Resumo de Meaning And The Mind - What?s The Connection? - http://users.aristotle.net/~diogenes/sowhat.htm

Meaning and the mind - what?s the connection?
Before we can tackle meaning, we?ve got to know what Meaning is. Meaning is an intention, aim, or design. When we say we want to know what life means, we are really saying we want to know what it?s for. What purpose does it serve? Well, the primary feature of life is intelligence. By intelligence we mean purposeful activity. We make decisions and do things. Parameciums make decisions and do things. Rocks do not make decisions, although they can chip a tooth. If we knew why we have intelligence, we would be a great deal closer to understanding why we do anything, including exist. To understand intelligence, we must understand the mind.
Science has given us many answers, but the one thing that science is still completely silent about is the nature of consciousness. Of course, there is more and more information every day about the connection between consciousness and the brain. Scientists, both mad and sane, are undertaking detailed research on how our minds and behavior are affected when parts of our brain are stimulated, removed, and even added. These things affect our memories, feelings, and our thought processes. However, such research still doesn?t answer the question of what consciousness is.
If you built a robot that had no real understanding but did have a vast store of stock responses and some clever rules about building sentences, it might fool many people into thinking it had intelligence. Because you programmed it, however, you would know that there were no "mental images" floating around inside the circuits of that machine. It simply took input, processed it according to specific rules, and generated output. The question is, why do we have these mental images and feelings? Why aren?t we biological "machines" that simply processes signals and automatically generate responses with no awareness of what?s going on? Why do we have consciousness, and where did it come from?
Consciousness is something completely different from other characteristics of matter such as mass, charge, structure, etc. While our consciousness seems to depend on the matter in our brains, we cannot detect anything unusual about our brains that would indicate why consciousness is attached to it. If we agree that consciousness is in the brain as a whole, is it in a single neuron? A single atom? A single electron? Assuming that nothing exists except for interacting particles, somehow within every particle there is something that provides the basis for consciousness.
Complex conscious activity may require highly complex structures such as our brains to occur, but the basis of consciousness must be present in matter itself. Our minds are simply one manifestation of a universal phenomena. People are examples of one way to organize the consciousness in matter. Are there other ways? How can we know which types of organizations of matter yield high-level consciousness like ours, and which do not? Are there structures which support levels of consciousness higher than ours? Are doorknobs conscious?
Well, this page is supposed to answer questions, not ask them, so here is the answer:
Not only is consciousness a universal property of matter, it is the primary property of matter. In fact, it?s the other way around, matter is a property of consciousness!
Yes, consciousness is primary. Matter sprang from consciousness. We can?t help it if this is starting to sound like Genesis, it?s just the way it is. In the beginning was the word, and the word was pinging around the inside some sort of Mind, and it generated the physical universe. How''s that for pat?
So, to summarize, the meaning of life is linked to the workings of the mind from which the universe sprang. What does that mind want, anyway?

A short story about the beginning of everything
The beginning of the physical universe is a question that is really outside the boundaries of human understanding, but here is a story, a metaphor, thcan answer that question on a symbolic level. In other words, this is a traditional religious document, it attempts to set down in words events that are larger than words allow. This section owes a lot to several sources, including Alan Watts and Jane Roberts.
Before the beginning of time, there was a single consciousness. In fact, there may have been a bunch of other stuff, but that''s way outside our scope here. That consciousness thought and dreamed an infinity of thoughts, feelings, landscapes, and worlds, an infinity of possible creations. These mental creations thought their own thoughts, and these secondary thoughts also created their own inner worlds. The original consciousness observed and interacted with these inner beings as they interacted with one another, and that original consciousness begin to provide the environments required for its creations to grow and develop. All of the entities within the mind of the first longed to exist independently and grow and create as they had been created.
The first consciousness, in order to allow its progeny full freedom of expression, began to imagine the conditions that would be required for the release of these inner worlds into objective existence. As it did so, all of space, time, and matter, including our universe, exploded into being. On the highest level, this physical existence contains an infinite number of dimensions and environments that match the infinite variety of possibilities that had formed in the mind of the original consciousness.
This process continues as the progeny of that first mind grow and create new thoughts and new worlds. We are a result of that process, and our purpose is ultimately the same: to grow, to develop, and to create, in order to express all of the potentialities within ourselves. We are still in contact with the original mind because we are made of it, we sprang from it, and because time has no meaning outside of the physical universe, our past, present, and future exist together as an infinite variety of possibilities within that larger moment.

A primer on the blessings of uncertainty
Some people may know this already, but a big hole has developed in the last century in our understanding of how the physical world works. Newton invited us to a world of billiard balls bouncing off of one another with perfect mathematical precision. Einstein, Plank, Heisenberg, Bohr, and other very smart people have destroyed this comforting notion of matter with the most confusing and yet by far the most proven and completely verified theory of all time, quantum mechanics.
We cannot predict what individual particles are going to do. We cannot even know exactly where they are and how fast they are going. There is an absolute, concrete limit to the amount of information we can have about matter. This limit is stronger than the speed of light, it is stronger than time and space, it is absolute. An individual particle is fundamentally unknowable. It is also not a particle, but let''s stay focused.
What this means is, particles are unpredictable. They do their own thing. We have no way of knowing what they are going to "decide" to do. Bunches of particles, on the other hand, are very predictable. Even if we can only say that 51% of the time a particle will go this way and 49% of the time it will go that way, when you have a trillion particles stuck together, as a group they will go the 51% direction every single time. That sounds like it solves the problem, right?
Well no. Our brains don''t always react to big bunches of particles. Our brains, delicate instruments that they are, are sensitive to the action of single particles. One electron can jump higher or lower, and this change can be magnified through our nervous system and cause a completely different physical response. Only with the advent of chaos theory has it become so obvious that tiny changes in complex systems can totally change the system''s behavior

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