A Critical Examination of Brendan Graham Dempsey's Cosmic Theory of Meaning
Frank Visser / ChatGPT
Why Meaning Isn't Just Made Up | with Brendan Graham Dempsey & Nick Hedlund
The Meaning Problem
Brendan Graham Dempsey's provocative claim is that meaning is not simply something human beings invent. In his recent work, including The Evolution of Meaning, he attempts to reconstruct meaning as a natural phenomenon that reaches much further down into reality than language, culture and conscious reflection. The project is ambitious: instead of treating meaning as a late and perhaps accidental product of human brains, Dempsey wants to show a continuity from thermodynamics and information through matter, life and mind into language, culture, value and the sacred. His formulation is explicitly evolutionary. The universe does not merely contain meaningful beings; rather, the acquisition of meaningful information is presented as part of a universal learning process through which cosmic complexity develops.
This is an important project, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Dempsey is also right about something that critics of cosmic meaning sometimes overlook. Meaning is not adequately explained by simply declaring it to be an arbitrary human construction. Organisms do not encounter their environments as neutral collections of physical facts. Food, danger, shelter, mates, temperature and predators matter to organisms because organisms are organized around their own continued existence. A bacterium does not have to possess a human concept of nutrition for a chemical gradient to make a biological difference to it. An animal does not have to formulate the proposition “there is a predator nearby” before its nervous system can treat something in its environment as significant. There is therefore a perfectly respectable naturalistic problem of meaning to be explained.
The difficulty begins when this modest and defensible observation is expanded into a much stronger metaphysical thesis. Dempsey wants to trace meaning all the way down to the physical universe itself. His argument is that entities exist by maintaining themselves through energetic relationships with their environments, and that the information involved in these relationships can be understood in terms of what contributes to the entity's viability. In his earlier formulation, he describes this as a continuum of structural learning, genetic learning, cognitive learning and conceptual learning, corresponding roughly to Matter, Life, Mind and Culture. Meaning consequently becomes richer as information-processing systems become more complex.
From Information to Meaning
Here we reach the central ambiguity in Dempsey's argument. There is an enormous difference between saying that physical systems exhibit the preconditions for meaning, and saying that physical systems already possess meaning. The first proposition is scientifically and philosophically interesting. The second is much harder to establish. A whirlpool, for example, can be described as a self-maintaining dissipative structure whose persistence depends upon energy flows through its environment. One can even say that particular environmental conditions select for certain patterns of organization. But does the whirlpool therefore possess “meaning”? Dempsey has suggested that even a whirlpool exhibits a crude form of meaning.
That is where the terminology starts doing more work than the evidence.
A whirlpool certainly has causal relations with its environment. Its existence depends upon particular conditions. Its structure is sensitive to energy gradients. It can persist for a period of time and disappear when those conditions change. But none of this, by itself, establishes semantic significance. The whirlpool is not interpreting anything. It has no interests in the biological sense, no evolutionary history of selection for representations, no nervous system, no capacity to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information in anything resembling the cognitive sense. To call its sensitivity to environmental conditions “meaning” may be a legitimate philosophical stipulation, but it is not a discovery forced upon us by thermodynamics.
This distinction matters because Dempsey himself recognizes that Shannon information is not the same thing as meaning. Shannon's information theory measures statistical properties of signals; it does not tell us what those signals mean to a receiver. Dempsey therefore introduces a richer notion of meaningful information: information that matters to an entity because it contributes to its viability or flourishing. This is a genuine advance over the simplistic claim that “information equals meaning.” But it immediately raises another question: where does the entity come from for which something matters?
That question cannot simply be answered by saying that everything is already an agent.
Does a Whirlpool Have Meaning?
The biological case is much stronger. Once we have self-maintaining organisms undergoing natural selection, we have a genuine basis for talking about significance. An organism must distinguish, in a functional sense, between conditions that promote survival and conditions that threaten it. Evolution builds increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for doing this. Nervous systems enormously expand the capacity to register environmental differences, learn from them, anticipate future states and alter behavior. With cognition, representation and language, meaning becomes richer still. There is a perfectly coherent evolutionary story here.
But this is not the same as saying that evolution itself is learning.
