At some point you’ve probably heard some variation on the following existential crisis, a staple cliche among college freshmen. You might have even thought it yourself.
“There is no true meaning to life. How could there be, when humans are just temporary arrangements of particles that existed long before us and will exist long after we die? There is no meaning in a particle or a wave and no way to derive meaning from the physical laws that govern their behavior. The illusion of meaning is an accidental byproduct of the chemicals in your brain. There’s no greater structure out there to confer meaning on these random fluctuations of matter.”
This argument isn’t usually taken at face value. Instead, it gets unconsciously translated to mean something like “I’m struggling to relate emotionally to the narratives of personal meaning my culture is presenting me.” If that’s a reasonable translation, then it’s reasonable to give answers that, taken at face value, are total non-sequiturs. Things along the lines of: “You’ll get used to it as you get older,” or “You just have to accept Christ,” or “You have to make your own meaning.”
Depending on how exactly they’re phrased, these responses range from useless to condescending. If this is just an emotional problem dressed in angsty philosophizing, it might not be useful to give an abstractly philosophical answer. That’s all well and good, but it turns out that this is also a serious and important philosophical question that, unbeknownst to most people, does have a reasonably straightforward answer. The answer is called semiosis.
Let’s rephrase the question a bit. At one point there was no meaning in the universe. Particles and waves just knocked around in accord with the physical laws that define them. Here and now, meaning is constantly bubbling up everywhere. You’re making meaning right now! Maybe it’s only the “illusion” of meaning, but that’s a distinction without a difference: illusions are meaning, and just as impossible to derive from physics as “genuine” meaning.
At some point, the surface of the Earth went from a barren desert of meaning like the rest of universe to a thin ring of prolific significance. When and how exactly did that happen?
Defining life
At the broadest scale, the difference between Earth and the non-meaningful universe is obvious: there is life on Earth, and (to our knowledge) nowhere else. The origin of life is at the very least the necessary first step from meaninglessness to a planet of conscious humans making meaning together. But what exactly is life? How does it differ from the physical behavior of non-living matter?
The answer was discovered and recognized by at least 1994. But if you ask most philosophers of biology, it’s still an unanswered question. They don’t like the answer because it identifies a new and unique process that is not derivable from physics.
To understand how foolish that is, imagine that astrophysicists had refused to accept nuclear fusion theory. Without a causal model of what made a star a star, they could only distinguish them from large gas giants by a range of traits. Stars are big and hot and bright because they release energy from within. Where does that energy come from? How is it released? No one has been able to figure out a way to explain that using classical mechanics!
It sounds absurd, but this is precisely the sort of definition people are still giving for life. Carl Sagan’s definition for Encyclopedia Britannica in 1970 was “Life is a system capable of evolution by natural selection.” Other definitions hinge on life’s unique capacity to locally decrease entropy. Wikipedia lists 7 capabilities that define life:
homeostasis
organization
metabolism
growth
adaptation
response to stimuli
reproduction
None of these definitions offer any clue about how life is able to achieve these unique and remarkable feats. They define life by its heat and light and give not even a hint that anyone has discovered the fusion that produces them.
What is semiosis?
If you’ve done advanced coursework in certain disciplines, or read much Umberto Eco, you may have encountered the term semiosis before. Semiotics (the academic study of semiosis—the two words are often used interchangeably) is a core element of many theories in linguistics, anthropology, and literary studies. It played an especially important role in the development of postmodern critical theories. But unless you’re especially well-versed in these fields, I doubt that the idea left much of an impression. (If you are well-versed in semiotics, I think my take on the idea will likely be distinct enough from what you’ve read before that it will still be interesting to you).
The first time I remember hearing the word and looking it up was in the postscript to Eco’s Name of the Rose. I had enjoyed the book and wanted to learn more, so I went to wikipedia and found something like this absolutely stultifying definition:
Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter.
