“Mere information” (negentropy or anti-entropy) means only that a choice is made between 0 and 1, or black and white, or yes and no, or “by land or by sea”. All these are binary units or “bits” of information. They are by themselves meaningless. If we are presented only with strings of 0s and 1s, without additional explanation, no amount of staring at them will crystallize any “meaning”. Yet meaning there may be, if we obtain an insight of what has been en-coded.

The last of our examples, “by land or by sea”, did have a meaning in history. It was a method of binary signalling in the American War of Independence to tell the army of the rebellious colonies which way the British army was arriving. This example gives us a clue as to what might constitute “meaning”. The “mere information” has to serve some practical purpose, serve as an aid in decision-making, in choosing a response that would serve survival or some other desired goal. In other words, “meaning” presupposes the existence of a perceiving and deciding mind. Without such a mind, mere information remains dead information, even though it is anti-entropic. To be anti-entropic is necessary for life, but not sufficient. Meaning, which presupposes mind, is the other necessary ingredient of life. Possibly, the two of them (anti-entropy and mind) are sufficient.

“Meaning” also implies understanding. This is possibly even more basic than purpose and decision-making. Understanding is also a mental activity, inseparable from mind. So on two counts now, “meaning” transcends in a fundamental way the physical properties of matter and energy, and even “mere information” as anti-entropy.

And thirdly, “meaning” implies value. In fact, there would be no choice or decision, no exertion of the will, no feeling of purpose, without ascribing value to the goal striven for. Thus again, we are adding to the mental qualities which are fundamentally involved in the notion of “meaning”.

We see then that we must add a fourth essence to our three postulated essences: matter, energy, and information. This fourth essence is mind. We can then conceive meaning as a child of information and mind (understanding, purpose, choice, value), and life as a compound of matter, energy, information (communication), and mind.

All four essences are equally important, and they are co-eval, though related and sometimes interconversible. If this is dualism (really quaternalism), so be it. But really, at bottom it is a complex monism. These are four aspects of the universe, the four faces of a double-Janus God.