The Secret Life of Meanings.

By idea we refer to some bio-electro action of the brain, then we associate a meaning to the idea which may be some observation in reality or some result of abstract thinking . In any case meanings are abstract constructions deposited in the memory the moment of their construction. But those meanings may also be put into dictionaries, written in the hard disc of some computer and included into data banks. This shows the time invariance of the meaning,we may recollect it at any moment,either from our memory or from one of the information carriers used. An abstract concept does not exist as an entity in space-time ,but we may see it as an ingredient of the abstract world we create first in our personal mind ,then in society by means of communication usually inputting it in some information system.

Sp meanings seem to be rather fixed ,however the meanings in the memory are not as invariant as we would think from the foregoing ,not only because of the properties of the memory and the well-known tricks it can play on you,but also because of some deeper properties of the meanings as conceived by us .First you can willingly change the meaning by a learning process and analysis of the meaning viewed like an object,hence defining ingredients and some relation expressing the construction of the meaning from the ingredients ,this may be a causal relation but it can be purely abstract logical too . Then you analyze it further by viewing the ingredients a sets of aspects related to the ingredients by properties abstractly constructed in the description of the meaning ,deforming the ingredient-relation to an aspect relation (which may have links in the opposite direction compared to the relation of the underlying ingredients ,this is where creativity and fantasy are involved (see blog on the learning process on Medium.). In the thus defined micro-process on the aspect level understanding is created whereas knowledge is on the level of the ingredient-process .Thus we consciously change the meaning this way . There is another way via society .Indeed once a meaning has entered the society it may change by transitions ,usually by linguistic pollution or by transfer to other areas of application ,like a technological term being used for other situations ,like temperature versus color-temperature or heat and a heated conversation . Thus changed meanings are recognized by each member of the society as new modified meanings but since the learning process on the modification is missing it will always be a more fuzzy meaning e.g; the heat from a fire is always understood correctly,the heat of a conversation is rather a matter of interpretation and personal evaluations influenced by the mood or the local situation.

Now we arrive at the meaning “changing itself” almost as a living thing . Well ,really it is us changing and growing ,expanding or reducing our brain capacities or the knowledge stored in the memory . Once defined a meaning may be kept unchanged in a dictionary for example but in our mind a meaning is in fact an interaction between our present self and our own history collected in the memory . But the memory is a tricky thing ,that is a first observation. Moreover, think of the meaning as a fixed linguistic expression,so its encoded form in words ,then when rereading it there may be differences in emotional contents or in gradations of intensity :heat may seem more attractive on an ice-cold day with strong gales than on an excursion in the Sahara. This means that a meaning automatically has side-kicks usually of the emotional kind and these vary rapidly with days going by. So we discover that a meaning goes deeper than just a definition ,in fact we do not know how deep it actually goes and to what feelings and other concepts it may connect in the future (or has been in the past) . In other words the embedding of a meaning ,even if formally invariant,in the total internal world of our mind including feelings,emotions, as ongoing processes is very important. This makes me think of algebraic geometry where one studies varieties as abstract objects but in practical application (even in theory at some level) the embedding in some affine or projective space is very important.The embedding of the meaning in the variable system of our mind-memory-emotions is unconscious , we cannot control that and even we cannot begin to analyse it ,there is just no “time” for that as the changing mind does not pauze .

We have to face it,the time invariant meanings we define are not experienced a really time invariant by us . We act as if they are time invariant usually because we are used to work with fuzzy definitions ,we do know that our attitude today may be different from yesterday’s and probably also from tomorrow’s . For example “forgiving” is a case of change of meaning of the aware type but combined with a change of meaning of the unaware type if the forgiving is real and changes our feelings towards a person drastically (which may lead to some surprise inside the forgiver and to non-understanding of the past attitude )

A formal person, a thinker according to rather fixed strategies ,may not recognize the fluidity of meanings in others ,to begin with not in himself. He will blame the (aware) attitude of the other for not sticking to the agreed meaning.A less principal or more flexible thinker may not associate a very big value to a fixed meaning,he may change meaning easily,both aware or unaware. The more flexible approach may seem more convenient but it means more doubtful conclusions and less “trustworthy” behavior . Perhaps calling the first a “scientific” thinker and the second a more “artistic” thinker is not well founded ,but it does give an idea of possible types of attitudes.

I once had a strange dream in which mathematical objects,like a group ,were connected to daily objects like bread .I thought a lot about the meaning of this dream and concluded that meanings in our memory are by construction of the memory linked to other meaning ,not necessarily by the content but just by some internal ordering in the memory . I imagined all meanings are in little drawers and the meaning in the next drawer may be unrelated logically but it is close in the memory! These ordering connections in the memory are unaware,they have no “meaning” but they may interact with any cognitive activity ,occasionally they may become aware. It is important in inter-human relations to realize this variability of supposedly non-varying concepts.

Conclusion. The ordered structure of the memory interacting with emotions and feelings while thinking about some meaning defines a process of variable embedding of the (supposedly invariant) meaning in our mind which results in an unaware shifting of meanings .

We may think of this as a secret “life” of meanings !