Warning: There is this known phenomenon where, when certain words are repeated over and over, they cease to have any meaning and simply become odd sounds. If such a thing occurs in what is to follow, it is recommended to step away for a while until meaning returns.

I’d like to start out by asking a simple question. The reasons why will come up later, but I think the question in and of itself is interesting. The question is this:

What does the word “mean” mean?

Now, I know there are probably any number of people out there (like me) who will immediately point out that the word “mean” can have many different meanings. I’m really interested in the meaning of “mean” that has to do with meaning, though, not with with things like mathematical averages or people who aren’t very nice. So let’s restate the question in a way that is perhaps a bit more mind-bending but hopefully more precise:

What does the last word in this question mean?

Perhaps you are able to come up with a definitive answer immediately and can spit out verbatim a dictionary definition of the word “mean”. Perhaps you could come up with something after a bit of thought. Perhaps you weren’t able to come up with an answer at all. If I can be honest, I was a bit in that last camp myself.

Here is the thing, though: even if you had a tricky time coming up with an answer – or, in fact, couldn’t work up any answer – you still knew what the question was asking. It’s actually a fairly straightforward and common thing to do, to ask what words mean. This means that

even though you couldn’t come up with an answer in words to what “mean” means, you knew what it meant anyway. You just couldn’t express it using other words.

You understood the question, even though you couldn’t actually answer it, even though it was talking about a part of itself, which was something you understood.

Mind buzzing yet?

This raises something I realized at some point, which is that the meaning that we assign to words is not necessarily what is given in dictionary definitions. We typically don’t learn words by looking up their definition. I know that, personally, the vast majority of words I know I learned implicitly, through hearing or seeing them used in context. I know what those words mean, even if I can’t give you a dictionary definition of them. The word itself is how I describe that meaning. Maybe someone can give you its meaning in different words, but that doesn’t change the fact that I use that word to convey that meaning that I intend, because that is the word I use for its meaning.

Sometimes I will go look up a word that I have been using for a while (perhaps a long time) when it suddenly occurs to me that I may have been using it incorrectly all that time. What’s interesting is that usually my internalized meaning of the word agrees to a great extent with what the dictionary definition says, even though I never looked up the word before or had it explained to me in words. I was able to pick up on its meaning contextually.

Let’s add something else into the mix:

What is the meaning of the word “meaning”?

I don’t expect you to work up that one yourself. That one feels even deeper, and when I went to look up its dictionary definition, I discovered there were aspects to it that hadn’t made it into the sort of implicitly derived meaning I had assigned to it. The first definition I came across was this:

what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.

Ok, well that’s not very useful. It relies on the word “meant”, which is tied up in “meaning” anyway. It’s sort of self-referencing. (More on that sort of thing later as well.)

So I found another, more interesting definition:

the thing one intends to convey especially by language

There are other variants of that that expand more, noting it might not be language as such. You could be using signs, symbols, sounds, gestures, or anything else that communicates.

What I find interesting about this is the “intends to convey” part – we have this thing inside us that we want to communicate to someone else, and we do that with words, gestures, etc. What that implies is that the words themselves are not the meaning. The words are a mechanism for conveying meaning, but they aren’t the meaning themselves.

Ironically, the answer to our question brings us back to the question: if meaning is this thing inside us that we wish to convey, and the words or whatever are just a means to do that, what the hell is meaning to begin with? It is what we intend to convey, but what does that actually mean? What is it that we translate into words or gestures or inarticulate sounds?

One answer might be that the words themselves are the meaning. There are any number of people out there who think that we think in words. I don’t know about them, but I certainly don’t, at least not in the serial, one-word-after-another fashion that I experience when reading or speaking. My brain makes connections much more quickly than that, wordlessly. And, for example, when I’m having a conversation with someone, as I’m listening to them speak, what I want to say next will come to me suddenly, in an instant, before I ever formulate words either out loud or in my mind. I know what I’m going to say, on some level, before I say it.

If you assume that words themselves are their meaning, then you run into an interesting problem: when you try to get to the heart of the meaning of any particular word (excluding for the moment tangible items, which you can sort of point to and say, “that”), you end up in this sort of circular regress: this word is defined by those words, but then what defines those words, and it’s other words which are then defined in terms of more words, or the same words, and it goes on and on. You never get anywhere. There is no foundation. It never bottoms out. You would need to have foundational or simpler words that the other build on… but then what defines their meaning?

