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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).

Brendan Graham Dempsey's New Cosmic Story

And the Problems It Inherits from Wilber, Teilhard, Vervaeke and Whitehead

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

A New Cosmic Narrative

Brendan Graham Dempsey's The Evolution of Meaning is an ambitious attempt to answer one of the most difficult questions in contemporary philosophy: where does meaning come from? His answer is deliberately evolutionary. Meaning is not something that suddenly appears when human beings invent language, religion or philosophy. It has a much deeper history, reaching back through life and biological organization into the physical processes from which life itself emerged. Dempsey wants to tell a continuous story from cosmos to culture, in which matter, life, mind and culture represent increasingly sophisticated ways in which reality organizes, processes and responds to information.

This makes Dempsey an interesting figure within the contemporary “integral” landscape. He is clearly dissatisfied with both crude materialism and equally crude forms of spiritual idealism. He does not want meaning to be reduced to a subjective projection, but neither does he simply want to revive the older vocabulary of Spirit descending into matter and then evolving back toward God. Instead, he attempts to reconstruct the grand evolutionary narrative in terms that sound more compatible with contemporary science: thermodynamics, information, self-organization, emergence, learning and evolutionary complexity.

The attraction of this approach is obvious. It promises to retain the grandeur of the cosmic story while removing some of the more overtly metaphysical assumptions of earlier evolutionary philosophies. But precisely because Dempsey is trying to occupy this middle ground, his project inherits a remarkable number of problems from those earlier thinkers. His terminology may be more contemporary, but the underlying temptation is familiar: to move from an empirically established sequence of increasing organization to a much more speculative story about direction, meaning and cosmic learning.

The result is a fascinating but unstable synthesis. Dempsey wants to naturalize the cosmic story without surrendering its sense of significance. The question is whether the scientific concepts he employs can actually carry the metaphysical weight he places upon them.

Meaning Before Human Beings

Dempsey's strongest starting point is also his most defensible one: organisms inhabit worlds of significance. For a living organism, the environment is not merely an arrangement of neutral physical objects. Some things sustain it, some threaten it, some attract it and some repel it. The organism must continually distinguish, however primitively, between environmental conditions that matter for its continued existence and those that do not.

This insight is hardly controversial within biology. An organism's survival depends upon its ability to respond appropriately to environmental conditions. Natural selection subsequently favors mechanisms that make such responses more effective. Nervous systems enormously expand these capacities, eventually producing organisms that can learn, remember, anticipate and manipulate representations of their surroundings. Human beings take the process further still through language, symbolic thought and cumulative culture.

Dempsey's important move is to ask whether the roots of this meaningful relationship with the environment can be traced further downward. If organisms derive meaningful information from their surroundings, can we identify more primitive forms of informational sensitivity in prebiotic chemistry or even in physical systems? And if we can, should these primitive forms already be called “meaning”?

That last step is where the controversy begins.

The Slide from Information to Meaning

Information is not meaning. This distinction has been recognized for decades, yet it remains surprisingly easy to lose sight of it when constructing grand theories of evolution. Shannon information, for example, concerns the statistical structure of signals and communication. It does not tell us what a signal means to a particular organism, person or culture.

Dempsey knows this and attempts to move beyond a purely Shannonian conception of information. Meaningful information, on his account, is information that makes a difference to the viability or flourishing of an organized system. This is much more promising because it introduces the relation between information and an entity for which that information matters.

But the conceptual problem has merely moved one step downward. Why does information matter to the organism in the first place? Because the organism has a structure organized around its own persistence. Its metabolism, reproduction and regulation establish functional distinctions between favorable and unfavorable conditions. Natural selection then reinforces those distinctions across generations.

This gives us a genuine naturalistic foundation for meaning. But it does not automatically give us meaning everywhere.

A rock participates in causal relationships. A flame responds to its environment. A whirlpool depends upon energy gradients. A crystal forms according to physical constraints. None of these facts by themselves establishes semantic meaning. If we call them all forms of meaning, we need to explain exactly what is gained by extending the term so far downward. Otherwise “meaning” risks becoming a synonym for “causal organization.”

Does Evolution Itself Learn?

The next major step in Dempsey's argument is even more revealing. He increasingly describes evolution in terms of learning. Matter exhibits one kind of structural learning; life exhibits genetic learning; organisms develop cognitive learning; human beings engage in conceptual learning. Evolution thus becomes a kind of universal learning process.

There is something genuinely insightful in this analogy. Evolution does produce increasingly sophisticated ways of storing, transmitting and exploiting information. Genetic systems preserve information across generations. Nervous systems permit individual organisms to modify their behavior. Culture allows information to accumulate at extraordinary speed. In this broad sense, the history of evolution can certainly be described as an expansion of learning capacities.