The distinction may seem semantic, but it is actually explanatory. Individual organisms learn. Nervous systems learn. Populations can evolve adaptations through natural selection. Cultures accumulate information and modify themselves across generations. But there is no obvious single learner called “the Universe.” The phrase “evolution learns” can therefore function as a useful metaphor for the accumulation of successful adaptations, but if it is treated as a literal description, it risks importing agency into a process that does not possess an identifiable subject.
When Evolution Becomes a Learner
Dempsey repeatedly uses the language of learning to describe the evolutionary trajectory. His book presents meaningful information as central to the persistence and development of organized systems, and his broader work describes a movement from structural learning through genetic and cognitive learning toward conceptual learning. This is rhetorically powerful because learning suggests accumulation, adaptation and increasing informational sophistication.
But the metaphor becomes problematic if it is treated literally. Individual organisms learn. Nervous systems learn. Populations can be said to evolve adaptations through natural selection. Cultures accumulate information and modify themselves across generations. But there is no obvious single learner called “the Universe.”
This is precisely where Dempsey risks reproducing a familiar pattern in evolutionary spirituality. A real process is identified—increasing complexity, adaptive organization, information accumulation, cumulative learning—and then the process is personified or generalized until the universe itself appears to be the subject performing it. What was originally a description of organisms becomes a description of evolution; what was a description of evolution becomes a description of the cosmos.
The danger is subtle because the underlying continuity is real. Matter really did precede life. Life really did precede nervous systems. Nervous systems really did make increasingly sophisticated forms of learning possible. Minds really did give rise to language and cumulative culture. Dempsey is therefore not simply inventing a cosmic staircase. There really is a historical sequence here. The question is whether the existence of that sequence justifies using the same conceptual vocabulary at every level.
The Wilberian Shadow
This is where Ken Wilber enters the picture, whether Dempsey intends it or not. Wilber's evolutionary story famously moves from matter to life to mind and beyond, while adding an intrinsic evolutionary principle—Eros—to explain why reality repeatedly produces greater depth, complexity and consciousness. Dempsey is considerably more scientifically cautious than Wilber in his terminology, and he attempts to replace metaphysical Eros with thermodynamics, information processing, emergence and learning. But structurally the problem can remain remarkably similar.
If the universe is said to be engaged in a universal learning process that progressively generates richer forms of meaning, one has supplied evolution with a directionality that begins to perform much of the explanatory work that Wilber assigned to Eros. The vocabulary has changed. The philosophical architecture has not changed nearly as much.
This is an important point because Dempsey's project can easily be read as a scientifically updated version of a much older evolutionary metaphysics. Instead of saying that Spirit is unfolding through matter, one says that information is accumulating. Instead of saying that Eros drives evolution upward, one says that the universe is learning. Instead of invoking an explicitly spiritual teleology, one speaks about increasing meaningfulness, complexity and adaptive organization.
That may indeed be a more naturalistic formulation. But naturalistic vocabulary does not automatically produce a naturalistic argument. One still has to demonstrate that the concepts being used at the physical level actually mean what they mean at the biological, cognitive and cultural levels.
Complexity Is Not Progress
There is also an important difference between complexification and progress. The universe has certainly become more complex in some historically contingent regions and periods. Stars, galaxies, planets, chemistry, organisms, nervous systems and technological civilizations are vastly more differentiated than the early universe. But complexity by itself does not constitute value.
A cancer is complex. A bureaucratic organization can be extraordinarily complex. A modern weapons system is complex. An ecosystem can become more intricate while individual species go extinct. Complexity is therefore not synonymous with improvement, and evolutionary development does not automatically produce wisdom.
Dempsey is aware of the need to distinguish levels and forms of meaning, but the danger remains that “higher” complexity quietly acquires normative prestige. Once the story is told as an accumulation of information, learning, integration and meaning, the reader is naturally encouraged to see the later stages as superior to the earlier ones. That may be justified in some specific respects—a human scientist can obviously understand things that a bacterium cannot—but it does not follow that cosmic evolution as a whole is therefore moving toward some intrinsically better condition.
This is one of the perennial problems with the grand evolutionary narratives of Teilhard, Wilber and their successors. A descriptive sequence is transformed into a developmental hierarchy, and the hierarchy gradually acquires a moral direction. “Later” becomes “higher,” and “higher” becomes “better.” But evolution itself makes no such promise.