And I think it’s born out in normal life: we don’t have an internal dictionary definition for all the words we use. We assign meaning to words and use those words to convey that meaning, but we don’t necessarily have to have, on hand, a knowledge of other words that we can use to express the same thing.

I wish that I could go back to before I knew any words, and to experience what it’s like to not only learn new words but new meanings… if that’s even the right word for what I mean. I don’t mean simply new arrangements of existing ideas. I mean learning something entirely new.

I recently subscribed to one of those “word a day” websites, because I thought it would be interesting to see what I could learn. Unfortunately, the first week was “portmanteau” week (where a portmanteau is a word blending together parts of other words, like “brunch” or “motel”), so it was just combining existing concepts into a new word. Nothing earth-shattering there. Later one of the words offered was “proparoxytone”. A rather imposing word. But it just means “Having stress on the third-from-the-last syllable.” Ok, so somebody made up a word for that. But that’s not really a new idea; it’s more a combining and refining of an existing idea. Words have syllables, syllables have accents, and we know how to count: combine them a bit. Nothing mind-expanding there.

But there was a time when I hadn’t heard the word “mean” before or even had an idea about what it meant. There was a time when I hadn’t encountered “love” or “justice”. We start off easy with things like “apple” and “block” and “hungry” and “mama, I believe I have soiled myself.” Those are tangible things, where we can know what someone means by the word, because it’s something right there, in the real world. Somehow, though, we pick up on more abstract ideas, and all just through context, by taking in how other people use them.

I wonder if we accumulate actual low-level meanings like that, or whether somehow – like language syntax – we have meanings built into our brains, just waiting for words to come along for us to make the connection and learn how to express. Ah, to go back in time, and undo all I know (except this question, of course)…

So why am I going into this? Meaning is something I have pondered often in my work as a computer programmer.

First, we can leverage a computer for anything that we can express in a way such that the computer can act on it. And I have wanted to create games or simulations with characters that could interact with the player, the virtual world within which they live, and each other. I wanted them to have conversations, to gossip, to pass knowledge around. But how do you represent that? How do you encode “meaning” in a computer? At least, can you do so in a (for lack of a better word) meaningful way?

I could simply dump a dictionary into the computer’s data structures. That would be all the words I know and a lot I don’t. But the words aren’t the meanings… Even if the computer could cross reference words with other words to try to come up with definitions, all the words just point to all the other words.

Meaning lies elsewhere.

Even knowing how to construct sentences… you not only have to know what words mean but also what role they play in sentences. All of this is wildly beyond my ability to comprehend.

(Google’s recent LaMDA AI chatbot raises an interesting issue. By using these incredibly large neural nets that train themselves, we may eventually have created consciousness and intelligence without understanding at all what consciousness and intelligence actually are. Buried in the mass of connections… And how will we know if a bit of software actually truly understands the real meaning of something? The “Chinese Room” thought experiment goes into that in an interesting way.)

The other aspect of meaning for me a computer programmer is a bit more down-to-earth: as someone writing code that others will want and need to understand, how do I express the ideas I have in my head in code in such a way that both the computer does well with them and a human being will be able to understand them? We often get hung up on syntactic or structural aspects of the code. Apart from the difficulty in naming things (and except for those times when someone just comes right out and says “this is confusing” or “I don’t get what’s going on), we don’t really emphasize meaning much, at least not in any sort of strong way. We generally want the code to be understandable, but we have very little that guides us in terms of making the code meaningful (in a comprehension sense, not a “higher purpose” sense), in terms of being able to effectively express what we intend to express.

And that, after all, is what meaning is.

So, I’ll continue to explore the idea of “meaning”. I may never get anywhere. It does have the advantage, though, of being something that’s going on inside me in a personal way, which is always a nice property to have.

(Post thought: I’m really interested in the idea about whether there can be new ideas or concepts to learn, on a fundamental level, for someone who is my age. Not repurposing or restructuring or refinement of existing ideas, but entirely new concepts, as we encountered when we were those “blank slate” babies. I’d be very happy to entertain any ideas people have about this. I suspect if so, it will be realms like mathematics, philosophy or something else that involves things existing in the mindscape.)