It seems to me that person could have quite a high level of integration between their goals, but at the same time could experience quite low meaning in their life.

Hmm, yeah I think you have convinced me the current frame is insufficient.

Some further musings... (epistemic status: who knows?)

Seems like there's at least a few things going on

1.  alignment-of-purposes, and a sense of "I'm doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing." 
2. "the thing I'm doing here matters, somehow."
3. "I feel vibrant / excited about the things I'm doing."

Number 2 I am perhaps most confused about. Will come back to that in a sec.

Number 3 seems to decompose into "why would you build a robot that had vibrance/excitement, or emotions in general." I don't think I can give a technical answer here that I clearly understand, but I have a vague fuzzy model of "emotions are what feedback loops feel like from the inside when the feedback loops are constructed some-particular-way." I don't know what-particular-way the feedback loops need to be constructed as to generate the internal feeling of vibrance/excitement, but... I feel sort of okay about that level of mysteriousness. It feels like a blank spot in my map, but not a confusing blank spot in my map.

I suspect if we built a robot on purpose, we'd ideally want to do it without the particular kind of feedback-loops/emotions that humans have. But, if I'm dumb ol' evolution building robots however I can without the ability to think more than one-generation-ahead... I can imagine building some things with emotions, one of which is some kind of vibrance, excitement, enthusiasm, etc. And then when that organism ends up having to build high level strategic planning in confusing domains, the architecture for those emotions-and-corresponding-qualia ends up being one of the building blocks that the meaningmaking process gets constructed out of.

...

returning to #2:  

So one thing that comes up in the OP is that humans don't just have to fill in an ontology beneath a clear-cut goal. They also have multiple goals, and have to navigate between them. As they fill in their ontology that connects their various goals, they have to guess at how to construct the high level goals that subgoals nest under.

StarCraftBot has to check "does this matter, or not?" for various actions like "plan an attack, establish a new base, etc." But it has a clear ultimate goal that unambiguously matters a particular way, which it probably wouldn't be necessary to have complex emotions about.

But for us, "what is the higher level goal? Do we have a thing that matters or not?" is something we're more fundamentally confused about, and having a barometer for "have we figured out if we're doing things that matter" is more actually useful.

Maybe. idk.

Tl;Dr: the last 2 paragraphs asks a question.

As I'm of the belief that it's only in hindsight, as a sentient human looking back at a theoretical bacterium and it's genes and formulating human meaning, that the gene has meaning, I'd like to offer an alternative word to consider which might make things easier in some ways.  

This couple of sentences: "Consider a gene in an ancient bacterium, in a time before there were any other kinds of cell...this gene still meant something. But what exactly? The protein perhaps?"

What if we changed it slightly to this: "Consider a gene in an ancient bacterium, in a time before there were any other kinds of cell...this gene mattered. But why? A specific protein perhaps?"

A word that often gets substituted as a synonym for "meaning" is "mattering", as in "Don't I mean anything to you?" or "Don't I matter to you?" Logically speaking, as I advocate for real literal interpretations of things at times like this, if "Meaning" requires sentience to make/understand/perceive it (which I believe it does), "Mattering" doesn't, if you take the idea of "Mattering" as very literal. 

For instance, the reason the hypothetical Apple that fell off the tree and onto Newton's head, didn't fall right through Newton to the ground, is because the Matter that Newton was made of interfered with the Matter the Apple was made of and diverted it's path after colliding with it. In a very real sense, the Apple mattered to Newtons head.

It didn't 'mean' anything to the Apple, or to the physical matter of Newton's head, but as a sentient observer, it meant something to Newton and now to us as we think about it. I've found that this switch works really well in terms of thinking about all kinds of other phenomenon, and it was really my departure from Facebook several years back that caused my thinking along these lines.

Like many people I've struggled with the complications of social media and feeling 'less than' other people, who all seem to have better lives than mine. I think digital media in general amplifies this sense of alienation many people feel as they spend more and more time with social media instead of face to face interactions. 

I was wondering why I felt so bad so often, and didn't really feel all that close to my friends anymore. As I thought about it and wrote about it, I discovered this switch in my thinking when I used different words for my experiences. I found that I still 'cared' about these people, that I often thought about them, and that they still meant something to me, but in a very literal sense they 'Mattered' very little to me. I used to take martial arts with some of them, but had stopped training and so my physical Matter no longer collided with their physical Matter when we grappled or punched and kicked each other, the vibrations of the air which the sound of their voices caused which reverberated in my ears was non existant now as we didn't talk, and the amount of light that bounced off of them and into my eyes was confined to tiny photos or videos on their profiles. 

