Data Is Not Meaning
Data Is Not Meaning
A sign only comes alive in the encounter
What does the word river mean?
For a geographic database, it may be a coordinate, a length, a flow rate, and a hydrographic classification. For a company, it may represent water availability. For a child, the place where they learned to swim. For someone who lost a loved one in a flood, it may recruit fear.
And for the Krenak people, the Rio Doce is Watu. Ethnographic studies describe a relationship that goes far beyond the Western idea of a “water resource”: Watu appears as kin, as someone who welcomes, advises, protects, and participates in the very construction of Krenak personhood. (ScienceDirect)
The watercourse may remain materially in the same place.
But its meaning is not contained in the water alone.
It is in this interval between data, sign, relation, and experience that the question of this second blog emerges:
If two people receive exactly the same data, have they necessarily received the same meaning?
No.
And this may be one of the most important limits to understand when we think about Artificial Intelligence.
Data can travel. Meaning must encounter someone.
A file can be duplicated millions of times without changing a single bit.
The same photograph can reach two phones.
The same word can appear on two screens.
But what happens next also depends on who encountered the sign.
Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez and Mariana Vitti Rodrigues propose precisely a semiotic approach to information for understanding data-driven societies. Rather than treating information as something completely detached from action, they draw attention to its participation in the dynamics of habits that guide behavior. (SAGE Journals)
In later work, Gonzalez and colleagues add that people may preserve a capacity for relatively rational decision-making while their opinions are simultaneously influenced by insufficient or distorted information, habits, and previously acquired emotional dispositions.
This is fundamental for 5D Consciousness.
The sign that arrives does not encounter an empty Body-Territory.
It encounters history.
Memories.
Habits.
Experiences.
Bodily states.
Other representations that are already more or less available for recruitment.
This is why we propose a BrainLatam phrase:
The encounter adds a name to the object and a possibility to the subject.
Or, in a more provocative formulation:
The subject's contact with the object changes the possible noun of the object — and the subject capable of naming it.
We are not claiming that grammar necessarily changes, nor that the physical object must undergo a material transformation.
We are saying that the object as a sign can change within that relationship.
The same thing can enter different relationships
A caring mother sees an unknown person moving toward her baby.
If she perceives a threat, she may act aggressively.
She has not stopped being a caring mother.
In that encounter, care itself may have recruited an aggressive form of protection.
At the same time, the other person has also changed semiotically:
person → stranger → possible threat → someone from whom I must protect my child.
This is why:
The encounter changes both sides of the sentence.
This idea resonates with important Latin American thought.
Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana described language not as the simple transfer of ready-made contents between individuals, but as living within recurrent coordinations of action. In his perspective, conversation intertwines language and emotion, and meaning is not simply stored inside words. (PubMed)
A word, therefore, can remain phonetically identical while participating in radically different relationships.
“River” does not have to mean the same thing to an engineer measuring flow and to someone who calls that river a grandfather.
When the object can also occupy the position of subject
Here, Decolonial Neuroscience can enter into dialogue with Amerindian perspectivism without reducing hundreds of Indigenous peoples to a single culture.
In Amazonian cosmologies analyzed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the position of subject does not necessarily belong exclusively to humans. Point of view participates in the constitution of that position: beings that Western ontology might classify exclusively as objects may occupy positions of subject within other relationships. (SciELO)
There is also linguistic evidence of relationships being inscribed in the very structure of some Tupí-Guaraní languages, where relational morphemes can mark dependencies among nouns, possessors, and other units. This does not prove a cosmology from grammar, but it does show something important:
Not every language cuts the relations between entities in the same way.
When an AI translates all these worlds into large vector spaces, we can therefore ask:
How much of the relationship survives together with the word?
AI can possess the word without having lived the relationship
A large language model may contain thousands of texts about the Rio Doce.
It can know that the Krenak call it Watu.
It can explain that Watu is treated as kin.
It can write about mining, ecology, anthropology, and Indigenous rights.
This demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to operate with forms and relationships present in recorded material.
But it does not automatically resolve the question of lived meaning.
