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Meaning machines: abstractions 

Perceptive-Action

The foundations for meaning are to be found in perceptive-action - as a single, embodied, activity - in all animate creatures.  Instinctually, we respond 'automatically' to things like heat, electricity, projectiles approaching our eyes, etc. It would seem safe to say that these responses occur outside of our cortex, as they occur immediately and automatically, before we (animate creatures) have even had a chance to think about them. Instinct, as they say, is 'hard-wired'. 

These changes in our environment are, in principle, changes that we (animate creatures) can experience through single (or at the most, very few) of our senses. We can describe them as uni-sensory (or uni-modal), building up to multi-sensory (or cross-modal).  When we get to multi-modal perceptive-action, we are already starting to explore, and respond to, not only uni-modal patterns (hot and cold, for example), but more abstract patterns (of patterns), or proto-concepts.

Cross-modal and Multi-modal

Let's bring dogs back into the picture: Dogs soon build up multi-modal, or even cross-modal experiences, and their associated proto-concepts, like 'walk' (as in going for a walk). They might respond similarly to a range of experiences - to the word 'walk', or the sound of their leash being take out of the cupboard, or the sight of a person putting on walking shoes or boots, or putting on a walking coat (if it is cold enough), etc. Clearly their experiences in any and all of these sensory modalities start to merge, to fuse, into a concept or proto-concept of 'going for a walk'.  The fact that they are not able to verbalise it does not mean they have not started to put 2 and 2 together, and realised that all these quite different experiences (jointly and severally, as it were) are indicative of a good prospect that a walk is happening soon. 

As these patterns of patterns - and these proto-concepts - are established, the dog (or person) is starting to respond to a wide range of experiences in a similar way - and the proto-concept is the beginning of abstraction - in the sense that an idea, a proto-concept is being formed, which fused quite disparate experiences into a 'whole' which is quite different from, even if triggered by, it's constituent parts. It's literally abstracted from individual, uni-modal experiences. 

A-modal concepts

The next stage is to make this abstraction more substantial, and more enduring - something 'learnt' as it were - a new, non-instinctive capacity for effective action. And according to Ramachandran (see his BBC Reith Lectures in 2003/4), this is facilitated in us (H. Sapiens) largely because we have an unusually big Angular Gyrus on each side of the brain, through which a multitude of different sensory signals pass.  (Unusually large, that is, for mammals, and even for great apes). All that makes fully a-modal concepts - concepts that function, and can be used, independently of multi-modal or even cross-modal patterns (as well as synaesthesia), possible.