Like many explanations of semiosis, this definition has a remarkable capacity to resist attention and understanding. All of the words are familiar enough on their own, and they’re put together in a way that seems pretty simple, yet as a whole the definition seems to find no purchase in my mind. It doesn’t leave me with any impression at all of what semiosis is or why it could be significant.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that fusion became a central element of modern physics while semiosis has struggled for recognition. Fusion is a deeply unintuitive mystery wrested from the unfathomable realm of atomic matter. We are compelled to study it to reconcile the sense that it should be impossible with the fact that it nonetheless plainly occurs. Semiosis, by contrast, is so overwhelmingly familiar that we struggle to focus our attention on it. Of course signs communicate meaning to an interpreter. It seems to go without saying. It’s hard to imagine how it could fruitfully enrich our understanding of anything as complex as life to point out something so banal.
If you push past that initial impenetrability, things only get worse. Semiotics as a field is an absolute mess of jargon and inscrutable models. Take this diagram of the “semiotic” triangle, given to explain the meaning of the word “house”:
Coming across a figure like this is not likely to clear anything up for anyone. Ironically, writing about semiosis devolves into meaninglessness faster than nearly any technical writing I’ve ever encountered.
Semioticians love to jump right into categorizing signs before they satisfactorily explain what a sign is and how it could come about. They are interested in large, complex systems and treat their physical workings as a black box. This is a mistake. Abstractions are useful for understanding complex systems, but semiosis cannot be truly understood as an abstraction. It is first and foremost a physical process.
An example
Here’s my simple definition of semiosis: two unrelated physical processes joined together such that one causes the other.
In other words, semiosis is a local, conditional relationship of cause and effect. Imagine it as a kind of universal causal duct-tape. If I take a bell and attach it to a door, then opening the door causes the bell to ring.
On its own, the door could never make the sound of a ringing bell. The bell would remain silent or ring as an effect of other causes. Only when bell is physically conjoined to the door does the door cause the sound.
Of course, by this definition, semiosis is inherent in all physical processes. You can’t bond an oxygen to two hydrogens to form a water molecule without meeting this definition of semiosis. And indeed, some semioticians apply semiosis to non-living systems in exactly this way (called “physiosemiosis”).
The semiotic definition of life, or “biosemiosis,” is more specific. It hinges not on the mere occurrence of semiosis, but on a self-propagating chain reaction of semioses. Just as fusion does, rarely, occur outside of stars, semiosis occurs outside of life. The difference in both cases is scale and persistence. What makes a star is not the occurrence of fusion, but the fact that each fusion event creates the conditions that guarantee another one follows. Hydrogen nuclei collide to form helium, which enables the fusion of helium nuclei to form carbon and oxygen.
Analogously, the beginning of life was the moment when the causal duct-taping of semiosis went from a series of dead-ends to a closed cycle. How did that cycle come about?
The beginning of life
Biosemioticists place a lot of emphasis on the existence of codes in biology, which relate two otherwise unrelated “worlds” of molecules. The most significant of these is the genetic code, which relates a sequence of 3 RNA nucleotides to a specific amino acid. Biologists and the educated public alike have fallen into the trap of treating this code as essentially synonymous with life’s definitional capacity for evolution. Both of these are mistakes.
It’s true that a code has enormous implications. But it’s important to remember that the “code” is nothing more than a library of semiotic relationships: different doors with different bells on them. In the case of the genetic code, that’s a library of “transfer RNA” molecules (tRNA), which duct tape a connector that matches a set of 3 nucleotides on one side to a connector that matches a particular amino acid on the other. Where these molecules exist, the genetic code is a causal “law.” Where they are absent, these nucleotides and amino acids have no relationship at all.
Of course, even this complete library of transfer RNA molecules would be a dead end if it somehow came into existence alone. It is only a “code” in the presence of a sequence of messenger RNA to match on one side, and amino acids to match on the other side, and a ribosome to bring them all together. The minimum viable complexity of the genetic code, this simplest and most fundamental element of evolving life, already seems irreducibly complex. And the only way we know of for an “irreducibly complex” system to come about is through evolution.
