Do computaional approaches of meaning exist?

Dear Wilfried,

You write: ''Meaning is a subjective attribute of things or events. There are no two human beings wich are congruent in their meanings.''

I almost completely depart from your conception. We are very similar to each other, particularly our close ones and the people of our culture and tradition , and tend to be consensual on meaning. Certain poet managed to be liked by a vast number of their fellows for the reason that they have a way to make realize to them what they all find meaningfull, they tell them what they already knew but did not clealy realize. No we live together and thus share most of our meaning. Our subjective world are shared . We use the same common language, have the same physiology, are enculturated about the same and so not only live together externally but share a common consciousness and what is not common is mostly idiosyncratic and meaningless and not worth sharing. But what is not yet common and worth sharing will be soon belong to most people throw communication.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

I agree with your statement but we need a little bit of a fine tuning in this case.

Naturally we have a common language, culture and tradition. Perhaps we also have some common sense in arts or sports and so on.

My question was more subtile. Let us take an example: What does the word 'apple' mean? It is no question, that it is a fruit of an apple tree. There are also associations of sweet and acid. I like a special type of apples, colored yellow and red, ... I remember the tale of adam and eve, I remember picking an appel from neigbours tree or the spell ' an appla a day keeps the doctor away', and many other little things - associations in the context of apple. The sum of all these associations is melted in a feeling which gives an apple a special meaning.

Best Regards

Wilfried

Dear Wilfried,

I do not see a contradiction but a confirmation of what I said by your apple example. I would say that 99.9% of what you associate consciously or unconsciouly is the same for people familiar with apples. In the .1% The way it appear is shard by all, the way it taste is shared by all, it is healthy and I was familiar with the ''one apple a day''. I have no clue about the very particularity of the german language and this is the part you only shared with you fellow germans and maybe there is some particularity , some subtlety in the taste of the apples growned locally. All this is part of the .1% percent.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

your 0.1 % argument ist very acceptable. Thank you for that. I focused too much on the small percents.

My obove qestion was about the relation of the meaning and the value of an object. I think the value of an object/situation is the subjective subset of attributes of such things which is co-related or condensed in an emotional state like feeling.

Regards

Wilfried

Wilfried Musterle Your four sentences of the question posed are lovely in how provocative they are. I'd love to find some time to tease this apart. In the meantime, this article of mine should result in some understanding of the (deep) relationship of value and information in forming all of the flavors of "meaning." Preprint The Emergence of Qualia and Concepts from Physical Fundament...

Meaning is two things- actually meaning is association with two kind of things, informational and affective. (An individual representation of meaning may have any amount of each.) Value (and thus "worth") initially comes from the affective. Meaning does not have to be subjective, though you can define your terms that way. And I see from your Wilfried Musterle later posts that you have.

Minimum feelings are combined into patterns. The result is both information representation and complex feeling in one package, the full flower of what humans call Meaning.

With stimulus exposition repetitions (it implies less focal attention), Access consciousness remains equal or can increase but Phenomenological -consciousness usually decreases. In the case of words like stimulus, the relationship between symbol and meaning changes.When you know a terrible notice, that your father is dead, you can experience P and A consciousness ( you feel the novelty of the information and its valence and arousal for you and you know a fact: your dad is now dead). Six or twelve months later, A consciousness remains (you know that your dad pass away) but P-consciousness is attenuated or lost. It is just a fact, a symbol but the meaning is lost. The same happens when you repeat in high voice a lot of times a non ambiguous word like WAR. The auditory feedback sounds strange, without meaning. That is the problem of automatization (like in the case of bureaucracy) or algoritms, that the meaning is lost with repetitions. The goal is lost, the origin is lost. For that reason we speak A ZOMBIE LANGUAGE full of symbols but empty of meaning. Is bad when you never say “I love you” to your couple, but it is also bad to repeat it everyday-everytime. P-consciousness is associated to body states representation (self-problem) and A-consciousness is associated to mind state representations (world representation problem). Think about the original meaning of the word “house”, it is related to security. You can feel it, every night when you close with your house keys the main door before you go to sleep. But think now about the frequent use of this word in your conversation. Most of the time it is associated to things like price, status, locality… The original meaning is lost, probably it is not even in the dictionary, but it can be felt sometimes. But the language meaning or access consciousness is expanded or extended and probably biased. Feeling is our goal, our starting and end points (intention), thinking-language and actions are our bridge between feelings. The feelings evaluate the outputs of actions, language, memory, inner voice… with respect to our goals.

Karl Sipfle,

thanks for your condensed formulation: "The result is both information representation and complex feeling in one package, the full flower of what humans call Meaning"

Meaning has two aspects: the public one which reflects an communicable value and the subjective value which is privat and results out of subjective experience.

Both are merged to a very special feeling which represents the value of something for an individual.