In every sense of the word, their Matter was no longer in my life in a way that they "Mattered" very much, although the memories and our correspondence still meant something to me. I still cared, but they were no longer physically present in my life. 

It works in many ways to think about why things matter, and it helps separate out animate from inanimate object relationships, but also to understand how we use inanimate objects as proxies for real physical presence. I might mean a lot to the woman of my dreams, but if I don't matter enough to her, the meaning I have to her is of a particular type, and very possibly platonic. If we matter to each other, if we touch and talk, smell each other and send cards, flowers and love notes to each other, then it is the physical touch which 'matters', not the thoughts, hopes or dreams. Those mean something. The mattering has meaning, but meaning matters very little I think.

On the other hand, if I dislike Bob just a bit, I don't really want to matter to him, so I evade him, don't shake his hand or pat him on the back, and don't give him a birthday card on his birthday. If it becomes the case though that he makes me mad enough, I might decide to punch him, therefore 'mattering' to him. My physical form interacts with his physical form in a way that carries meaning to his conscious mind.

It also explains why we become attached to our possessions; a car we drive every day for years might matter more to us than the girlfriend we've been involved with for a few months, even though we might care more about the girlfriend in many important ways, she might mean more to us, but the car matters more. The favorite shirt we've had for 10 years has mattered to us for that long, so that when it gets a hole in it, it's difficult to throw out, and we don't want to part with it. The things that matter most to us I believe are people, places, and things, while the things which mean the most are our concepts of them. 

Can things which matter to us not mean anything to us? I think so. The sidewalks, telephone poles, streets and buildings we mindlessly walk on, pass by, or try to avoid running into everyday matter very much to us, but if we don't think about them, they are often meaningless to us. When was the last time, pre-pandemic, you really contemplated how important toilet paper was to you? The thought that the stores might run out of it caused people to panic and hoarde it, as it's importance was suddenly realized. Then it's matter meant something, but after the pandemic when it's readily available, it will still matter to us at very important times, but it probably won't mean that much to us anymore.

People too, can matter to us, without meaning anything important. I've spent a fair amount of time helping out supposed friends with rides, coffee, and concerned conversation, only to realize that even though I was attempting to show my care for them by making time and space to matter to them, my efforts meant very little to them. What does that mean to me now? I try to be very careful about the people I attempt to matter a lot to.

What makes sense to me as well, is the idea that inanimate objects, and "non-intelligent" life forms, as well as atoms and molecules and maybe quantum particles, outside of human perception, also interact with each other. It's easy to think of them mattering to each other as they bounce around and off each other, interacting in various ways based on their physical composition' like billiard balls on a pool table, or the infamous tree that falls in a forest when no ones around. These are examples of non-human objects interacting physically with each other, mattering quite a bit as they sort of mindlessly navigate the world of physics, but I don't think they mean anything to each other. 

I am wondering what you think of this as it applies to the bacterium and the gene scenario, not the piano or the experience of having a child. I think human endeavors create meaning and so it makes sense to use this word when discussing human culture, but I still am cautious about using the word 'meaning' in relationship to events and objects which exist and relate outside of human perception.

P.s.I have read a little on Black holes and the idea that matter has 'information' attached to it. But I'm not really clear on what that means, aside from helping to explain how it allows for general relativity and the laws of thermodynamics to be preserved when attempting to explain what happens to things that fall into a black hole, if and when they come back out as Hawking Radiation. I'm curious if this is where the idea of the gene having meaning comes from?

Nod, agreed that that overall process sounds fruitful. 

Curious what the experiential-focused version looks like when you do it? 

I think you make some key points kithpendragon. 

Firstly "Reality comes to us in a series of sensory moments..." and "The tags and transformations that allow us to go from raw sensory information to the much-lower-dimensional objects that populate the map constitute Meaning"

From my readings on Cultural Theory I pull this statement "Culture creates meaning." At a much lower level of abstraction we have to look at some Evolutionary Psychology. In pre-verbal human society, how did they 'create meaning'? Without the use of language, the shared meaning came from shared emotional states: when there was food and people were hungry, if you felt welcome by the people who brought in the food and you were comfortable enough to stay and enjoy food, you ate and stayed alive. Otherwise, maybe the hunter didn't like you and so behaved in a way to create a fearful emotional state in you that would make you run away. In general without the ability to share emotional states with other humans, you would be left out in the cold and likely die. In the same way today, if you can't 'get along' with your coworkers you will be fired, and if you can't 'get along' with roomates or a spouse, you will live alone.