But there is a danger in converting the analogy into ontology. Organisms learn. Populations evolve. Cultures learn in a metaphorical or distributed sense. But who, exactly, is the learner when we say that the universe learns?

This is not merely a linguistic quibble. Learning normally involves a system that changes its behavior or internal organization as a consequence of information acquired through interaction with its environment. Natural selection, by contrast, does not require a system that consciously or intentionally updates itself. Evolution can produce adaptive complexity without any evolutionary subject deciding what it ought to learn.

To say that evolution “learns” can therefore be illuminating if it means that successful information is retained and unsuccessful configurations disappear. But if the universe is treated as an actual learner, Dempsey has quietly introduced precisely the kind of cosmic agency that his naturalistic vocabulary was supposed to avoid.

The Wilberian Problem in New Clothing

This is where Dempsey begins to resemble Ken Wilber more than he may initially appear to. Wilber's evolutionary philosophy requires an internal principle of directionality. His answer is Eros: an intrinsic tendency within the Kosmos toward greater depth, complexity, consciousness and realization. Evolution is therefore not merely a succession of accidents and selections but an expression of a deeper evolutionary impulse.

Dempsey does not simply reproduce Wilber's Eros. His framework is much more closely tied to thermodynamics, information and learning. Yet the structural role of his concepts can become surprisingly similar. Once evolution is interpreted as a universal learning process that progressively generates richer forms of organization and meaning, “learning” begins to explain the directionality that Wilber explains through Eros.

This creates an interesting question for Dempsey. Has he actually escaped evolutionary metaphysics, or has he translated it into the language of information?

Replacing “Spirit” with “information” does not by itself make a theory scientific. Replacing “Eros” with “learning” does not automatically remove teleology. The crucial issue is whether the new concepts have independent empirical explanatory power or whether they are simply more acceptable names for the same underlying intuition: that the cosmos somehow tends toward greater complexity, consciousness and meaning.

Dempsey's challenge is therefore not to abandon the cosmic narrative but to demonstrate that the directionality he perceives is an emergent statistical and historical phenomenon rather than evidence of an intrinsic cosmic drive.

The Teilhardian Inheritance

The resemblance to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is even more obvious. Teilhard famously interpreted cosmic evolution as a grand movement from matter through life and consciousness toward increasing unity and eventually the Omega Point. His great intuition was that evolution should not be understood merely as biological change. The entire cosmos has a history, and consciousness is part of that history.

Dempsey's story is far less explicitly Christian and far more naturalistic, but the narrative architecture remains strikingly similar. Matter gives rise to life, life gives rise to increasingly sophisticated information processing, mind gives rise to culture, and culture gives rise to increasingly explicit forms of meaning. The result is another great evolutionary arc in which the universe becomes progressively more capable of processing and generating significance.

There is nothing wrong with recognizing this historical sequence. The problem arises when the sequence is interpreted as evidence of an inherent direction toward meaning.

Teilhard could ultimately appeal to theology to explain the Omega Point. Dempsey cannot simply do the same thing while claiming that thermodynamics and evolutionary science have established it. The existence of increasing complexity in some regions of the universe does not demonstrate that complexity is the universe's destination.

The historical emergence of human consciousness is a fact. The claim that the cosmos was somehow striving toward consciousness is an interpretation.

The Whiteheadian Connection

Dempsey also stands in the shadow of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead's process philosophy rejected the image of reality as a collection of inert objects and instead described the world in terms of events, processes, relations and becoming. This makes Whitehead an obvious precursor for anyone attempting to construct a cosmology in which meaning and novelty are intrinsic to evolutionary development.

Whitehead's philosophy is especially relevant because he attempted to explain how novelty and value could emerge within a world understood as process rather than mechanism. His notion of experience extends far beyond human consciousness, allowing different grades of experiential organization throughout nature.

Dempsey's account can sound Whiteheadian when he describes increasingly complex systems as participating in progressively richer forms of informational significance. Yet there is an important distinction. Whitehead's metaphysics is not simply an empirical generalization from thermodynamics. It is a highly elaborate philosophical system with its own concepts of actual occasions, prehensions, creativity and God.

This distinction matters. Whitehead may provide philosophical resources for interpreting the scientific picture, but Whiteheadian metaphysics is not something that physics has experimentally demonstrated. Dempsey's project becomes vulnerable whenever philosophical interpretation is presented as though it were simply the logical consequence of scientific facts.

Dempsey and Vervaeke: Meaning as Relevance

John Vervaeke offers perhaps the most useful contemporary comparison because his work approaches meaning from the standpoint of cognition rather than cosmic metaphysics. His concept of relevance realization addresses a genuine problem: organisms and minds are confronted with more possible information than they can process, so intelligence consists partly in determining what matters in a given context.

