So meaning is generated in a sense by how we live and affect the world
This is a perfectly normal and emotional astute comment. Nothin' wrong with it. I just see something different for science analysis. I see the
meaning (informational objects) as already part of the environment - just like the forces and masses of physical objects are there in a physical exchange. How we live
transforms meanings and real-world probabilities into newly constituted meanings. In this way information objects convert from prior states to currently manifest states and set-up new information objects in new states.
Think of the laws of conservation of matter and energy and project them to the informational environment. Time are space can be replaced with state and sequence structure. I am comfortable with understanding the Materialist/Physicalist position as a robot, because methodological materialism is a valid set of math models to describe physical events.
Second, robotics is real and I have a 20 year fascination of how AI is useful in reality. Thinking of human behavior - as if we are robots is a valid description of events -
however incomplete. It gives a mechanical level of abstraction to study. Robots work by programming and a robotic program is an integrated network of OOPs. Hence, as in informational realist - I can appreciate the robot's program output and compare and contrast to actual human behavior data. I argue the incompleteness of materialism - like a number of other posters here. I have an agenda to compliment mechanical metadata with informational metadata.
Can a robot detect meaning in its environment? Yes - they can choose pre-programmed clues. Can a "robot feel a room" at a party and get the crowd to laugh and like them? Not so well. Living things detect meaning at a different level of abstraction. (LoA) I argue the understanding of anything is a sense, in terms of interacting with ambient information objects.