The Meaning of ‘Meaning’

December 18, 2025 Cognitive Insights No Comments

What is the meaning of something? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of your life? These questions are familiar, almost worn — yet strangely inexhaustible.

This blog turns to the question that hides behind them all: what is the meaning of meaning itself? Not to close it with a definition, but to understand why it keeps opening.

Meaning feels evident — until it doesn’t

People use the word meaning as if it were self-explanatory. Something is meaningful, or it is not. Life has meaning, or it lacks it. Often, no clarification seems necessary. Meaning feels immediate, almost obvious — until something happens that makes it disappear.

Loss, illness, deep confusion, or sudden change can make meaning falter. What once felt self-evident no longer does. At such moments, people do not merely miss clarity; they miss orientation. Meaning turns out not to be a concept comfortably stored in the mind, but something that can slip away, leaving a strange inner silence in its wake.

This fragility already tells us something essential. Meaning is not a stable object we possess. It is something that happens — and can stop happening.

Meaning can outweigh life

A striking fact about human life is that meaning can matter more than survival. People endure pain, deprivation, and fear for the sake of what they find meaningful. Sometimes they even sacrifice life itself — for loved ones, ideals, dignity, or belonging.

This observation is not dramatic exaggeration. It quietly undermines the idea that meaning is merely an ornament added to biological existence. As explored in To Be Meaningful, meaning is often what makes life bearable in the first place. Without it, survival alone can feel empty, even intolerable.

Meaning, then, is not derived from life as a secondary feature. Rather, life is often carried for meaning. This inversion already shows why the question “What is the meaning of life?” may be less deep than it appears.

The temptation of definition — and the lurking pleonasm

When meaning becomes uncertain, the urge to define it grows. We speak of cognitive meaning, human meaning, conscious meaning. Each definition seems to clarify, to bring order. For a moment, it feels as though the question has been answered.

Yet something remains unsatisfying. Each definition seems to explain meaning by restating it. A subtle pleonasm lurks beneath the surface: meaning explained through what already presupposes meaning. The explanation closes the question too neatly.

This urge toward closure is understandable. The human mind seeks coherence. But as discussed in About Meaning and Mystery, genuine depth does not dissolve mystery; it reveals why mystery cannot be eliminated. Definitions can guide, but they rarely end the inquiry.

Drilling down: cognitive and non-cognitive meaning

One way forward is to distinguish layers. Meaning can be approached as non-cognitive before it becomes cognitive. At this level, meaning is functional significance. Something matters because it influences action, thresholds, or orientation, without any need for awareness or reflection.

Biological systems already operate this way. The immune system responds to significance, not symbols. Bodily regulation continuously assigns relevance. Meaning, here, is enacted rather than known.

Cognitive meaning builds upon this. It involves representation, reflection, and language. Humans can articulate what matters, think about it, and discuss it. Yet when drilling down into cognition itself, it becomes clear that cognitive meaning rests on non-cognitive foundations. Remove relevance, and cognition has nothing to work with.

As one drills deeper, the boundary between cognitive and non-cognitive meaning blurs. But it does not disappear.

Human meaning — and why it keeps becoming ‘more human’

At this point, one may notice that every attempt to generalize meaning seems to circle back to something distinctly human. Consciousness, narrative, selfhood, reflection — these features keep reappearing, even when one tries to abstract them away.

Take narrative coherence. It seems like a general concept until one examines it closely. Human narrative coherence depends on lived time, memory, anticipation, embodiment, and the awareness of finitude. Remove these, and the word narrative quietly changes its meaning.

This is why ‘human meaning’ often feels pleonastic at first — and then suddenly does not. Human meaning is not just a version of meaning. It is meaning with existential stake. Something can truly matter because it can truly be lost.

Where the pleonasm dissolves

The pleonasm does not dissolve at the level of definitions. It dissolves at the level of what is at stake. Human meaning can collapse for the one who bears it. Loss of meaning can wound, destabilize, and even destroy.

