How Did Meaning Emerge in a Meaningless Universe? |
This post is Part 1 of a series.
In an earlier post, I explored how meaning might arise in a physical, meaningless universe—drawing in part on physicist Carlo Rovelli’s relational account, which treats meaning as emerging when physical correlations acquire evolutionary significance.[1] But that post left largely unexplored how this actually happens in brains. How do electrical signals come to be about something? How does significance arise from circuitry?
This four-part series explores how the brain generates meaning, tracing how meaning emerges in living systems—from biological value and goal-directedness (Part 1), through the neural representations that guide action (Part 2), to shared symbols grounded in social cognition (Part 3), and finally to the cultural institutions and personal narratives that give meaning its richest human forms (Part 4).
Physical systems exhibit patterns—molecular arrangements, light wavelengths, temperature distributions, etc.—that we can describe in informational terms.
Claude Shannon’s information theory, developed in the 1940s for telecommunications, formalizes informational description by treating unpredictability as the measure of a signal. Predictable patterns (like “AAAAA”) contain little Shannon information because you already know what’s coming. Random patterns (like “XQJKZPM”) contain maximal Shannon information because every letter is unpredictable. Yet random strings mean nothing—they carry no semantic content. Shannon information says nothing about meaning.[2]
But meaning clearly exists for organisms with brains. A scent can signal food or danger to an animal. The brain’s representation of that scent is about something in the world. Philosophers refer to this property as “aboutness,” or intentionality. It arises when living systems register environmental patterns in relation to their own needs, capacities, and stakes in survival.
Meaning, however, exists not in neural patterns alone but in relationships between those patterns, the organism's evolutionary history, its current goals, and the environment it navigates. A pattern of neural firing becomes meaningful through how it was shaped by natural selection, how it's been tuned by the organism's individual learning, and how it's currently being used to guide behavior.
Consider place cells in a mouse’s hippocampus. When the mouse occupies a specific location, particular neurons fire. That pattern represents location because evolution favored spatial tracking, learning refined it through experience, and downstream circuits use it to guide navigation.
The meaning isn’t in the firing pattern itself but in its web of........