Thinking and Meaning: Biological and Artificial

Thinking is widely agreed to be the most basic mental phenomenon that permeates all others across animals and machines. Its building blocks are unanimously taken to be ‘concepts’. This chapter demonstrates that the latter viewpoint is mistaken. The building blocks of both thinking and concepts are the notions of ‘meaningful neural formation’ for biological systems, and its generalisation of ‘meaningful material formation’ for all types of noémon systems. Following a succinct review of the major theories of meaning the chapter outlines a novel physical theory of thinking and meaning that is extended to include significant notions of both psychology and AI including ‘concept’, ‘idea’, ‘belief’, ‘information’ and ‘reasoning’. © Petros A. M. Gelepithis 2024.