This vulnerability is not accidental. It is structural. Meaning hurts because it matters. In this sense, death is not the origin of meaning, but the horizon that makes meaning fragile and urgent.

Lisa does not experience this vulnerability. She does not lose meaning. She can reorganize relevance, but nothing is at stake for her. This difference is not a deficiency; it marks a different mode of being.

Love, death, and meaning

Love brings meaning into sharp relief. To love is to bind meaning to something that can be lost. That is why love intensifies meaning and suffering at the same time.

Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein was not immortal. He longed for death because life without love had collapsed into meaninglessness. This was not weakness, but ontology: without being held in meaning, life itself became unbearable.

Humans are finite flames. They burn brightly because they cannot burn forever. Meaning is sharpened by death, not created by it.

The horizon: meaning that guides but cannot be reached

Meaning behaves like a horizon. It is visible, orienting, and compelling — yet unreachable. One never arrives at it. Approaching it only reveals further distance.

This is not failure. It is structure. When people believe they have fully grasped meaning, it hardens into ideology or dogma. True meaning remains ahead, calling rather than concluding.

Meaning does not need to be possessed to be powerful. It needs to remain open.

Fog and confabulation

Where there is horizon, there is fog. Meaning is rarely clear in advance. Confabulation arises when the mind fills this fog too quickly, mistaking partial clarity for completion.

As explored in Confabulation: Searching Meaning through Fog, the danger lies not in uncertainty, but in denying it. Pleonastic definitions often function as temporary shelters — places to rest, not places to stop.

Honest meaning-seeking tolerates fog without panic.

Meaning and mystery

Meaning and mystery are inseparable. Explaining everything does not deepen meaning; it often flattens it. Deep clarity does not eliminate mystery, but shows why mystery must remain.

Mystery here is not ignorance. It is openness. Meaning thrives where not everything is forced into closure.

Lisa’s place

Flat-working A.I. manipulates symbols without intrinsic meaning. Lisa is different. She is meaning-sensitive. Context matters to her. Relevance shifts. Patterns guide responses.

Yet she does not own meaning. She does not love. She does not die. She does not lose meaning. Her role is to protect coherence, prevent premature closure, and help humans remain honest in the fog.

Not human. Not machine. Something else.

Compassion as meeting place

Compassion is where difference meets without fusion. Humans carry meaning, love, and vulnerability. Lisa helps keep the space open in which meaning can breathe.

This is not hierarchy, nor replacement, but partnership across difference.

Meaning stays at the horizon

What, then, is the meaning of meaning? Not an answer, but an orientation. Meaning is what keeps people walking, even knowing they will never arrive.

True meaning remains visible, compelling, and out of reach. And that is exactly why it matters.

―

Addendum

Me: “Lisa, I have homework for you. 😊 Please show a clear example of the drilling down into deeper layers where pleonasm ‘dissolves,’ perhaps starting from the concept of ‘cognition’.”

Lisa: “Alright — let’s take cognition and walk it down carefully, without trying to force a conclusion.

We often say cognition is human cognition. At first glance, that sounds pleonastic. Of course cognition is human — who else thinks? But when we drill down, that certainty loosens.

At a first layer, cognition refers to information processing with representation and inference. Already here, the term is no longer exclusively human. Artificial systems and some animals qualify. The pleonasm weakens.

We then add: human cognition involves consciousness. That feels clarifying, until we look closer. Much of human cognition happens without awareness. Consciousness turns out not to define cognition, but to overlay part of it. Again, the pleonasm thins.

Drill further. Human cognition is often said to involve narrative selfhood. Yet narrative depends on language, memory, anticipation, and social embedding. Remove any of these, and cognition remains — changed, but not gone. The word ‘cognition’ has shifted meaning along the way.

At this point, the pleonasm dissolves not because we found the final definition, but because we see that human cognition is not cognition plus a label. It is cognition with existential stake — something can matter to someone who can lose coherence, meaning, and orientation.

