A neurobiological interpretation of semiotics: meaning, representation, and information

they were buckets or placards. Meanings can only exist in brains, because each meaning expresses the entire history and experience of an individual. It is an activity pattern that occupies the entire available brain, constituting a location in the intentional structure of a brain. It is the limited sharing of meanings between brains for social purposes that requires reciprocal exchanges of representations, each presentation by a transmitting brain inducing the construction of new meaning in the receiving brain. EEG data indicate that neural patterns of meanings in each brain occur in trajectories of discrete steps, which are demarcated by first order state transitions that enable formation of spatiotemporal patterns of spatially coherent oscillations. Amplitude modulation is the mode of expressing meanings. These wave packets do not represent external objects; they embody and implement the meanings of objects for each individual, in terms of what they portend for the future of that individual, and what that individual should do with and about them. Abstract