Meaning is a means that has evolved into an end. Ends and goals are the results of possible actions that subjects imagine. The ability to set goals, that is, to imagine means and to choose between them, distinguishes humans from animals, which also use the environment as a means.

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 188).

The evolution of meanings began with the simplest actions and their results, such as the making of a chopper. The simplest chopper—a stone whose edge has been sharpened by chipping off fragments with another stone—is the result of the motions of a hominid. The sum of the motions forms a holistic action, the result of which is the chopper. A hominid, his instrumental action, and chopper itself are necessary for meaning to emerge. The moment when hominids began deliberately making choppers was also the moment when nature became their means and culture emerged. It is obvious that this “moment” is actually a bridge across time, and the spans of this bridge require further exploration.

Ants of the Attini family grow Basidiomycota fungi that process leaves they cut. The ants in turn feed on the protein-rich “ant kohlrabi” that grows on the fungi. Ants do not just use means, but engage in a whole “craft,” a kind of “agriculture.” However, the ants’ activities remain within the limits set by their genetic program. Their behavior changes only as their instincts evolve, and it cannot change through the inheritance of learning-based practices. Human behavior can change through practice: learning creates understanding, understanding creates choice. Unlike ants, humans imagine things before they act: “new technologies are constructed mentally before they are constructed physically” (Arthur 2011, p. 23).

Animals do not have ends or means, but they do have wants or needs. Need is the focus of a living being on something that does not exist. “In its primary biological forms, need is a state of the organism expressing its objective want for a complement that lies outside itself” (Leontiev 1971). Terence Deacon introduced the concept of “entention,” which can be considered a kind of generalization of the concept of “need.” Entention combines direction and lack, it is “a fundamental relationship to something absent” (Deacon 2013, p. 27). The object to which the need is directed is the motive.

“…Motives must be distinguished from conscious goals and intentions; motives ‘stand behind goals’ and stimulate the achievement of goals. If goals are not directly given in the situation, motives encourage goal formation. However, they do not generate goals, just as needs do not generate their objects” (Leontiev 1971).

Emotions are internal signals that reflect the relationship between motives and activities caused by motives. Alexey Leontiev reduced emotions to a reflection of meaning: “Emotional processes include a broad class of processes of internal regulation of activities. They perform this function by reflecting the meaning of the objects and situations that affect the subject, their significance for his life” (Leontiev 1971). It seems to us that this is not quite correct historically, because if meanings preceded emotions, then monkeys would be like robots, and we would now need to look not for a bridge from emotions to meanings, but for a bridge from meanings to emotions. In fact, meanings arose from emotions. Emotions still are a large part of the content of meanings, if only because they reflect processes in the body. “Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behavior patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.” (Denton et al. 2009). Meaning is a symbolization and mediation of emotions.

In humans, emotions, as one of the origins of meaning have gone beyond the instinctive response to signals: in the long evolutionary process of mediation, the emotional content of meanings has been partly rationalized so that meanings and emotions form a unity. Humans do not have meaningless emotions: they explain emotions in order to understand them. Meaning, in turn, has a certain emotional significance. This significance comes to the fore in values as meanings ordered by preference: Milton Rokeach called values “cognitive representations and transformations of needs” (Rokeach 1973, p. 20).

This understanding of values emphasizes their reflected and mediated nature. There is also another understanding that seeks to emphasize the continuity between the biological and the cultural in humans, according to which needs and values (as representations of needs) are not an exclusive feature of humans, but are inherent in all living beings: “Value is a more abstract category than organisms, since it is the one thing that all organisms pursue” (Frisina 2002, p. 217). Values are both subjective and objective phenomena: they are given to humans in their imagination and in their being. For the subject, the circumstances of the environment, things, events all appear as values: positive (goods or opportunities) or negative (evils or risks).

Human feelings—both direct perceptions and emotions as motive-oriented feelings—are always meaningful, they are to some extent abstract or mediated. Meanings, in turn, are to some extent sensory, they are always concrete or material. The dual nature of meaning as generalization and feeling is evident in etymology. We use the terms “meaning” and “sense” synonymously, since in Russian there is a word for both: smysl. The sensory and concrete side of smysl (sense) is indicated by its etymological origin in some European languages, where it is derived from “feeling.” The abstract and communicated side of smysl (meaning) becomes clear in Russian word smysl that is derived from “think,” “we send” (Chechulin 2011).

At the same time, motives and sociality are what distinguish meaning from mere information without sense and direction. The concept of information and the information science itself may have emerged when people began to view nature as a specific part of culture that has no agency or subject in itself.

Those motives, emotions and ideas that do not find expression in the results of an individual’s activities remain forever hidden in the depths of his mind. They do not exist for society and do not constitute meaning. They remain mental facts or mental processes that exist only for the subject of these motives, emotions and ideas. This is one extreme at which meaning disappears. The other extreme is when meaning degenerates into a dead result, detached from the society of people, their motives, emotions and ideas. In this case, it turns into a material abstraction and loses all meaning, becomes an empty artifact, an incomprehensible archaeological find. For example, any written symbol has meaning only when it is involved in human activities, that is, when it has a subjective side. Since the symbols of the Minoan Linear A script cannot be “involved” in our activities, in our context, they remain undeciphered.

Mental facts and artifacts are extreme points at which all meaning vanishes. They point to two fundamental properties of meaning: determinateness (certainty) and direction. Where one of these properties disappears, the meaning itself is lost.

Depending on the direction (towards things, people or ideas), three sides of meanings can be distinguished: (1) material action, or making; (2) social action, or communicating; (3) abstract action or thinking. The identification of these three directions in human culture is in itself the result of the accumulation of meanings, of cultural evolution. Each direction has its own function: making is translated into technology, communicating into organization, thinking into psychology.