The title. I never understood that expression… can someone help?
Edit: auto correct on ‘someone’
In: 1694
I want to add something else to the conversation:
**Meta-data**
If you are chatting with some one on imessages or whatsapp or RCS
Then the message is private to you and your friend.
The metadata for that conversation is your name, your phone number, your possible location , your id on apple/facebook/google, the date-time of conversation, possibly the coarse location of you and the coarse location of your friend.
But the meta-data isn’t.
Anything that references itself, or reflects awareness of its own condition and existence.
Ex: a book that is about the book itself being written
It refers to the recursive application of a concept to itself.
For example
RAS syndrome = redundant acronym syndrome = where you write out the entire word represented by the last letter of an acronym in order to provide a noun with enough context to make communication clear.
RAS syndrome itself happens to exhibit the property of RAS syndrome, which is pretty meta.
Other examples might be refusing to tolerate intolerance, recognizing the mental activity of recognition, asking who shall watch the watchers, or computing the probability that a probabilistic calculation is correct.
The term “meta” may soon change meaning to refer to an ignominious downfall, such as what happens if a social media company tries to change itself into a VR company and does so poorly.
Lots of helpful comments here, I want to add another use of the word ‘meta’ as it’s used in philosophy.
Meta essentially means thinking about x. The field of ‘metaphysics’ is philosophy about the nature of physical things. ‘Metaethics’ is philosophy about the nature of ethics (i.e. instead of asking “is x action moral or immoral” (which is ethics) we ask questions about the property of morality itself)
Meta colloquially means self referential. However, I don’t think this an accurate reflection of its meaning though since it could be argued that the term is taken from metaphysics which has to do with the fundamental principles or axioms of things. **’Meta’** means before/after in Greek. **’Physic**’ means nature/natural order.
Metaphysics has to do with defining and understanding essential principles like time, change, separation, etc. These are axioms, important first principles, that effect everything. So these things are pre ‘physic’. So the subject of things beyond the normal scope of regular or natural things is metaphysical.
I think this is how we get the common term meta is used now. We might say that thinking about what exactly what separates the future from the past is metaphysical. Similarly, we also say that discussing something that refers to itself or is about the subject as a whole, like a movie making fun of the movie industry, is meta.
An etymologist would know more but I would argue that this is where the meaning comes from.
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