This gives us a powerful way of understanding the evolution of meaning. Biological organisms become increasingly sophisticated at detecting environmental regularities that are relevant to their survival. Nervous systems allow flexible responses. Brains construct models and predictions. Human cognition adds abstraction, language and symbolic reference. Culture then creates collective systems for preserving and refining knowledge.

The Vervaekian framework therefore provides a plausible bridge between biological organization and human meaning without requiring us to declare the entire universe a meaning-making agent.

Dempsey's more radical contribution is to ask whether relevance itself has deeper physical roots. That is an interesting question. But the danger is that the explanatory direction becomes reversed. Instead of showing how physical organization eventually gives rise to biological relevance and then cognition, we start by labeling physical organization itself as primitive relevance and then congratulate ourselves for having explained the later forms.

The terminology has unified the levels, but the transition between them remains to be explained.

Evolutionary Biology Is Less Teleological

There is another problem that becomes apparent when Dempsey's cosmic story is compared directly with evolutionary biology. Evolutionary theory certainly explains the accumulation of adaptations, but it does not require a general tendency toward increasing complexity. Evolution produces simplification as readily as elaboration. Parasites can lose biological functions. Organisms can become highly specialized. Lineages can remain relatively simple for immense periods. Complexity can increase under some conditions and decrease under others.

Most importantly, evolution does not know where it is going.

Natural selection is extraordinarily powerful precisely because it does not require foresight. Variation arises without regard to future usefulness. Selection filters variants through their consequences in particular environments. The resulting adaptations can look remarkably purposeful, but the purpose is not present in the evolutionary process itself.

This is why evolutionary biology is so resistant to cosmic teleology. Once we start describing evolution as “learning,” “development” or “progress,” we must constantly remind ourselves that these words can easily smuggle agency and direction into a process that has neither.

Dempsey's project will ultimately succeed or fail according to how carefully he maintains that distinction.

The Problem of Adaptive Truth

There is another important issue that a theory of evolutionary meaning must confront: survival and truth are not the same thing. An information-processing system can be highly successful without representing the world accurately in every respect. Evolution selects for adaptive consequences, not philosophical truth.

Human beings are particularly good examples. We have evolved extraordinary capacities for reasoning, abstraction and scientific discovery, but we are also capable of superstition, self-deception, tribal mythology and elaborate false beliefs. A belief can be psychologically satisfying, socially cohesive or reproductively advantageous without being true.

This complicates any straightforward narrative in which evolution gradually accumulates “meaningful information” and therefore approaches greater knowledge. Evolution certainly accumulates information in genomes and cultures, but information can be misleading, redundant, maladaptive or false. Cultural evolution can preserve errors for centuries.

Science is remarkable precisely because it introduces institutional mechanisms for correcting some of these errors. Observation, experiment, prediction, replication, criticism and theory revision create a cultural system that is unusually good at detecting mistakes. But this is not a guarantee supplied by cosmic evolution. It is a hard-won cultural achievement.

When Complexity Becomes Value

The same caution applies to the relationship between complexity and value. Dempsey's evolutionary story is naturally attracted to increasing complexity because complexity is one of the most obvious features of cosmic and biological history. But complexity is not itself a moral category.

A more complex organism is not automatically better than a simpler organism. A more complex society is not automatically wiser than a simpler one. A more sophisticated technology can increase human freedom or make mass destruction easier. A highly differentiated civilization can produce both great art and industrialized murder.

This is where the older integral and evolutionary traditions have repeatedly gotten into trouble. They tend to transform empirical trends into developmental hierarchies. Once a sequence has been established, the later stages become “higher,” and once they are higher, they are implicitly judged to be better.

But nature does not come equipped with our value judgments.

If Dempsey wants to defend genuine evolutionary progress, therefore, he needs an account of value that is not simply smuggled in through the words complexity, integration, meaning or learning.

The Sacred Returns

Eventually the question of meaning becomes inseparable from the question of the sacred. Human beings do not merely process information. They care about things. They distinguish what is ordinary from what is worthy of exceptional reverence, loyalty, devotion or protection. Religious traditions make this especially explicit, but secular societies also construct sacred values around human rights, nations, freedom, justice, truth and other ideals.

Dempsey is right to recognize that the sacred cannot simply be dismissed as an irrational residue left over from primitive religion. The human capacity to experience value and significance is a profound feature of our psychological and cultural evolution.

But once again, there is a crucial distinction between explaining the emergence of the sacred and proving that the cosmos itself is sacred. The first is a scientific and philosophical project. The second is a metaphysical or theological interpretation.

Dempsey's cosmic story becomes most vulnerable when these levels begin to merge.

And Then There Is God

The question of God makes the problem unavoidable. If the evolutionary process is interpreted as a universal movement toward greater meaning, one can easily begin to wonder whether the process has a divine dimension. Dempsey's engagement with Whitehead makes this temptation particularly visible because Whitehead provides a sophisticated model of a God who is not simply an external creator but participates in the unfolding of the world.

