This is Part 4 of a four-part series exploring how the brain generates meaning.

In Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series, I traced meaning from biological significance through neural mechanisms to symbolic language. But human meaning has a further transformation: It becomes cultural and narrative. We don't just share meanings; we build civilizations on them and organize our lives around them. Once meanings are shared, they do not merely coordinate behavior but become norms, institutions, and narratives that shape how individuals understand both the world and themselves.

Beyond genes, humans inherit culture: practices, technologies, institutions, and ideas. This creates what researchers call a "second inheritance system."[1]

Culture isn't unique to humans. Many animals have traditions: specific foraging techniques, tool use, and migration routes passed across generations. But human culture differs in two crucial ways. First, meanings stabilize through shared conventions, making reliable communication possible. Second, meanings ratchet: Each generation builds on what came before. While other species have cultural traditions, these rarely accumulate. Human culture, by contrast, builds towers of accumulated knowledge.[2]

Unlike biological evolution, which requires generations for significant change, cultural evolution can be rapid. Ideas can spread globally in days. This speed creates new selection pressures: Successful ideas reproduce; unsuccessful ones die out.

Language was crucial to this cultural ratcheting—enabling meanings to be externalized, preserved, and built upon across generations. But how did language itself emerge and evolve?

Language evolution was driven by cultural evolution.[3] As early forms of language diversified and grew across human populations over long evolutionary timescales, cultural evolution drove the establishment of genetic variations that supported language capacity. Selection of these supporting variations opened more learning opportunities, creating positive feedback that accelerated language evolution in an expanding co-evolutionary spiral.[3]

This gene/culture coevolution drastically modified the human mind, enabling new forms of thought, memory, and social coordination impossible without symbolic representation. But what makes language itself so transformative? How does it actually work to reshape human cognition?

Among the many different characterizations of what kind of capacity language really is, the linguist Daniel Dor suggests this one: Language is a communication technology for instructing the imagination. According to Dor's framework, language is based on a jointly identified set of conventional signs and norms of communication, which are constructed through social negotiations and cultural evolution. Speakers use ordered chains of words to intentionally instruct listeners in imagining their intended meaning. The speaker’s rich, private mental representations are distilled into "skeletal"—that is, stripped-down—mutually agreed-upon concepts represented by words. The listener uses these words as scaffolds, raising past experiences from memory and reconstructing them to produce a novel, imagined experience. We often discover what we wanted to say only after saying it.[3]

This highlights language’s unique power: It doesn’t merely label pre-existing thoughts but actively shapes how we think. With this understanding of language's cognitive machinery, we can see how shared meanings acquired even greater power—creating not just communication but entirely new forms of social reality.

Some shared meanings create what philosopher John Searle calls "institutional facts," things that exist only because we collectively believe they do.[4]

Money is the paradigmatic example. Paper currency has value only because we agree it does. But this collective agreement creates real effects: You can exchange paper for food, shelter, and services. The shared meaning generates real causal power. Such norm-governed shared understandings have enormous value precisely because they enable large-scale cooperation.

Research shows young children understand games have constitutive rules (creating the game itself) versus regulative rules (governing existing behavior).[5] When shown a novel game, children spontaneously correct rule-breakers, grasping institutional facts' normative dimension.

By ages 3-5, children grasp that some things are real because we collectively treat them as real.[6] This builds on the capacity for joint attention described in Part 3: Shared focus on objects enables shared understanding of what those objects count as.[7] The development of institutional understanding closely parallels children’s growing participation in shared intentionality and conventional practices—the same developmental pathway that supports symbolic reference and rule-governed activity.[6,7]

This capacity transforms meaning. Once meanings can constitute facts, they shape behavior not just by representing reality but by creating it.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that large-scale human cooperation depends on "imagined orders," shared beliefs enabling coordination among strangers.[8]

Nations, corporations, money, laws, and rights exist through collective belief. Yet they're not arbitrary: They emerge from negotiation, serve functions, and have real consequences.

Meanings don't have to be objectively true to be functionally powerful; they must be intersubjectively shared. Once enough people believe something matters, it does matter—it shapes behavior, creates obligations, and enables coordination.

Your mortgage, citizenship, and employment shape your life as forcefully as physical constraints. Institutional facts are real in their causal power, even if ontologically dependent on collective recognition.

