Meaning as Persistence-Relevant Transformation

What makes information meaningful? Traditional approaches often associate meaning with representation, utility, prediction, or subjective interpretation. The Self-Preserving Flow (SPF) framework proposes a different starting point. Meaning is neither an intrinsic property of data nor a direct measure of survival value. Instead, meaning emerges when a structural perturbation becomes relevant to the persistence architecture of a system. This paper presents a conceptual account of meaning within SPF and outlines how semantic processing emerges through the interaction between structural change, adaptive preservation, and recursive continuity. Crucially, we position meaning as an evolutionary primitive, whereas consciousness is formalized as a late, emergent specialization of recursive meaning-processing systems.