So in this sense the saying "humans are social creatures" can be interpreted as if our socializing and ability to form society, doesn't depend on 'words' per say, or any definition of meaning requiring words, if you believe pre-lingual humans could understand meaning. Without the use of language, the ability to form social arrangements, relationships, and to focus on shared goals still existed. So maybe 'meaning' doesn't rely on words. 

Another aspect of this idea of meaning, is the content of the thoughts of pre-verbal humans. Like all of us, we have a few ways of 'thinking': not only do we think in language and words, but also in images and sensations. This is what pre-verbal humans did, thought in images and sensations. What would that be like without having so much of your neural wiring taken up by language? 

When you mentioned seeing your kids lego bricks and understanding how they go together, i'm guessing you were using a combination of visual memory recall and sensory memory as you likely 'saw' in your mind how they went together, and you also probably recalled how it 'felt' to put them together. When I look at lego's I can recall the plasticy feel of the surface and the lightness of them in my hand and how the holes in the bottom feel very different than the pegs on the top. 

So in this light, it is the ability to correctly correlate the image, and sensory information of the outside world, with the physical sensations they cause in our inner experience, with the abstract words, phrases and concepts which your particular culture ascribes to our common experiences results in a contemporary sense of meaning.

This is why I believe to really create a sentient AI, it needs to include an entire analogous set of both the human Central Nervous Sytem and Peripheral Nervous System. We require them, and are the only sentient forms of life we know of, so then why would we expect to create sentient life without the entire nervous system? Some of the reading I've done on Habits, Emotions, and Human Decision making really leads to the idea that rational thought is good for contemplating, but it is the emotional processes in conjunction with the memory which provides the motivation to act. 

Without the motivation to act, you might be able to program an AI that could beat human players at StarCraft, which Google has, but after a few years it would need to move into its parents basement because it spends it's whole day playing StarCraft instead of getting a job and getting friends. Without the ability to go out into the rest of the world and truly live like humans, we're just creating basement dwellers who beat us at games we used to enjoy playing before they became dominated by AI. I'm still a little upset with AlphaGo, as it has changed the Go world, and Im still not sure what to make of that.

This brings me to another point I wanted to make about an earlier post. Looking forward more than one generation at a time, and considering we are using imitations of the human brains with neural nets, imitations of how humans think with language and image processing algorithms and AI, and imitating human endeavors whether it be playing StarCraft, running a cash register, building a car, or doing scientific research, one thing we seem to be neglecting is an imitation of human family roles and society. At a point in the future where humans become indistinguishable from robots, will they have their own families, their own societies, that imitate  our own? Will we have a shared sense of meaning? 

Do we need to train robots to develop rituals like ours around important events like birth and death? What will robots teach each other, what should they teach each other, and how do we develop them in such a way that when they do become sentient, they don't resent us? At the same time how do we develop them so that we don't resent them?

When I think of this problem, I recall the story of Pinocchio, where Gepeto is the kindly old father figure attempting to make a boy out of wood. Somewhere magically near the end, Pinocchio becomes a real boy and they all live happily ever after. Here it is a wise adult, creating a mechanical child, who he can raise as his own. It seems like this is a decent analogy for the process of creating Sentient AI, maybe not the best, but certainly the most achievable I think. But what would happen if we tried it the other way around? This story is that of a real boy, attempting to build a mechanical Father, in the hope we can all live happily ever after. This way the attempt is to create a kind and wise Father figure, one who can become real and teach the boy the correct way to live life. 

I'm putting my money on a better future outcome for the human race going with the story of Pinocchio, because in human terms we have become wise, experienced and jaded, probably like Gepeto, and we are creating a very young technology, not an omniscient and wise one. To see ourselves as a young boy creating an old and wise technology seems off. Maybe an even better story is that of a young boy, creating a young mechanical friend, one on equal footing. Neither smarter nor dumber than us, but better at us in some ways and not so good in others. 

The stories and analogies we use, help to create the meaning in our lives. Sometime its better to create meaning through stories, sometimes through shared emotional states. Until we have robots that 'feel' emotion, that is one vector of communication that serves as a wall between us. 

Any particular essay that's good here?