There is nothing illegitimate about exploring such a theology. But it should be called theology.

Science can investigate the physical conditions under which complexity emerges, the biological evolution of organisms, the cognitive basis of meaning and the cultural history of religion. It cannot, by those discoveries alone, establish that the universe is ultimately divine or that evolution is moving toward God.

The moment the argument makes that additional step, we have left empirical science and entered metaphysics.

A Naturalistic Cosmic Story Is Still Possible

None of this means that Dempsey's project should be abandoned. On the contrary, his central question is worth pursuing precisely because the conventional alternatives are inadequate. We should not have to choose between the claim that meaning is merely an arbitrary human projection and the claim that every atom already contains a tiny piece of cosmic meaning.

There is a third possibility: meaning is an emergent property of certain kinds of organized matter. Physical systems make life possible; life creates systems for which environmental conditions matter; nervous systems transform those relations into increasingly sophisticated forms of information processing; minds generate representations; language creates symbolic worlds; culture allows meaning to accumulate across generations.

On this account, meaning has a history without having to be primordial.

That distinction is crucial. We do not diminish meaning by making it emergent. We explain how it became possible.

The Cosmic Story Without the Cosmic Script

Dempsey's greatest challenge is therefore to tell the cosmic story without turning it into a cosmic script. He is right that the history from matter to life to mind to culture is astonishing. He is right that information and learning become increasingly important as evolution proceeds. He is right that meaning cannot be understood solely as an arbitrary human invention. And he is right that the sciences of complexity, thermodynamics, evolution and cognition need to be brought into conversation if we want a genuinely integrated account of reality.

But none of this requires the universe itself to be a learner.

None of it requires an intrinsic Eros.

None of it requires an Omega Point.

None of it requires that complexity be equivalent to progress.

And none of it requires that the physical universe possess meaning in anything like the human sense.

The strongest version of Dempsey's argument may therefore be the one that asks the least from metaphysics. Rather than claiming that the cosmos itself has been evolving meaning from the beginning, we can say that cosmic evolution eventually produced systems capable of generating, receiving and reflecting upon meaning. Matter became organized enough to sustain life. Life became organized enough to sustain cognition. Cognition became organized enough to sustain symbolic culture. Culture became organized enough to investigate the universe from which it emerged.

That is already an extraordinary evolutionary achievement.

Beyond Wilber, Teilhard and Whitehead

In this respect Dempsey has an opportunity that earlier evolutionary philosophers did not possess. He can retain the great historical intuition shared by Teilhard, Whitehead and Wilber while abandoning their more problematic metaphysical extrapolations. Teilhard saw the cosmic continuity of matter, life and consciousness but interpreted it through Christian teleology. Whitehead developed a profound metaphysics of process, creativity and value but went far beyond what empirical science could establish. Wilber recognized the importance of evolutionary and developmental hierarchy but introduced Eros as a cosmic explanatory principle.

Dempsey can potentially learn from all three without simply reproducing them.

From Vervaeke he can learn to take cognition and relevance seriously. From evolutionary biology he can learn to distinguish historical direction from cosmic purpose. From complexity science he can learn how order can arise without an ordering intelligence. From thermodynamics he can learn that local increases in organization are perfectly compatible with the overall dynamics of physical systems. And from philosophy he can learn to distinguish empirical description from metaphysical interpretation.

The result would be a genuinely post-Teilhardian evolutionary narrative: grand enough to encompass the cosmos, but modest enough to respect what science actually establishes.

Meaning Without a Cosmic Eros

Dempsey's great challenge is ultimately the same challenge that has confronted almost every evolutionary spirituality since Darwin. We desperately want evolution to mean something. We want the extraordinary sequence from matter to life, mind and culture to be more than a chain of contingent events. We want direction, development and perhaps even destiny.

But wanting the universe to have a direction does not demonstrate that it has one.

The scientific picture may be stranger and more exciting than the old teleological story. A universe governed by relatively simple physical laws can generate stars, planets, chemistry, life, nervous systems, minds and civilizations without having planned any of them. Natural selection can produce extraordinary adaptations without knowing what it is doing. Self-organization can produce order without an organizer. Cultural evolution can produce knowledge without guaranteeing wisdom.

Meaning can emerge without having been planted.

That may be the genuinely revolutionary possibility in Dempsey's project. The cosmic story does not have to end with the discovery of a meaning that was secretly present from the beginning. It can culminate, at least provisionally, in the emergence of beings for whom meaning becomes a problem in the first place.

The universe did not necessarily evolve toward meaning.

It evolved a world in which meaning became possible.

And that is perhaps where Dempsey's evolutionary story becomes most compelling—not when it tells us that the cosmos itself is learning, but when it shows us how astonishing it is that, somewhere within that cosmos, learning eventually became conscious of itself.