The science of physics has been extremely successful over the last four centuries, mainly for one reason: It does everything it can to disregard anything that has to do with non-physical parts of reality. Although the human body is a physical body, large parts of what distinguishes human beings, sometimes briefly called the human condition, does not belong to the physical domain. This implies that physics (and other sciences of the material universe) offers nothing more than self-imposed helplessness when it comes to questions as to what it means to be human. Yet it is possible to scrutinize the way in which physics (and other sciences) is delineated from the rest of reality: to reconsider its boundaries as they were set about four centuries ago. In other words, it is possible to look for features within the physical that are related to something outside the physical which physics itself ignores. The key concept to do so is proposed to be meaning, in its two variants of reference and sense. Meaning provides a viable perspective to illuminate the deep structure of reality as it extends beyond physics and across its boundaries.

物理学在过去四个世纪中取得了巨大的成功，主要是因为一个原因：它尽其所能地忽视与现实的非物理部分有关的任何事物。尽管人体是一个物质身体，但人类的大部分特征（有时简称为人类状况）并不属于物理领域。这意味着，当涉及到作为人类意味着什么的问题时，物理学（以及物质宇宙的其他科学）只不过是自我强加的无助。然而，我们可以仔细审视物理学（和其他科学）与现实的其余部分的划分方式：重新考虑大约四个世纪前设定的边界。换句话说，可以在物理内部寻找与物理本身忽略的物理外部事物相关的特征。这样做的关键概念是意义，有指称和意义的两种变体。意义提供了一个可行的视角来阐明现实的深层结构，因为它超越了物理并跨越了它的边界。