Beyond institutions, humans organize experiences into narratives. We don't just live lives; we tell life stories. Developmental research shows that autobiographical memory emerges through social interaction and language, as children learn to organize their experiences into culturally shaped narratives that give personal events meaning.[9] In adulthood, people organize these memories into narrative life stories that provide identity, continuity, and personal meaning over time.[10]

These narratives do crucial psychological work. They provide identity; your life story answers "Who am I?" They create continuity, making you the same person who experienced childhood, chose your career, and made commitments. They offer purpose by giving life the structure and direction that stories naturally possess through their plots and trajectories. And they enable integration, transforming disparate experiences into episodes within a coherent whole.

But narratives aren't discovered; they're constructed. We select which events matter, how to interpret them, and what trajectory they suggest. We need experiences to cohere into a story that makes sense. When life events don't fit the story, meaning can fracture: divorce shattering the "happily married" narrative, job loss undermining the "successful career," trauma fracturing the "safe world." Resolution often requires revising the narrative: seeing the event differently, changing the plot, reinterpreting the trajectory. Your life story continuously evolves as experiences demand reinterpretation. A job loss can be narrated as either "personal failure" or "escape from a dead-end job." Frequent childhood moves can be framed as "I never developed roots" or "I learned adaptability." Different narratives make the same facts mean different things.

Let's return to where we began at the start of this series: In a meaningless universe, where does meaning come from?

The short answer: Meaning emerges when matter organizes into self-replicating systems with goals and representational capacities. From there, increasingly complex forms emerged—organisms with brains and consciousness, then symbolic language, then civilization-building cultures.

We can trace this trajectory more precisely through progressive transitions, each adding something fundamental. Life created value (Part 1)—goals emerged, some things mattered. Brains created internal representations that could stand in for external features. Consciousness enabled the subjective experience of meaning, transforming how organisms respond to their world. Distributed neural networks (Part 2) grounded semantic meaning in sensory, motor, and emotional experience. Symbols enabled conventional reference (Part 3), letting meanings be externalized, preserved, and refined across generations through shared intentionality. Culture created institutions (Part 4) where shared meanings could constitute new realities. And narrative organized individual experiences into coherent life stories that provide identity, continuity, and purpose.

With each transition, meaning became richer, more flexible, and more powerful. But it never lost connection to its origins in goal-directed biological systems.

The universe doesn't care about meaning. But we do. And that caring, grounded in biology, extended through culture, and integrated in narrative, is what makes us human.

References

1. Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, and Joseph Henrich, “The Cultural Niche: Why Social Learning Is Essential for Human Adaptation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, suppl. 2 (2011): 10918–10925, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1100290108.

2. Claudio Tennie, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Ratcheting up the Ratchet: On the Evolution of Cumulative Culture,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364, no. 1528 (2009): 2405–2415, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0052.

3. Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution, illustrated by Anna Zeligowski (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). Dor’s account of language and the gene–culture coevolutionary framework are discussed in Chap. 4.8, “Language and Imagination.”

4. John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995). Searle’s notion of status functions provides a useful descriptive framework for institutional facts; developmental accounts of how such frameworks emerge are discussed by Rakoczy and Tomasello (2007).

5. Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken, and Michael Tomasello, “The Sources of Normativity: Young Children’s Awareness of the Normative Structure of Games,” Developmental Psychology 44, no. 3 (2008): 875–881, https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.875.

6. Hannes Rakoczy and Michael Tomasello, “The Ontogeny of Social Ontology: Steps to Shared Intentionality and Status Functions,” in Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts, ed. Savas L. Tsohatzidis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 113–137.

7. Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll, “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 5 (2005): 675–735, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X05000129.

8. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015). Harari’s discussion of “imagined orders” is best understood as a high-level synthesis; developmental and evolutionary accounts of how such institutions emerge are provided by Tomasello et al. (2005), Rakoczy and Tomasello (2007), and Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich (2011).

9. Katherine Nelson and Robyn Fivush, “The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory: A Social Cultural Developmental Theory,” Psychological Review 111, no. 2 (2004): 486–511, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.111.2.486. Nelson and Fivush show that autobiographical memory emerges through the interaction of language, narrative, and social experience across early development.

10. Dan P. McAdams, “Personal Narratives and the Life Story,” in Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 3rd ed., ed. Oliver P. John, Richard W. Robins, and Lawrence A. Pervin (New York: Guilford Press, 2008), 242–262. McAdams describes how autobiographical memory is organized into narrative life stories that support identity and meaning in adulthood.

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