When a viewer interacts with a fashion picture, the significance that develops from this particular interaction is related to the viewer's ability to acknowledge, retain, and manipulate the information she receives from the picture. The meaning of information communicated by the picture exists as a virtual cache of shared, similar significances that are stored among a group of minds in thoughts and can be communicated as chains of words in conversation. Description can limit or open up ideas. Mathematics is a symbolic language; consistent symbolic description where all people agree on meanings and values of symbols and those meanings and values up to an individual user to decide.

Humans are conscious and able to attend to, perceive, and describe differences and similarities among elements of matter and/or energy. Thus, areas of information that exhibit unique attributes can emerge as distinctive entities in a person's mind. When it comes down to it, the thoughts a person holds in her mind are all the proof she has that the world exists as it does. So I believe it makes sense to consider what information, significance and meaning are in terms of generally accepted knowledge about human physiology, before considering how sigificance and meaning might exist in and relate to other systems. (This isn't exactly a new idea-- Singh came up with it too.) On the other hand... (find the thing from Godel, Escher Bach and put it here)

A person can develop unique conceptualizations about the information she receives by consciously examining her own personal observations, as well as the standards established by other people. If she does so, she may choose to describe what she observes or explain it to others using signs or symbols-- things like words, numbers, and pictures that can stand for the things she observes, and be used to manipulate and exchange information. A person can use words as conceptual tools to allow her to access areas of information. If she thinks of what the information delivered by a particular word (or string of words) stands for, she will be likely to think of information beyond what is delivered in that word by thinking of other possible definitions, or of other ideas and associate them with that word. Words, phrases, sentences and other descriptive tools like numbers and graphs can only, at best, approximate ideas-- an idea exists in its fullness in a person's mind; the thing an idea stands for (if it exists) exists in its fullness outside of a person's mind and ideas.

My mind created the descriptions of information, significance, meaning contained in this webpage. I formed generalized definitions of these terms from my own perceptions of the world, and perceptions communicated to me by the writings of other people. I believe that all definitions of how information exists and behaves in any system are based on human perceptions, conceptualizations, and descriptions of information. Any definitions and descriptions of information you might read in this webpage, or find elsewhere, are created from human conceptualizations of what information is. Generally, a description of a particular system, set of information, or representation causes a person interpreting that description to conceptualize what is being described in a fixed state, even though the thing described and/or its surroundings are always changing. Our conceptualizations and descriptions of stillness and motion affect how we interpret information, develop significance, and approximate meaning.

I see myself as part of the world around me. I do not think that what exists in my mind is the only universe that exists, even if it is the only universe I can know, and know imperfectly, for myself. Therefore, my viewpoint influences my descriptions of what exists outside of me. The accuracy of my descriptions, for practical purposes, depends on how they match up with established principles created and legitimated by others, an by whether they "work", or can be applied repeatedly in an experiment, or shown to exist in nature.

So this is the catch. If I am a part of something larger, I can be complete within myself, but not omniscient, because I am not capable of seing myself and everything outside of me and knowing how the individual parts exist speciically all at once. I always have a proverbial "blind spot". So nothing I say can be deemed perfectly legitimate, thre's always something missing if one is looking for absolute completeness, etc. I don't want to mix metaphors, but when I describe a particular system and exclude what exists outside of the system, and also discuss its qualities and properties then I describe an entity in a manner that is complete within itself; I may sacrifice a little accuracy for a lot of specificity.

No one person can create a self-contained system that perfectly describes how information, significance, and meaning exists or behaves. My descriptions of information, significance, meaning, and the systems that comprise them exist in language. They are created from ideas that came from my observations of the world around me as well as ideas communicated to me in in words by books and by other people.

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