Carl Sagan’s definition of life—“a system capable of evolution by natural selection”—thus poses a bit of a paradox. If life is defined by evolution and evolution occurs through the genetic code, then life can only come about if it already exists.
The semiotic view of evolution
The resolution to this paradox is semiosis. The true beginning of evolution long predates the emergence of the genetic code. Evolution began when the rate of semiosis exceeded a certain minimum threshold. In some “primordial soup” on ancient Earth, all sorts of new and complex molecules were able to form. Through their mere existence, they duct-taped all sorts of random causes to random effects.
Because these molecules were large and structurally complex, they could link a much wider array of causes and effects than was typical of molecules in other parts of the universe. The number of possible combinations was large, and as molecules formed and broke apart and reformed, those combinations were explored. Most of these molecules were sterile, just one of countless local arrangements of matter that altered the local environment until they ceased to exist.
A few of them, however, changed the conditions in their environment in a way that made it more likely for similar molecules to form. These persisted, and by their very prevalence altered the conditions under which other molecules formed and persisted and interacted. Through many generations of this "chemical evolution,” a highly unlikely but extremely self-stabilizing cycle of molecules emerged, together creating the precise conditions necessary to replicate each other.
This is the essence of evolution. What is under selection is not DNA, not genes, not memes, not any abstract notion of a replicator but semiosis, the actual physical pairing of cause and effect. Through evolution, the local manifestation of the universal laws of physics is utterly transformed. Arrangements of matter so unlikely as to be impossible anywhere else in the universe become inevitable and hyper-abundant.
The difference between semiosis and nuclear fusion is that semiosis can scale up indefinitely. Stars cannot produce atoms heavier than iron. Semiosis can duct-tape together other semiotic processes without apparent limit short of the maximum information density of the universe. The genetic code is only the beginning. On top of genes, even a single-celled bacterium is defined by a prodigious number of interrelated semiotic systems that each affect the behavior whole swathes of complicated molecular structures. Eukaryotic cells and their organelles, multicellular organisms, organs, sensory perception of the environment, communication between individuals, and all of culture are nothing more than semiotic duct-tapings of causes and effects which are themselves inputs and outputs of complex semiotic systems.
Returning to the meaning of life
It might seem like we are still a long way from answering our original question: how did meaning come about in a meaningless universe? But in fact the rest is just (very interesting!) details. The answer involves nothing more than the same semiotic process, stacked on top of itself a million times over. A red light “means” stop in only and exactly the places where physical mechanisms (thousands to millions of semiotically evolved physical mechanisms) connect light detectors to brake systems.
What conclusion should our nihilistic teen take from this semiotic view of life and meaning? Does it elucidate the answer to their real question, “what is the meaning of (my) life?” In the profound, emotional, narrative, quasi-theological sense the question is usually posed, I think definitely not. This kind of question can only be answered by inheriting pieces of answers from other people and shaping and combining them to suit your own particular life.
On one hand, I think it elucidates quite a lot about this kind of question simply by clarifying what “meaning” always was in the first place. It was never the timeless, transcendent, universal story we wanted to cast ourselves in. It was always just the outcome of particles following physical laws as they evolved increasingly complex layers of intricacy. Semiosis shines the light of scientific explanation into the last corners of woo, realms where physics is understood to be inadequate and abstractions about things like purpose and soul and destiny still persist.
On the other, semiosis does tell us that “meaninglessness” simply isn’t an option on the table. Meaning suffuses every cell of our bodies and every moment of our waking and dreaming life because we are, as living organisms, nothing but gigantic Rube Goldberg machines of this-means-that semiosis. We inherit meaning in the very construction of our bodies, and in every moment of learning that alters and rearranges them. Meaning is not an illusion we can dispel to see that there is really nothing but meaningless particle motion. Meaning is the evolution of the laws themselves.