Meaning subjective from "summary" of Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife
In the grand scheme of things, the concept of meaning is a rather slippery one. It's something that's hard to quantify, hard to pin down. After all, what does it really mean for something to have meaning? Is it a property of the words themselves, or does it lie in the minds of those who interpret those words? It turns out that the answer is a bit of both. In the world of information theory, meaning is a subjective thing. It doesn't reside in the words themselves, but rather in the minds of the people who read or hear those words. In other words, meaning is in the eye of the beholder. This might seem like a rather philosophical point, but it has some very practical implications for how we think about communication. Take the example of a book. The words on the page are just marks on paper; they don't inherently mean anything. It's only when a reader comes along and interprets those marks that they take on meaning. And here's the kicker: different readers might interpret those marks in different ways. What's meaningful to one person might be meaningless to another. This is why meaning is subjective. It's a function of the minds of the people who are doing the interpreting. This idea has some profound implications for our understanding of the universe. It means that information isn't some objective thing that exists independently of us. It's something that we create through our interpretations. In a very real sense, we are co-creators of the meaning that we find in the world around us. So the next time you pick up a book or watch a movie or listen to a song, remember that the meaning you find in it isn't something that's just sitting there waiting to be discovered. It's something that you bring to the table yourself. And that, in a nutshell, is what it means for meaning to be subjective.
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