Meaning bootstrapped consciousness, just ask dna and rna.
I don't get any of these anthropocentric arguments, meaning predates humanity and consciousness, that's what dna is, meaning primitives are just state changes the same thing as physical primitives.
syntactic meaning exists even without an interpreter in the same way physical "rock" structures existed before there were observers, it just picks up causal leverage when there is one.
Only a stateless universe would have no meaning. Nothing doesn't exist, meaninglessness doesn't exist, these are just abstraction we've invented.
Call it the logos if that's what you need, call it field pertubations, reality has just traveling up the meaning complexity chain, but complex meaning is just structural arrangement of meaning simples.
Stars emit photons, humans emit complex meaning. Maybe we'll be part of the causal chain that solves entropy, until then we are the only empirically observed, random walk write heads of maximally complex meaning in the universe.
We are super rare and special as far as we've empirically observed, doesn't mean we get our own weird metaphysical (if that even exists) carve out.
There's much more meaning than can be loaded into statements, thoughts, etc. And conscious will is a post-hoc after effect.
Any computer has far less access to the meaning load we experience since we don't compute thoughts, thoughts aren't about things, there is no content to thoughts, there are no references, representations, symbols, grammars, words in brains.
Searle is only at the beginning of this refutation of computers, we're far more along now.
It's just actions, syntax and space. Meaning is both an illusion and fantastically exponential. That contradiction has to be continually made correlational.
meaning is an illusion? That's absurdly wrong, it's a performative contradiction to even say such a thing, you might not like semantic meaning but it, like information, physically exists, and even if you're a solipsist you can't deny state change, and state change is a meaning primitive, meaning primitives are one thing that must exist.
this isn't woo, this is just empirical observation, and no one is capable of credibly denying state change.
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.
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.)
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).
You really seem to be conflating a lot of different things.
I understand you want to make this personal, making unfounded assertion about my training and background, but that's quite weak and also incorrect I think we should expect better of ourselves in discourse.
You seem to confuse semantic and structure with synthetic. Where do respected scientists in the field agree to draw the line between synthetic and meaning? Cite a non woo paper? These are clearly orthogonal concepts.
Barbour is a telling appeal. I don't want to be uncharitable to a new throw away green account but I think you fundementally don't understand what is being said.
You cite these fields as your base but even as fields they are downstream. You seem to be working backwards.
I'd like to see your definition of meaning. You seem to reject semantic meaning as a true form of meaning. So far your definition sounds very fuzzy and possibly confused.
DNA is not synthetic nor posthoc.
I'd really like to see you say something that actually says anything, the non applicable appeals to authority make it seem like you're unable to directly engage with the issue.
Personally I don't think you have shown any evidence of being a neuroscientist which is likely why you are posting on a green account.
Also, it's very common for people who are in a downstream field to view everything through their fields lens and miss the larger picture, a kind of anthropocentric and vocational blindness.
I speculate that you have very strong, poorly defined, metaphysical biases and I'd love to see some counter evidence.
Scientists hacking engineers who pretend meaning is in fermions is one of the great experiences here. Don't sell it short, engineer. Science is coming to overtake binary. And if you ever get to sign a paper for a presidential session at a top-level conference, you'll know what it's like to practice science and not debate ideas merely in social media.
I don't get any of these anthropocentric arguments, meaning predates humanity and consciousness, that's what dna is, meaning primitives are just state changes the same thing as physical primitives.
syntactic meaning exists even without an interpreter in the same way physical "rock" structures existed before there were observers, it just picks up causal leverage when there is one.
Only a stateless universe would have no meaning. Nothing doesn't exist, meaninglessness doesn't exist, these are just abstraction we've invented.
Call it the logos if that's what you need, call it field pertubations, reality has just traveling up the meaning complexity chain, but complex meaning is just structural arrangement of meaning simples.
Stars emit photons, humans emit complex meaning. Maybe we'll be part of the causal chain that solves entropy, until then we are the only empirically observed, random walk write heads of maximally complex meaning in the universe.
We are super rare and special as far as we've empirically observed, doesn't mean we get our own weird metaphysical (if that even exists) carve out.