Roughly 530 million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion, the emergence of nervous systems and brains transformed the cosmic learning process. With this breakthrough, animals became capable of processing meaningful information at the individual level—through sensation, memory, prediction, and adaptation in real time. Meaning shifted from being purely genetic to being cognitive, embodied in conscious experience.
Here I explore how neurocognitive systems brought forth new dimensions of meaning. With brains, animals developed internal models of their environments, simulating possible futures and reducing the risks of trial-and-error survival. Theories like Karl Friston’s Active Inference and John Vervaeke’s Relevance Realization reveal how organisms filter vast amounts of sensory data to focus on what truly matters for survival and flourishing. Here, meaning becomes transjective—emerging from the dynamic agent–arena relationship between an animal and its world. From these processes arose consciousness itself: the unification of sensation, value, and memory into a single subjective perspective. Scholars like Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka trace how unlimited associative learning and integrated “value currencies” gave rise to felt experience—pleasure, pain, attraction, repulsion. Different animals, shaped by their unique ecological contexts, inhabit distinct experiential worlds, or Umwelten, each with its own meanings. As nervous systems complexified, so did minds. Social emotions, relationships, and eventually language emerged, catalyzing human consciousness and culture. Symbolic language, as Terrence Deacon argues, did not merely arise from larger brains—it caused brains to grow larger, fueling an autocatalytic spiral of cognitive complexification. With this, the evolutionary story of meaning entered a new phase: the rise of Culture.
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