Dempsey and Vervaeke
The comparison with John Vervaeke is particularly illuminating. Vervaeke's work on relevance realization provides a much more psychologically and cognitively grounded account of why information matters. An organism or cognitive agent faces an environment containing vastly more possible information than it can process. The problem is therefore not simply acquiring information but determining what is relevant. This gives us a principled route from biological existence to cognition and eventually to symbolic thought.
Dempsey's contribution is to try to push this story further downward, into the physical and thermodynamic domain. That is an intriguing research program. But the further downward one goes, the more careful one has to become about the word “meaning.” A human being can understand that a sign stands for something. An animal can learn that a particular sound predicts food or danger. A cell can respond selectively to a chemical gradient. A physical structure can be constrained by its environment. These are not identical phenomena merely because they can be placed on a continuum.
The scientific challenge is precisely to explain how one kind of organization gives rise to another. If every form of causal sensitivity is called meaning, the problem has not really been solved; the word “meaning” has simply been stretched until it covers almost everything.
From Matter to Culture
This is where Dempsey's strongest contribution may actually be more modest than his cosmic language suggests. He is helping to articulate the conditions under which meaning becomes possible. That is philosophically significant without requiring us to conclude that meaning was already present in the primordial universe.
Matter does not have to possess human-like meaning for biological meaning to emerge later. Life does not have to contain language in miniature for language eventually to arise. Continuity does not require identity.
The biological transition is especially important. Once organisms are self-maintaining systems with their own conditions of viability, environmental differences can become significant in a way that they are not for ordinary physical objects. Natural selection then builds increasingly sophisticated capacities for responding to those differences. Nervous systems add memory and prediction. Minds add flexible representation. Language adds symbolic reference. Culture adds cumulative inheritance.
At this point “the evolution of meaning” becomes an entirely defensible phrase. Meaning-making systems really do have an evolutionary history. Human beings inherit not only genes but languages, concepts, technologies, institutions, narratives and practices. Cultural evolution can preserve information independently of genetic inheritance and can accumulate innovations at a speed biological evolution cannot match.
That is already a remarkable cosmic story.
The Symbolic Universe
Human symbolic culture introduces another genuine transformation. Language allows us to refer not only to what is immediately present but to what is absent, hypothetical, remembered, imagined or possible. We can discuss yesterday, tomorrow, distant galaxies, fictional characters, mathematical objects and possible futures. Symbols create a new layer of reality in which meaning can be detached from immediate perception and recombined in virtually unlimited ways.
This does not mean that culture floats free of biology or physics. On the contrary, symbolic systems depend upon embodied organisms, brains, social interaction and material infrastructures. But neither can they simply be reduced to the physical descriptions of those substrates. A constitution, a scientific theory or a monetary system has properties that cannot be adequately captured by describing the ink, paper, neurons or electronic states involved.
Here emergence provides a more promising philosophical framework than cosmic teleology. New levels can arise from lower levels without being reducible to a mere restatement of them. The existence of genuinely emergent properties does not require those properties to have been present in microscopic form from the beginning.
Meaning can therefore be both natural and emergent.
The Trouble with Cosmic Teleology
The problem returns when this historical emergence is interpreted as evidence of cosmic direction. The universe produced life, life produced minds, and minds produced culture. But the fact that one event historically preceded another does not demonstrate that the earlier event was aimed at the later one.
The universe did not have to be “trying” to produce meaning in order eventually to produce creatures capable of producing and discovering meaning. Evolution does not need foresight. Natural selection does not need a destination. Complexity does not need a cosmic intention. A process can generate genuine novelty without having anticipated its outcome.
This distinction is particularly important when discussing the familiar idea that the universe eventually becomes conscious of itself. There is a perfectly defensible poetic formulation here: the universe has produced organisms capable of investigating the universe. Human beings are made from cosmic material, and through science they can reconstruct aspects of cosmic history. In that sense, the universe has indeed produced beings through which it can be known.
But the statement that “the universe produced beings capable of knowing it” is not equivalent to saying that “the universe produced beings in order to know itself.” The first is historical. The second is teleological.
That tiny word—in order to—carries the metaphysical burden.
