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"The things that affect a living organism's functioning, and the responses it makes, cover a very broad range....Physicist Friedeman Kaiser notes, 'The type of the external stimulus is irrelevant...It is the information contained in the signal that is significant.'
Thus it is the information, the meaning encoded, within the perturbation, that is important, not the form in which it is delivered. The form is merely one possible language of communication out of myriad possibilities. In the end it is the meaning inside the behavior that is significant, not the behavior itself. It is not the chemical released, nor the movement of the body, nor the electromagnetic field that is important, but the information, the meaning, that it carries.
And for too long scientists have assumed there is no meaning in Nature. As a result, they have spent their time studying static, dead forms, when the communications of meaning themselves are the essential thing."
--Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature, pp. 43-44.
Thus it is the information, the meaning encoded, within the perturbation, that is important, not the form in which it is delivered. The form is merely one possible language of communication out of myriad possibilities. In the end it is the meaning inside the behavior that is significant, not the behavior itself. It is not the chemical released, nor the movement of the body, nor the electromagnetic field that is important, but the information, the meaning, that it carries.
And for too long scientists have assumed there is no meaning in Nature. As a result, they have spent their time studying static, dead forms, when the communications of meaning themselves are the essential thing."
--Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature, pp. 43-44.
So, I'd like to keep in the front of my mind the fact that my mind is not necessarily always an important player in the meaning-making. There's much going on on cellular and chemical and energetic levels (and more).* When this is looked at from a Big Timeline perspective (not exactly deep time, but the timeframe of Earth's livingness and on a planetary scale), the meaning will be expressing itself over centuries and across populations. I am but a singular biological cell in a larger living pattern. I shall keep from being surprised that I don't know the meaning of this particular perturbation.
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* Here's a theory - as @sdi pointed out in a private message, there's been observation of a state of acedia accompanying covid infection. Perhaps the meaningness that'll be played out will be a species-wide decrease in busy-body-ness, and in the kind of viral-mindset we call productivity. I admit that in a lot of ways this culture already looks listless, diffused, and wasted, but what if the viral changes modify our equally-present social compunction to manipulate the world and tally marks on spreadsheets as evidence of "doing something"? In the long run, natural systems might breathe a little sigh of relief if we can't "be bothered" to reignite the drive toward economic growth (not to mention the difficulty of doing that post resource draw-down). Anyway, this is pure speculation, don't trust it too far - it just points to some of the ways this two-plus-year experiment in viral spread and social upheaval might play out.
