Lately I've been wondering if 'meaning' is something that's out there in the universe, or it's something that's generated by our brains.
I once started thinking about that (somehow, reading some part of Dion Fortune's
Mystical Qabalah triggered it, I forget why or how).
I came up with the idea, a bit HHGTTG-esque, of a sofa floating in deep space. Regular deep space as we know it, the kind where there's no humans or intelligent life around for thousands of lightyears.
With no intelligence being around, this sofa is essentially just a weirdly-shaped clump of atoms. The whole "you can sit on it" meaning is for all intents and purposes not present.
There are indeed some Hofstadterish ways around this, if you're being real clever, you can encode the meaning in the object or message. Or at least, it really seems like you could do that. It's a bit hard to say if it were "true". But it requires all sorts of Goedel-y tricks and math, which *most* things we deal with in our lives, that we ascribe meaning to, do not employ.
So maybe it is possible to have "static" meaning without an intelligence generating it (MAYBE, because it's not really a clear cut argument). HOWEVER, it seems that MOST meaning around us, is generated in our brains and is not embedded in a real way. Like the sofa in my example.