Talk:Meaning/Archive 1

message: === Possible definition ===
What do you think about this definition:
Meaning is association between symbol and sense or idea.
=== Meaning and information ===
For some reason I did not find this page on my earlier trials.
I do not think that meaning and information are synonyms in the way it is put down in the article.
Information and meaning are similar to the extent that both need a recepient to attribute meaning/information to something that such a recepient is looking at for meaning/information.
Whether you find meaning/information in anything studied depends greatly on the structure and content of your own experience/knowledge, the amount of which may not be measured as easily as in a hardware in binary terms.
Man is an animal characterised by his state determined by various needs, one of which is looking for meaning almost everywhere. As a corollary to this condition man assumes that meaning lies behind the surface, and there is a hiden message of Nature out of the range of human perception. Hence the analysis of the world by intrusion and force using a constantly improving precision technology of targeting and shooting on anything with a promise of economic gain. 
Now meaning is most frequently attributed to verbal cues that are used to tag experience (mainly pictoral, or multi channeled in nature), words that are thus also devoid of context and details, except for the fragments that are mentally preserved by asociation, hoping that similar experience will be evoked in the listener on hearing such verbal cues and establishing thereby a seeming synchronisation of the focus of minds of the individuals.
Now in explaining the meaning of a word (verbal cues) by collecting them into a list for ease of reference/locating and placing in proximity other words that may be considered a recursion or another form of tagging of the same thing, one tries to reconstruct the original context of that verbal clue, the product of abstraction, and tries to reengineer the lost context that was not possible to share otherwise, but by abstracting (using a language).
Mental processes are pretty fast for us to pin down sequences of operations, but it appears that that you have intent first, preceeding formulasing your thought, then ample time to articulate what you can from your collection of experience tagged with verbal cues. Should you have experience that others do not share, or focus that is wider/narrower than what other people can handle you will have difficulties in communicating your thoughts, one of the most fearful experience of humans as a social being.
thread suspended for the time being Apogr 09:23, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old page 

message: For some reason I did not find this page on my earlier trials.
I do not think that meaning and information are synonyms in the way it is put down in the article.
Information and meaning are similar to the extent that both need a recepient to attribute meaning/information to something that such a recepient is looking at for meaning/information.
Whether you find meaning/information in anything studied depends greatly on the structure and content of your own experience/knowledge, the amount of which may not be measured as easily as in a hardware in binary terms.
Man is an animal characterised by his state determined by various needs, one of which is looking for meaning almost everywhere. As a corollary to this condition man assumes that meaning lies behind the surface, and there is a hiden message of Nature out of the range of human perception. Hence the analysis of the world by intrusion and force using a constantly improving precision technology of targeting and shooting on anything with a promise of economic gain. 
Now meaning is most frequently attributed to verbal cues that are used to tag experience (mainly pictoral, or multi channeled in nature), words that are thus also devoid of context and details, except for the fragments that are mentally preserved by asociation, hoping that similar experience will be evoked in the listener on hearing such verbal cues and establishing thereby a seeming synchronisation of the focus of minds of the individuals.
Now in explaining the meaning of a word (verbal cues) by collecting them into a list for ease of reference/locating and placing in proximity other words that may be considered a recursion or another form of tagging of the same thing, one tries to reconstruct the original context of that verbal clue, the product of abstraction, and tries to reengineer the lost context that was not possible to share otherwise, but by abstracting (using a language).
Mental processes are pretty fast for us to pin down sequences of operations, but it appears that that you have intent first, preceeding formulasing your thought, then ample time to articulate what you can from your collection of experience tagged with verbal cues. Should you have experience that others do not share, or focus that is wider/narrower than what other people can handle you will have difficulties in communicating your thoughts, one of the most fearful experience of humans as a social being.
thread suspended for the time being Apogr 09:23, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meaning and information 

message: Meaning of verbal expressions is subject to chunking, the process of finding the right delimiters in the string of verbal cues. When you do chunking, in fact, you divide the input in two: the left side of the function, and the right side of the function, which rewrites metaphorically as focus and domus, or the symbol that you want the meaning of, and the (immediate) context that you need to consider, but keep separate.
In contrast to disambiguation (which concerns homonyms only e.g. People Like Maria)
Chunking may take larger segments or chunks that should be interpreted as one (e.g. idioms, phrasal verbs, syntagmas, nominal phrases denoting one entity, etc.)
All that is a function of the orientation, size of the immediate memory of the observer and his mental facilities. If you speak two languages, you can read a string (word or longer stretches) once in language A, and another time in language B. This process may also be called as abstraction. 
In most cases we rely on visual input that is not sequential, a feature we display in thinking and remembering, all taking place in time, therefore has to be rearranged, simplified, condensed or compressed, and linked, i.e. abstracted in short to fit the working of our mind.
Thus context is essential for the understanding of meaning, yet there is no plausible theory or classification of context available for the time being. Obviously, context includes the mind of the reader or the listener as well so it is exposed to the interpretation of the interpreter (do you remember recursion?)
There are thousand examples of how chunking and context influence meaning, a very telling word indeed. The meaning of meaning suggests two noteworthy points: a) meaning as exposed in the word, text, etc. spoken, written, etc. and the meaning (see intent) of the  communicator, which is hidden, but may be inferred from various contextual clues.
In the current Western civilization the issue of meaning is very well consolidated in a commonplace scene of any western where there are two antagonists facing each other in a challenge. The rules are clear but paradoxical: the one who reaches for his pistol first is a paranoid, because he assumes that the other guy wants to kill him.
On the other hand, whoever shoots the other one is a psychopath, by the mere fact of killing another man. Since the two antagonists stand wide apart, normally it is impossible to make a fair judgment of what is happening and in what sequence. What is the conclusion? The conclusion is that meaning is also subject to the urgency of making a decision, the most likely moment when it is the same thing as information. In other situations whether you find meaning/information in anything studied depends greatly on the structure and content of your own experience/knowledge, the amount of which may not be measured as easily as in a hardware in binary terms.
 
