Mind, Matter, and Meaning develops a systematic account of consciousness, perception, intelligence, and linguistic meaning, and applies that account to questions about artificial minds. Drawing on a tradition extending from Aristotle and Aquinas through Brentano, and engaging contemporary figures including Chalmers, Searle, Dennett, Putnam, and Tye, the book examines the conceptual framework that portrays the mind as a private inner domain standing between the subject and the world.

Against this framework, the book defends a reductive, non-eliminative form of a posteriori physicalism together with strong representationalism. It argues that phenomenal character consists in a complete world-presenting representational profile, including content, perceptual or bodily-affective mode, determinacy, field structure, and attention. On this account, perception presents the world rather than internal objects, and the explanatory gap surrounding consciousness reflects a limitation in our concepts rather than an ontological division in nature. The account of meaning likewise treats reference and semantic content as world-involving achievements grounded in causal history, producer–consumer organization, public linguistic practice, and the possibility of error.

The final part considers artificial systems. It distinguishes mechanism-level content, representational competence, bounded and integrated understanding, phenomenal consciousness, and autonomy. Robotics provides a central test case. Neither linguistic fluency nor formal computation alone establishes understanding or consciousness. Robotic embodiment, however, can connect perception, action, and correction across a continuing, world-involving history, strengthening the case for attributing content and some degree of understanding to the system. Any verdict on conscious understanding must consider the causal history, grounding relations, integrative organization, perceptual capacities, and error-sensitive engagement of the particular system.