(2021-10-26, 01:41 PM)Silence Wrote: I don't follow this. May be semantics, but "meaning" is inexorably tied to "consciousness". Without the latter, there is no former. So asserting that nature (presuming you mean the physical universe) is independently full of meaning just doesn't square for me.Thanks for pointing to a key point of departure from physicalism. In this viewpoint - there is both objective meaning and subjective meanings. Living things import information from their environments. If there is a predator lurking, the information is there modeling flow in the ecological picture, even if the living thing never sees it. This meaning is not mental juice in a brain - its real-world possibilities. The danger is/was real. The predator may have just learned something and is making a decision to lurk nearer in the future.
What would "meaning" be defined as if we weren't here (being anthropomorphic here)?
Minds change real-world probabilities.
Information in the environment - when detected is then mutual information with an agent.
As long as their is a possible exporting of data from a system - there maybe usable real-meaning, including in far off space.