In the above example the two antagonist are tube-sighted, and are not concerned with anything but the movement of their opponent. Information and meaning are similar to the extent that both need a recipient to attribute meaning/information to something that such a recipient is looking at for meaning/information.
Man is an animal characterized by his state determined by various needs, one of which is looking for meaning almost everywhere. As a corollary to this condition man assumes that meaning lies behind the surface, and there is a hidden message of Nature out of the range of human perception. Hence the analysis of the world by intrusion and force using a constantly improving precision technology of targeting and shooting on anything with a promise of economic gain. 
Now meaning is most frequently attributed to verbal cues that are used to tag experience (mainly pictorial, or multi channeled in nature), words that are thus also devoid of context and details, except for the fragments that are mentally preserved by association, hoping that similar experience will be evoked in the listener on hearing such verbal cues and establishing thereby a seeming synchronization of the focus of minds of the individuals.
Now in explaining the meaning of a word (verbal cues) by collecting them into a list for ease of reference/locating and placing in proximity other words that may be considered a recursion or another form of tagging of the same thing, one tries to reconstruct the original context of that verbal clue, the product of abstraction, and tries to reengineer the lost context that was not possible to share otherwise, but by abstracting (using a language).
Mental processes are pretty fast for us to pin down sequences of operations, but it appears that that you have intent first, preceding formulating your thought, then ample time to articulate what you can from your collection of experience tagged with verbal cues. Should you have experience that others do not share, or focus that is wider/narrower than what other people can handle you will have difficulties in communicating your thoughts, one of the most fearful experience of humans as a social being.
Note. I am to be blamed for all this garbage is, and I am ready to consider your points and advice.
Apogr 15:35, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Meaning of verbal expressions

message: :My comments:
Meaning is the result of chunking whereby the interpreter of the meaning perceiving a whole set of signals separates a seqence (chunk) that he/she finds meaningful (relavant to his/her existence (awareness of) - and complete (a whole) thus an input to be used for orientation.
:This is more-or-less fine.  A bit of general cleanup is required, but nothing major, provided you can provide references.  This isn't just something I want from you, I'm pushing fairly hard for as many references as possible in all Wikipedia articles.
In finding the meaning of/in verbal input chunking is done to arrive at the shortest/smallest meaningful unit of the string of symbols, which is conventionally called a word or a lexeme or a morpheme, yet it is not.
:"of/in", "shortest/smallest", etc. are perhaps not the most appropriate uses of language here.  I'd choose one or the other.  Also, "yet it is not"?  Yet what is not what?
::.. to arrive at the shortest meaningful unit (with a singel sense!!) (in terms of time available to chunk the input whether in writing or in audio) ... yet it is not a lexeme or a morpheme, because, they will then need to be disambiguated, which is not just sorting out homonyms, senses from n to z, but realizing and inferring from context that something is assumed to be known and felt redundant to put down, such as ... millions of examples....  
The main point is that in chunking one should be able to see simultaneously the whole and the chunk of the whole, just as in slicing bread, where you get a whole slice of bread, a chunk, yet a whole (a slice).
:Do you mean "a whole (a loaf)"?  Regardless, this is pretty good.
What I mean is that in defining meaning (an attempt to restore a picture, a whole) you work with two focuses and in toggle mode. You have something in focus and you have the context (domus). Or less metaphoric examples:
983745969374 is a number and you will probably not be able to remeber it, becasue you have nowhere t conncet it.
But if yu know that is my phone number, then you feel you got the picture, and may decide to record it , etc. Now 
Disambiguation is/should not be done just at word level (homonyms, senses) but longer streches, phrases, clusters until you arrive at an "alphabetic identifier" of some denoted entity.
:Again, "is/should not be".  In fact, this one is worse, as reads like a contradiction.  You may mean "is not/should not be", but that isn't clear from the text.  I'd just use "is not done", as an encyclopedia's place isn't to offer advice.
:: that's poor English: I meant to say "is not done" as you have infered illustrating my point, that one is looking for meaning and restires garbage. You will have known that scrambled (tipos) words are read out "prprly" and mutilated tapings are hear complete, etc..
Consequently, it is erroneous to make a (single) word to be the entry word/item or a unit of treaty of a dictionary and/or a lexicon, which is supposed to be a collection of knowledge associated with not words as lingustic units, but chunks of reality described.
:I'd argue for disinclusion of this paragraph, as again, an encyclopedia's place isn't to offer advice or cultural criticism.
This is a note to the editors, who are very much against anything but taxoboxing, despite the fact that the general reader may need a compass on such difficult issues, including thinking, a stub for over two years in wikipedia... you can see now why.
:: The Hungatrian author Mr. Kiefer on semantics and meaning has plenty of References (from all around the world) in is book, that did not help him by any inch to get closer to a defintiion.
 Apogr 05:52, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: All in all, this is much better than before - much more encyclopedic in style, and much more readable, also much more coherent and concise.  With references, I'd feel fine with its inclusion in a section in the article, though still not as the introduction.  -Seth Mahoney 20:35, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)
Introduction to meaning: two subjects: 
recursion and fractals - without them it amy be futile to see the woods behind the trees....
Apogr 06:34, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Meaning, revisited