I hope you did your homework. And so do you believe in the colour blue? And /or all the other colours out there?

It’s astonishing how close to the surface of things a Central Paradox can be found. The answer is that colours do exist, because we perceive and experience them, yet they don’t exist, because objectively if there was no mind process to perceive them they would not be colours – whatever else they might be.

This is not mere sophistry. The fact is, things and phenomena do exist independently, but have no existence as concepts unless a mind perceives them. So the tree in the garden is there when there’s nobody about, but it’s a nameless non-concept until some old josser comes stumbling through the undergrowth and his dog pisses on it.

This kind of mental urogymnastic becomes slightly easier if we consider a sensory modality that’s less dominant – the sense of smell, for example. Does the green (hmm!) cheese on the moon smell if there’s nobody on the moon to smell it? It’s not rocket science to leap to the conclusion: where there is no olfaction there ain’t no pong neither.

So all of that is a prelude to my Theory of the Meaning of Meaningfulness. I think we can be reasonably comfortable with the notion that our senses generate perception when they get the right kind of signals, once those have been subjected to the right kind of processing by a whole lot of marvellously efficient systems in the brain. And yet at the same time we are perfectly at ease in accepting that what we experience is reality.

“To put that in a nut-case,” said Coco, “Are you telling me, O Great Platonico-Avuncular Theorist, that we can believe simultaneously and synchronologistically that what we see or experience is real, while yet knowing perfectly well that the entirety of what we experience is generated by brain-processes forming some kind of substrate for the mind?”

“Good Dog!” I replied, “I think you’re on the scent of the Theory of the Meaning of Meaningfulness. Do have a biscuit.”

If we first accept that colours are internally generated mental constructs, Coco and I now suggest that one of the central drivers in the human mind, and come to think of it, the canine mind also, is Meaningfulness.

In a sense, everything we experience has a value attribution created and attached as we process it through Mind. Things that relate to survival, and to intense emotion in any form, have a high Meaningfulness value. Coco and I assert, on the basis of our considerable experiences (mine concerning 65 years of unceasing enquiry and his involving a large number of stinky things in the wood, nothing wrong with that, Coco), that the centrality of the Meaningfulness sensation is related to its value in terms of survival.

“So we survive,” said Coco, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but spoiling the impression somewhat by drooling in non-Pavlovian but Labradoric fashion, “by virtue of our mind-generated Meaningfulnessh?”

“Precisely, my dear Coco,” I replied. “That is exactly the meaning of Meaningfulness. It is a real yet mind-generated sensation, with an external utility closely related to preservation of the individual and of his or her immediate family. That's my Theory, anyway.”

Coming shortly: But what does Meaningfulness feel like when it’s at home, Uncle Donnie?