The Evolution of Meaning: From Thermodynamic Survival to the Sacred

This framework addresses the explanatory gap between physical substrates and the phenomena of life, mind, and culture by proposing that meaning is not a late-arriving human projection but an Ontological feature that deepens across genuinely emergent planes of reality. Drawing on Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), it posits a monistic foundation — a single energy-information field — from which four qualitatively distinct planes emerge: Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture. Each plane is constituted by a novel form of information processing and characterized by a unique entity-field coupling that defines its Viability domain.

The key move is grounding meaning in Mutual Information — the statistical correlation between a system's internal states and its environment, maintained against entropy. This allows meaning to be identified even at the level of Dissipative Structures in physics. Jeremy England's work on Dissipative Adaptation provides the formal basis: thermodynamic boundary conditions select for structures that minimize free energy, generating proto-teleological dynamics without importing purpose from biology or intentionality.

Life represents a genuine Ontological transition, not merely increased complexity. DNA introduces Semantic information — a symbolic encoding system that represents ecological constraints rather than merely instantiating physical order. Evolution operates as a recursive epistemic process: variation generates informational novelty, natural selection tests it against environmental reality, and better-coupled organism-ecology relationships are preserved. A crucial asymmetry emerges: evolution itself is non-normative, yet it reliably produces organisms with increasingly sophisticated normative capacities.

Language marks a further phase transition. Drawing on Carlo Rovelli's distinction between direct and Indirect meaning, language retroactively reframes all prior biological and experiential meanings while generating novel semantic domains with no sub-cultural analogue. Indirect meanings recursively generate further indirect meanings, producing a self-amplifying architecture of semantic complexity. The relationship between thermodynamic foundation and cultural Superstructure is one of necessary condition without content determination.

The sacred, reframed in information-theoretic terms, represents the attractor states of a culture's meaning-space — the most causally potent values refined through collective selection pressure. It functions as a dissipative structure itself, simultaneously conservative and generative. Awe, understood through predictive processing, is the phenomenology of encountering information weighty enough to demand fundamental model revision. The meta-sacred is the learning process itself — the invariant mechanism beneath every historically specific sacred form, and the deepest expression of the cosmic trajectory toward ever-richer meaning.