"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?"
"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 arises from biological value and goal-directedness when organisms register environmental patterns relative to survival-relevant stakes. Purely informational descriptions based on unpredictability, as in Shannon information, fail to capture semantic content because randomness lacks relevance to an organism's needs. Neural systems convert environmental regularities into representations that guide action, producing aboutness by linking signals to capacities, goals, and expected outcomes. Social interaction and shared symbols further ground individual representations, enabling communication and cultural coordination. Cultural institutions and personal narratives amplify and structure meaning, embedding individual experience within larger frameworks of significance and collective practice.
Read at Psychology Today
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