A Post-Wilberian Alternative
This is where Dempsey's project could become more interesting than either a conventional reductionism or another version of evolutionary spirituality. We can preserve the grand narrative without retaining the cosmic script.
We can tell the story from the early universe to stars, chemistry, life, nervous systems, minds, language, culture and science while refusing to insert a hidden cosmic subject behind the process. The universe produced beings for whom things can matter. Life produced organisms for whom information can become significant. Evolution produced nervous systems capable of learning. Culture produced symbolic systems capable of accumulating knowledge. None of these achievements becomes less astonishing when we remove the word “purpose.”
Indeed, the opposite may be true.
A genuinely post-Wilberian evolutionary narrative would therefore distinguish three questions that are often collapsed into one. First, what happened? That is the domain of empirical science. Second, how did new levels of organization become possible? That is where evolutionary theory, complexity science, thermodynamics, cognitive science and related disciplines contribute. Third, what does this history mean to us? That is where philosophy, ethics, existential reflection and perhaps religion enter.
The mistake is to use the answer to the third question as if it were already contained in the answer to the first.
Meaning as an Emergent Achievement
The deepest lesson of Dempsey's project may therefore be slightly different from the one he sometimes draws from it. Meaning does not have to be fundamental in order to be real. It does not have to exist in a whirlpool in order to exist in a bacterium. It does not have to be present in elementary particles in order to emerge in nervous systems. And it does not have to be written into the cosmos in advance in order for human beings to discover truths about the cosmos.
Meaning can be an achievement of organized matter.
That is hardly a reductionist conclusion. It is an emergentist one. Matter can become life; life can become sentience; sentience can become cognition; cognition can become language; language can become culture; culture can become cumulative knowledge. At each stage, something genuinely new can appear without having been secretly present in finished form at the beginning.
This provides a middle position between two unsatisfactory extremes. On one side is the claim that meaning is nothing but a subjective fiction imposed upon an intrinsically meaningless universe. On the other is the claim that meaning was somehow already encoded into matter from the beginning and that cosmic evolution is merely the unfolding of a pre-existing purpose. The emergentist position says something subtler: meaning is relational, embodied and historically developed, but once it emerges it is real.
The Universe Without a Script
Dempsey is right to resist the idea that meaning is “just made up.” But he may be asking too much of thermodynamics, information theory and cosmic evolution when he asks them to establish that meaning is already present throughout reality. The scientifically stronger and philosophically more interesting thesis is that the universe has generated systems for which things can matter. Once that happens, meaning is no longer an illusion. It is a real feature of the world—but a feature that emerged.
This also allows us to retain what was valuable in the earlier evolutionary visions. Teilhard was right to see the history of the cosmos as an extraordinary story of increasing organization and consciousness, even though his Omega Point cannot simply be extracted from science. Whitehead was right to insist that reality is characterized by process and becoming, although his metaphysics goes far beyond empirical physics. Wilber was right that biology alone cannot exhaust the story of human development, even if his invocation of Eros introduces a metaphysical direction into evolution. Vervaeke is right that meaning has to be understood through relevance, cognition and agency. And Dempsey is right that meaning has an evolutionary history extending from biological organization into cognition and culture.
The unresolved question is how far that history can legitimately be pushed downward.
Perhaps the best answer is also the simplest. Meaning need not have existed before life. Purpose need not have existed before organisms. Consciousness need not have been secretly waiting inside matter. What was required was a universe whose physical laws permitted increasing organization, chemistry, self-maintaining systems, evolution and eventually nervous systems capable of learning and minds capable of reflection.
That is not a diminished cosmic story. It is a more demanding one.
There is no guarantee that the universe will produce wisdom. There is no guarantee that complexity will produce goodness. There is no guarantee that intelligence will survive. There is no guarantee that human civilization represents the culmination of anything. Evolution has no obligation to validate our aspirations.
But against that backdrop, the emergence of beings capable of asking what anything means becomes even more remarkable.
The universe did not have to be heading toward us.
It only had to make us possible.
And perhaps that is the point at which Dempsey's “evolution of meaning” can be rescued from cosmic teleology without losing its deepest insight: meaning is not something we merely invented from nothing. It is something that nature eventually learned to do.
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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).