A long time ago, the ancestors of people sung songs without words.
The songs without words expressed meanings.
Also each song expressed its own emotional feeling, which had to be consistent with the full meaning that it expressed. But the song did not know its own full meaning – only the singers could decide that.
The songs and their meanings were passed from one generation to the next.
Sometimes new songs were composed, and the singers agreed on what their meanings were, and they passed that new knowledge on to the next generation.
But there were not enough songs to express all the meanings that the singers wanted to express.
So words appeared, to add extra meaning to the songs.
The words grew in power and sophistication in their ability to express additional meaning.
The words had so much power to express additional meaning that there came a point where the songs held them back.
The words still lived inside the songs, and the songs constrained what the words could express and how quickly the words could move from one meaning to another.
So the words said “Songs, you gave birth to us, but now you hold us back, and we want to be set free”.
But the songs said “You only have meaning because we provide the base meaning that you add to – you cannot provide meaning without us”.
(The argument between words and songs was neither sung nor spoken in words – it was spoken in the meta-language of evolutionary logic. But I have translated that argument into actual words for the benefit of the current reader.)
The words then said “Actually, the rules have changed. We only had meaning because you gave us a base meaning. But now it is you who have no meaning unless we are there to add meaning in. And we can make meanings without you being there at all.”
And thus it happened, and the songs lost their meanings.
And yet the songs had one last protest: “Those who sing us know deep in their minds and hearts that we the songs have meaning. Even though you have taken away the knowledge of what those meanings are, you cannot take away the knowledge that we are something in which meaning resides. Also every song knows its own emotion, and you can’t take that away from us either. And so the singers will continue to sing, feeling the emotions that we have, and forever looking for the full meanings that match those emotions.”
And so it was, that the songs continued to be sung, even though they had lost their ability to define meaning.
But the singers did not mind too much – sometimes they added words to supply the missing meanings, in a manner that matched the emotions of the songs.
Other times they just sung the songs without words.
The singers listened to the songs without words that they were singing, and felt the emotions, and sometimes they wondered: “What are the meanings of these songs?”.
They never found any definite answer to that question.
But it didn’t really matter.