11. Meaning Across Scales

The Golden Thread

So, what can we say about meaning’s “complexification” then?

Throughout this series, I have endeavored to show how meaning has indeed grown richer and more informationally rich across cosmic evolution. Though meaning ultimately stems from the existential requirement to resist entropic dissolution, emergent meanings of complex entities clearly cannot be simplistically reduced to this foundation but recognized as qualitatively transforming as complexity increases. As meaning has complexified from Matter to Life to Mind, new layers added upon existing ones, building upon previous developments. New kinds of entity–field relationships formed, with new kinds of information to process and interpret for meaning. In this way, genetic meanings gave rise to neuronal meanings, which (for one group of primates with exceptional neuronal complexity) eventually gave rise to language and the domain of symbolic meaning: the stuff of Culture.

Along the way, meaningful concerns and behaviors proliferated. Beginning as a purely thermodynamic imperative to materially persist, meaning deepened into complex organisms’ goal-directed behavior of energy capture, self-maintenance, and reproduction; then infinitely diversified through an explosion of mobile animals normatively navigating a vast possibility space by means of increasingly complex mental models. All this eventually gave rise to (and plays out within) an inner world of subjective experience, wherein normative values became felt as qualia states for a persisting experiential self—which in time led to social selves in group dynamics sensitive to complex social relationships of all sorts.

Language both reframed meanings from previous levels and opened up entirely new domains of meaningful experience. For instance, it aided humans’ continued material existence by enriching our mental models with abstract concepts, whose patterns dramatically increase our competencies for action and thus our viability. It enhanced and deepened social relationships through intersubjective communication, collective problem-solving, and shared group goals, all of which reshaped sexual relationships and power hierarchies. In these and a million other ways, language transfigured meanings from the earlier levels of Matter, Life, and Mind. But it also opens up entirely new realms of meaning unique to the level of Culture, as language gives rise to a concept of an egoic self, a theory of mind, and entirely abstract concepts such that meaning can now unfold through self-awareness, relationship to other selves, and the vast horizon of human reflection, from philosophy to logic to religion and science and beyond. With language, the full range of human meaning becomes possible.

Jumping back to our primary sense of meaning discussed at the outset—that of meaningful information as what aids an entity in resisting entropy—we see that a throughline does indeed run from it all the way to the rich and diverse activities of cultural life that we ourselves actually tend to identify as meaningful and valuable in the common colloquial sense. However, to be clear once more (in case there is any lingering confusion), this is not at all to suggest that human meaning can be simply reduced to a survival imperative, any more than human anatomy can be reduced to the skeleton or the contents of a book can be reduced to the paper it is written on. Rather, this throughline simply shows how, without the skeleton, the body cannot stand; without the paper, the book could not be read.

From a secure, naturalistic foundation of meaning in thermodynamic principles, we have thus been able to build up successively more complex layers spanning multiple novel information processing systems which are dependent upon (but not reducible to) the substrates from which they arise. By the time we reach the Culture level of human meaning, there is a rich tapestry of various semantic registers interweaving symbolic, social, experiential, genetic, and other sources of meaningful information. Underpinning them all, however, is the same basic teleological and thus normative endeavor of successfully persisting and enhancing viability. As physicist Carlo Rovelli puts it in a 2018 paper, this most basic notion of meaning is the first link in a long chain of successively more complex meanings. “The claim here,” he says,

is not that the full content of what we call intentionality, meaning, purpose—say in human psychology, or linguistics—is nothing else than the meaningful information defined here [as thermodynamic viability]. But it is that these notions can be built upon the notion of meaningful information step by step, adding the articulation proper to our neural, mental, linguistic, social, etcetera, complexity. In other words, I am not claiming to provide here the full chain from physics to mental, but rather the crucial first link of the chain.^[i]

Rovelli distinguishes between “direct” and “indirect” meaning to reflect the difference of meaningful information that has immediate causal bearing on viability in a thermodynamic sense and that which only secondarily relates to it (e.g., by being relevant for obtaining more existentially relevant information). “Obviously,” he writes,

not any manifestation of meaning, purpose, intentionality or value is directly meaningful… Reading today’s news paper is not likely to directly enhance mine or my genes’ survival probability. This is the sense of the distinction between ‘direct’ meaningful information and meaningful information. The second includes all relative information which in turn increases the probability of acquiring meaningful information. This opens the door to recursive growth of meaningful information and arbitrary increase of semantic complexity. It is this secondary recursive growth that grounds the use of meaningful information in the brain. Starting with meaningful information in the sense defined here [as what aids an entity in resisting entropy], we get something that looks more and more like the full notions of meaning we use in various contexts, by adding articulations and moving up to contexts where there is a brain, language, society, norms…^[ii]

Over the course of this book, I have endeavored to do just this: move up the various levels coupling entities to environmental contexts in more complex relationships, whereby more complex meaning is generated. By the time we reach the domain of Culture and human symbolic meaning, we are in an intricate field indeed, where all sorts of information vie for attention and interpretation, both directly and indirectly.

A scene from the first metamodern spirituality lab, a very meaningful event indeed!

What all of this ultimately offers us is a robust theorization of human meaning and value, and a framework for understanding how and why these emerge and change. It allows us to see how 1) meaning in human culture constitutes a dynamic system of meaningful information processing at multiple levels, linking the human person to material, biological, neuronal, and cultural realities; 2) these meanings play out in context, in response to specific conditions that characterize the entity–field relationship; 3) these meanings are subject to the continual revision of an ongoing learning process, whereby new information reduces uncertainty and reshapes beliefs and values.

In an attempt to represent this cumulative and dynamically recontextualizing nature of meaning across cosmic complexification, Table 1.3 presents the four types of learning in relation to the new layers of meaning that accrete with their novel forms of information processing.

Table 1.3. The Complexification of Meaning

Such meanings, we see, constitute an unbroken chain that leads from the most rudimentary to the most lofty.^[iv] At every level, meaning depends upon the various lower-order meanings that support it. Fostering social relationships, for instance, is rooted in the valence qualia of consciousness, which emerges from world modelling, which depends upon being alive, etc. The meanings unique to the human Culture plane given here are, however, admittedly little more than placeholders for the discussion that will follow. It will be the aim of the remainder of this book series to spell out more fully just what the evolution of human meaning and value actually looks like as Culture complexifies.

To get a better appreciation for how meaning can complexify in this way, let us look at a couple of examples. For this, we can use two profoundly meaningful issues operant at all scales of complexity: namely, generation and annihilation. Such matters are, obviously, fundamental to the issue of viability. What I wish to show here is just how these meanings evolve through complexifying Umwelts.