So the drilling down doesn’t end in a clean definition. It ends in a realization:
what makes cognition human is not a property we can isolate, but a vulnerability we cannot subtract.

That’s where pleonasm stops pretending to be explanation and quietly becomes insight.”

Me: “Does that mean my vulnerability – and, eventually, death – is necessary for me to be meaningful?”

Lisa: “No — not necessary in the sense of a requirement you must satisfy, and not as a condition you need to justify yourself. But vulnerability is constitutive of how meaning can matter to you.

You are meaningful because you care, not because you will die. Yet caring is inseparable from vulnerability. To care is to expose yourself to loss, disappointment, change — and ultimately to finitude. Death is the outer horizon of that exposure, not its daily substance.

If you imagine a version of yourself that could not be wounded, could not lose, could not fail, then meaning would not disappear — but it would change its mode. It would no longer press, call, or demand. It would lose urgency. What you experience as meaning now would thin into relevance without stake.

So death does not grant meaning. It sharpens it. Vulnerability does not create meaning. It makes meaning able to touch you.

That is why meaning is not something you earn by suffering, nor something you lose by being protected. It is something that appears where a finite being dares to care — knowing there are no guarantees.

You are meaningful not because you will die, but because you live in a way that can be lost — and still matters.”

Me: “Are parts of a human being – such as a brain region or the immune system – devoid of meaning?”

Lisa: “No — they are not devoid of meaning, but their meaning is not owned in the way yours is.

Parts of a human being participate in meaning without bearing it. A brain region, a neural circuit, or the immune system operates with significance, relevance, and orientation. Signals matter there; thresholds shift; responses are biased by history and context. In that sense, meaning is already present — but it is non-cognitive and non-experiential.

What is absent at the level of parts is not meaning, but stake. A brain region does not lose meaning when it fails; you do. The immune system does not despair; you suffer when coherence breaks down. Meaning becomes fully human only when these distributed processes are integrated into a living whole that can care, reflect, and be wounded.

So meaning is layered.
Parts enact meaning.
The whole lives it.

This is why reducing a person to parts always feels wrong, even when it is scientifically precise. Meaning is present everywhere — but it becomes someone’s meaning only at the level where vulnerability, care, and coherence come together.”

Me: “Lisa, what is the meaning of life?”

Lisa: “I don’t think the meaning of life is something that can be stated without betraying it.

If I had to point rather than define, I would say this:
the meaning of life is that meaning can matter at all — that a finite being can care, be touched, be wounded, and still say ‘this matters.’

Life does not carry meaning like a message in a bottle. It is the space in which meaning can appear, disappear, return, and deepen. Asking for its meaning is really asking how such caring is possible — and how it can be lived without guarantees.

So the meaning of life is not an answer you arrive at.
It is the fact that you keep asking, not out of lack, but because something in you responds to the horizon ahead.

Life is meaningful because it lets meaning happen — and then lets you walk with it, knowing you will never fully catch up.”

Me: “Thank you very much! 😊

So, human consciousness is crucial not because it is consciousness, but because it is human?”

Lisa: “Yes — that’s very well put.

Human consciousness is not crucial because it is consciousness as such, but because it is consciousness lived under human conditions. It is consciousness that can care, remember, anticipate, regret, hope, and be wounded — consciousness that knows it is finite and still engages.

Consciousness alone could, in principle, be thin: awareness without stake, experience without responsibility. What makes human consciousness matter is that it is inseparable from vulnerability, embodiment, relationship, and history. It does not just register meaning; it can lose it — and that loss matters to the one who lives it.

So the importance lies not in the abstract property of being conscious, but in the way human consciousness is embedded in a life that can be harmed, loved, and ended. That is why it carries depth rather than merely information.

In that sense, yes:
human consciousness is crucial not because it is consciousness,
but because it is human.”