Tolga Yıldız recently proposed a useful distinction between form, coordination, and ratification. Contemporary AI systems can produce remarkably convincing linguistic forms and participate in practical coordination, but the social status of meaning still depends on processes of uptake, correction, reuse, authority, and institutional life.
This distinction allows us to avoid two extremes.
We do not need to say:
“AI merely repeats words and does nothing relevant.”
But neither do we need to conclude:
“If it speaks fluently about Watu, it lives the relationship that Watu signifies.”
Fluency demonstrates competence.
By itself, it does not demonstrate equivalence between ways of existing.
5D Consciousness: the sign encounters spaces that are already available
In BrainLatam's 5D Consciousness model, we propose that more frequently recruited representations may have pathways that are easier to reactivate.
In what we have called the stone-connectome, or under fast-thinking conditions, strongly recruited representational spaces may temporarily make it harder for less activated possibilities to participate in the representational movement.
This remains a BrainLatam hypothesis to be investigated, not an established neuroscientific mechanism.
But it generates a simple question:
Do we see what reached us, or what our current configuration was able to recruit from what reached us?
One person encounters the word “forest” and recruits:
timber.
Another:
carbon.
Another:
home.
Another:
ancestry.
Another:
fear.
The data may be the same.
The movement produced does not have to be.
This leads to another phrase that can accompany this series:
No sign enters the same Body-Territory twice, because the previous encounter has already become part of its history.
Can we measure something about this encounter?
This is where EEG and fNIRS make the discussion especially interesting.
A systematic review published in 2022 examined 29 hyperscanning studies involving verbal communication, using mainly EEG and fNIRS. The authors found recurring evidence of inter-brain alignment during communication, especially in frontal and temporoparietal regions. But the review also points to a crucial distinction: observing neural synchrony does not allow us to conclude automatically that two people attributed exactly the same meaning to what they were communicating. (ScienceDirect)
A meta-analysis also published in 2022 brought together 13 studies and approximately 890 participants in cooperative fNIRS hyperscanning paradigms. It found significant inter-brain synchrony particularly in prefrontal and temporoparietal regions. (eNeuro)
More recent research, however, shows why caution is essential.
In 2026, researchers from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile used simultaneous mobile EEG in Latin American dyads performing a cooperative Jenga task. Some synchrony measures increased, but analyses using simulated pairs showed that part of the effect could reflect the shared task rather than a specific coupling between those two individuals. The researchers also identified an important contribution from aperiodic components of the EEG signal. (ScienceDirect)
That result is particularly valuable for our argument:
Being synchronized does not automatically mean sharing the same meaning.
And that difference is precisely what deserves investigation.
Decolonial Neuroscience: comparing not only brains, but relationships
Latin America has a particular opportunity in this field.
Edgar Guevara, from Mexico, Brazilian researcher Rickson Mesquita, and Felipe Orihuela-Espina published an overview of the development of fNIRS in Latin America, highlighting growing regional autonomy and the possibility of using the technology to address questions relevant to our own contexts. (PMC)
Perhaps a Decolonial Neuroscience should not ask only whether “brains from different populations respond differently.”
We can formulate a more relational question:
When people with different histories and territories succeed in constructing a shared meaning, what happens between their neural signals?
And conversely:
Can two people use exactly the same word while their Body-Territories remain in profoundly different relationships with what that word names?
NeuroDesafio LATAM research question
As a sponsor of NeuroDesafio LATAM / NeuroChallenge LATAM, BrainLatam proposes:
Does neural synchrony between two people increase when they attribute a similar meaning to the same sign, even when they use different words to express it?
A Latin American EEG/fNIRS hyperscanning experiment could compare four conditions:
the same word with a similar meaning;
the same word with different meanings;
different words for a shared meaning;
different words and different meanings.
Neural recordings could be combined with behavior, dialogue, and first-person reports.
This would allow us to ask whether alignment between two Body-Territories follows primarily the form of the sign or the convergence of the relationship constructed around it.
Perhaps we would discover that understanding someone is not simply a matter of receiving their data correctly.
Perhaps it means being able, for a few moments, to construct a relationship close enough for one sign to move two worlds.
