The irreducible immateriality of meaning and its crucial role for artificial, human, and (maybe) non-human intelligence

Are there good reasons to believe that meaning is not reducible to any material object? Some new arguments in favor are discussed here, which do not depend on any previous specific theory, but only on factual evidence: we may disagree on how to explain the immaterial nature of meaning and therefore also of the process of thinking, or even recognize that we cannot explain them at all, but this is not a good reason to accept a reductionist explanation if it has proved inadequate. First, I will present a new version of the classical Gödelian argument aimed at proving that meaning cannot be fully formalized and, therefore, the human mind is not a computer. Then, I will argue, also by means of a little experiment, that, in a sense, not even a computer is a computer, since what we call “computation” is such only for a mind able to understand its meaning, and not in itself. Finally, I will try to explain why, paradoxically, it is precisely thanks to the immaterial nature of meaning that a material object like a computer can imitate human intelligence, at least to some extent, and perhaps human intelligence could one day communicate with some form of non-human intelligence (if any), as shown by some recent studies carried out in the field of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program that is currently carried out all over the world by means of radio telescopes.