What do we mean by “context”?
Every moment of experience arrives already framed — by your mood, your history, your body’s state, the physical environment, the social situation. Context isn’t just a backdrop to experience, to a large degree it is the experience.
Change the context and you change what a thing means, even if the thing itself is identical.
Philosophically, this is the territory of hermeneutics — the study of interpretation. Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that meaning is never in a text (or object) alone; it emerges from the encounter between the thing and the interpreter, who always brings a horizon of assumptions, history, and context. The object is inert. Meaning is relational.
Wittgenstein made a related point with his concept of language games — the meaning of a word or sign isn’t fixed; it’s constituted by the rules and practices of the context in which it’s used. Change the game, change the meaning.
There’s also intentionality in phenomenology (Husserl, Brentano): consciousness is always about something, and what something is for us is inseparable from how we’re directed toward it. The receipt isn’t perceived neutrally — it’s always perceived as something, and that “as” is context-dependent.
Scientifically, this maps onto how the brain actually processes information. Perception is not passive recording — it’s predictive. The brain runs a constant model of the world and interprets incoming signals through that model. Context primes the model before the signal even arrives. This is why the same visual stimulus produces different perceptions depending on what surrounds it — the classic ambiguous figures like the Necker cube, or Adelson’s checker shadow illusion, where two identical grey squares look completely different shades.
At a neurological level, what fires in response to an object depends on what was already active — memory circuits, emotional tagging via the amygdala, social context cues. The object triggers a different network each time.
The synthesis: the thing itself carries no meaning intrinsically. It’s a stable node in an unstable web of relations. Meaning is the web, not the node.
The neuroscience angle
The brain is fundamentally a prediction machine (this is the core of Karl Friston’s predictive processing framework). Rather than passively receiving the world, it constantly generates models of what it expects, then updates based on incoming signals. Context is essentially the brain’s prior — the accumulated expectation it brings to each moment.
This means:
∙ The same stimulus (a sound, a word, a face) activates entirely different neural patterns depending on context
∙ Memory itself is context-dependent — we recall things more easily when we’re in the same state or environment as when we learned them
∙ Even pain perception is heavily contextual — soldiers wounded in battle often report feeling little pain in the moment, because the meaning of the wound is different
The “infinite” part
Contexts nest inside each other and interact in ways that multiply endlessly. Your cellular state influences your mood, which colours your interpretation of a conversation, which shifts your sense of identity, which alters how you read the landscape you’re walking through. There’s no clean bottom level — no context-free bedrock of pure experience.
This connects to something you’ve explored before around embodied cognition — the idea that thinking isn’t just happening in the skull but is shaped by the body’s position, sensation, and movement in the world. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is always already situated — there’s no view from nowhere.
The philosophical edge
If contexts are truly infinite and nested, it raises an unsettling question: is there a stable “self” doing the experiencing, or is the self just another context-dependent construction — something the brain generates situationally rather than something that persists? This is where neuroscience starts to rhyme with Buddhism, and with thinkers like U.G. Krishnamurti, who you’ve engaged with — the suggestion that the sense of a fixed observer is itself a kind of useful fiction.
The infinite contexts idea might ultimately point to something humbling: that meaning is never found, it’s always made — and remade — in the ongoing negotiation between brain, body, and world.