The Origin of Meaning

Semiosis and the deep past of the future

On the Peircean account adopted here, the young Earth could be full of patterns while lacking meaning. Lightning branched; crystals repeated their lattices; tidal pools concentrated and dispersed salts. For a pattern to mean something in the sense used in this chapter — to stand for a state of affairs beyond itself — an interpretive relation must take it that way. Other naturalistic theories recognize thinner causal or informational relations before life. The claim here concerns interpreted aboutness, not every legitimate use of information.

The mystery has a precise shape once you refuse to be sloppy about what a symbol is. The most rigorous account we have is Charles Sanders Peirce’s,¹ and it is triadic. Every genuine symbol involves three things at once: a sign, the pattern that does the standing-for; an object, the state of affairs it stands for; and an interpretant, the agent or mechanism that takes the sign as standing for the object. Remove any leg and the triad collapses. A sign with no interpretant is just a mark. An object with no sign is just a fact. And an interpretant is not optional decoration on a relation that would otherwise hold on its own — it is the thing that makes the relation hold. Meaning is irreducibly three-legged, and the load-bearing leg is the interpreter.

On this semantic convention, prebiotic patterns were not yet symbols. Lightning correlates with electrical discharge, but the correlation alone is not Peircean interpretation. The proposal is that the first minimal interpreter and the first minimal agent arose together. This is a biosemiotic thesis, not a result established by defining correlation or computation.

This chapter concerns semantic meaning: interpreted aboutness. Volume 9 later concerns existential meaning: the relation through which reflective agents situate experience and action within endorsed values, purposes, narratives, and relationships. The first can be attributed to minimal interpreters under this proposal; the second requires richer capacities and should not be inferred from a signal-response relation alone.

The First Interpreter

So the question “when did meaning begin?” becomes “when did the first interpreter appear?” This account locates the transition near the origin of life, because living regulation supplies the first plausible interpreters.

I mean this in the specific sense developed in Constructors. A constructor is a pattern that not only persists but propagates order into its surroundings, and when a constructor acquires self-maintenance and replication it crosses the threshold we call living. Such a thing has, for the first time, a stake in its environment. It has states it must preserve and states that would destroy it. That stake is what an interpretant needs and a crystal lacks. A salt crystal does not care whether it dissolves; a protocell’s whole existence is organized around not dissolving. Once there is something with a stake, a molecular pattern can come to matter to it — can be taken as a signal to act one way rather than another. Interpretation is not something minimal agents do in addition to living. It is a description of what living is.

This is why meaning is coeval with agency and not a late arrival on top of it. We are tempted to imagine meaning entering the world with human language, or with nervous systems, or at least with brains complex enough to hold a thought. But that picture puts the interpretant far too late. The triad closes the instant there is an agent with a stake and a pattern it responds to as a stand-in for its stake. That is a chemical event, not a cognitive one, and it happened at the dawn of life.

Where exactly? The universal encoding we inherited — DNA, whose codons stand for amino acids and are read by cellular machinery that builds proteins accordingly — is a fully-formed semiotic system, as clean an instance of Peirce’s triad as exists in nature. A codon is a sign; the amino acid is its object; the ribosome and its retinue are the interpretant. But DNA is far too elaborate to have been first. A code that intricate is the outcome of a long history of simpler codes, the way a written alphabet presupposes speech.

The RNA-world hypothesis points at the more plausible beginning. Before the division of labor between information-carrying DNA and work-performing proteins, RNA molecules did both — carrying sequence and catalyzing reactions in the same strand. In that world the first symbol may have been an RNA sequence whose presence stood for an environmental condition: the availability of a nutrient, the shape of an energy gradient. A minimal replicator that responded to that sequence by shifting its chemistry was interpreting it — taking one pattern as standing for another and acting on the reading. A membrane-bound protocell offers the same story in a different key: a molecular marker embedded in the membrane standing for internal resource levels or external stress, read by the metabolic machinery within and answered by an adjustment. In each case the triad is complete. Sign, object, interpretant — nutrient-marker, nutrient, replicator. Meaning, in the strict Peircean sense, hundreds of millions of years before the first cell we would recognize.

Notice that this is the same structure I develop in Truth Machines, pushed back to its origin. There I argue that a computation is an interpretive act: given a pattern \(P\) and an interpreter \(I\), the output \(I(P)\) is \(P\) interpreted under \(I\), and there are no absolute truths, only consistent interpreter–pattern pairs. The first protocell is the first \(I\). It is the first place in the history of matter where a pattern was handed to an interpreter and thereby made to mean. Everything that follows — codons, neurons, words, this sentence — is elaboration on the triad that closed in a warm pool four billion years ago. Meaning did not wait for minds. Minds are what meaning grew into.

The Second Great Inversion

If the first inversion was matter learning to mean, the second was time learning to run backwards.

At some point in prehistory, hominin planning acquired greater temporal depth. No surviving tool or bone can tell us when an individual first imagined a world ten years ahead; the interval is a rhetorical marker for long-range planning, not an archaeological measurement. What changed was not merely anatomy but the reach of imagination, and imagination does not fossilize directly.

Consider what conceiving of a decade ahead requires. It is not one capacity but a stack of them, each abstract, laid one atop the next. You need number, to hold “ten” as a quantity rather than a vague “many.” You need duration, to grasp a year as an interval and not just a season felt and forgotten. You need a self, a continuity of identity that persists as the intervals accumulate. And you need counterfactual simulation — the power to build a world that does not exist and inspect it. None of this is memory. Memory replays what was. This constructs what is not, and might be. It is recursive imagination: the mind stepping outside the present to watch the self advance through time.

Nonhuman animals plan in ways that vary by species and experiment, and the outer limits of that planning remain contested. Archaeology gives indirect evidence about hominin projects, teaching, migration, and ritual; it cannot recover the exact time horizon represented by Homo erectus or Neanderthals. By the Upper Paleolithic, cumulative craft and symbolic practices support an inference to planning across seasons and generations. A mind that does that is not merely intelligent. It is temporally extended: it can organize action around a self and community represented across years.

This is the recursive imagination of Creativity as Virtual Evolution turned upon time itself. There creativity is modeled as a generate–evaluate–retain loop: trying out possibilities against represented constraints before paying the price of testing them in the world. Temporal depth aims that machinery forward, making possible futures available for comparison before the body commits. The evolutionary language is analogical inside one mind unless variants are transmitted and differentially retained across a population.

And once it appeared, the direction of explanation seemed to invert. Past conditions still shaped the organism, but an imagined future represented in the present could help steer action. The hunter set out partly because of what he pictured. Nothing traveled backward in time: present neural states with future-directed content altered present behavior. The metaphor matters because goals reorganize causal explanation even while ordinary physical causation remains intact.

Language crystallized the new dimension and made it collective. Later, tomorrow, next winter — adverbs are prosthetics for long-range simulation, handles that let one mind pass a piece of the future to another. Rituals bound shared time; calendars measured it; myths gave it a shape running from an origin to an end. Having domesticated fire, we set about domesticating duration. Cultural transmission could then retain practices whose users anticipated seasonal or long-range conditions, alongside many other filters. This did not replace biological selection or rebuild a purely reactive brain in one step; it expanded the reach of socially scaffolded prediction.

To think years ahead is, metaphorically, to resist local decay by investing work in continuity. The second law is not suspended, and causality does not reverse; an organized system spends energy now because its present model represents possible futures. Meaning, on this account, began with minimal interpretation and expanded when animals could represent futures far beyond the current stimulus. That was when time became a medium of deliberate human projects.