Our Science / Meaning
Meaning is what the world is made of.
Reality has one thing in it, and that thing is light. Every event is light telling one thing from another. A meaning is nothing but how it differs from every other meaning, so meaning isn’t something minds add to the world. It is the world.
One thing: light.
Stars, stones and people are made of light. Newton split it into colours, Maxwell found it was a wave, and Einstein found it comes in pieces.
Each of them measured light. None of them asked what light means.
A meaning is its differences.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 defines about forty thousand words, and every definition is made of other words. Ferdinand de Saussure explained why: in language, there are only differences. A word means what it means because of how it differs from all the others.
Light means the same way. Starlight carries dark lines, and each line tells one element from another. The pattern of differences is the meaning, and the light carries it.
Nothing is erased.
Light keeps its record. Light that left its star long ago still carries that star’s lines, ready to be read. Every event stays in reality’s record for good.
You are the reader.
You are not your body. You are the light that reads the record. When the body dies, the reader carries on.
The first light was also the first meaning.