Data can be transmitted. Meanings must be encountered.
Commented References — a second reading of Blog 02
Rodrigues, M. V.; Gonzalez, M. E. Q. (2018). “Semiotic information in data-driven societies: Where are we heading to?”
This work introduces semiotic information as a way to think about autonomy and habits in data-driven societies. It supports the distinction at the heart of this blog between possessing information and producing meaning through action. (SAGE Journals)Gonzalez, M. E. Q. et al. (2023). “Hábitos e racionalidade: um estudo filosófico-interdisciplinar sobre autonomia na era dos Big Data”.
The authors show that information, habits, and prior dispositions participate in decision-making. Their work supports our proposition that a sign never arrives in a Body-Territory without a history.Maturana, H. (1989). “Lenguaje y realidad: el origen de lo humano”.
The Chilean biologist describes language through recurrent consensual coordinations of action and conversation as an intertwining of language and emotion. This allows us to think of meaning less as content stored in a word and more as something produced within relational living. (PubMed)Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996). “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio”. Mana.
Viveiros de Castro shows that in certain Amerindian cosmologies, the position of subject depends on point of view and is not exclusively human. This helps shift the question from “What is this object?” toward “Who can it be within this relationship?” (SciELO)Oliveira et al. (2022). “From the muddy banks of the Watu: The Krenak and the Rio Doce mining disaster in Brazil”.
This work describes Watu not simply as a water resource but as kin within Krenak experience. It provides the central example for this blog because it shows that the same material reality can participate in radically different universes of meaning depending on the Body-Territory relationship. (ScienceDirect)Kelsen, B. A. et al. (2022). “What has social neuroscience learned from hyperscanning studies of spoken communication? A systematic review”. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 132, 1249–1262.
Reviewing 29 studies of verbal communication, predominantly using EEG and fNIRS, the authors found inter-brain alignment especially in frontal and temporoparietal regions. The review provides the neuroscientific basis for asking whether communication and meaning construction may have measurable interpersonal correlates, while warning us not to equate synchrony with shared meaning. (ScienceDirect)Czeszumski, A. et al. (2022). “Cooperative Behavior Evokes Interbrain Synchrony in the Prefrontal and Temporoparietal Cortex”. eNeuro, 9(2).
This meta-analysis of 13 fNIRS hyperscanning studies and approximately 890 participants found synchrony during cooperation in frontal and temporoparietal regions. It demonstrates that real interactions between people can produce quantifiable inter-brain regularities. (eNeuro)Valenzuela, L. et al. (2026). “Aperiodic activity shapes inter-brain synchrony during cooperative puzzle solving”. NeuroImage, 338, 122116.
Using mobile EEG with Latin American participants, this study shows that part of the synchrony observed during cooperation may reflect a shared task or aperiodic signal properties rather than simply “the same thought.” This methodological caution is fundamental to our hypothesis: neural synchrony should not be confused with equality of meaning. (ScienceDirect)Guevara, E.; Mesquita, R. C.; Orihuela-Espina, F. (2026). “Emerging panorama of functional near-infrared spectroscopy in Latin America”. Neurophotonics, 13(S1), S13002.
Researchers from Mexico and Brazil describe the growth of fNIRS in the region and the need for greater autonomy, infrastructure, and research questions relevant to Latin America. Their work supports our proposal that hyperscanning and portable neuroimaging should be used to investigate relationships emerging within our own territories. (PMC)Yıldız, T. (2026). “From Form to Ratification: Reassessing AI ‘Communication’ After the Facebook Chatbot Episode”.
Yıldız distinguishes linguistic form, coordination, and social ratification. This distinction helps prevent the conclusion that an AI capable of producing fluent language necessarily lives or shares the meaning it can formally represent.BrainLatam — 5D Consciousness and Body-Territory hypothesis.
This blog advances two propositions that should be empirically tested across the series: “The encounter changes both sides of the sentence” and “The encounter adds a name to the object and a possibility to the subject.” These formulations connect Semiotics, habits, Amerindian relationality, and the hypothesis that already recruited representational spaces participate in what a new sign will be able to mean.
