the very universe may depend on the meaning you create in the network (is reversing entropy even locally likely? I doubt it, but we haven't ruled it out yet, it's still early days.)

[marshfarm]

Without being a dualist, we can say from neurobiology, ecological psych, coord dynamics, neural reuse that meaning isn't simply upstream.

Technically it can't be because of the language problem is post-hoc.

You're an engineer so you have a synthetic view of meaning, but it has nothing to do with intelligence. I'd study how you gained that view of meaning.

A meaning ladder is arbitrary, quantum field dynamics can easily be perceived as Darwinism, and human speech isn't meaningful, it's external and arbitrary and suffers from the conduit metaphor paradox. The meaning is again derived from the actual tasks, scientifically no speech act ever coheres the exact same mental state or action-syntax.

Sorry you're using a synthetic notion of meaning that's post-hoc. Doesn't hold in terms of intelligence. Not even Barbour (who sees storytelling in particles) et al would assign meaning to Fermions or other state changes. It's good science fiction, but it's not science.

In neuroscience we call isolated upstream meaning "wax fruit." You can see it is fruit, but bite into it, the semantic is tasteless (in many dimensions).