Meaning and Consciousness
Meaning does not necessarily entail any phenomenological consciousness, but consciousness might owe its emergence in part to meaning drawing it out.
Evolution
Basal Meaning - Part 2 - Primordial Meaning
There is meaning in life, at least in human life. Is there meaning in other life? I propose that there is but that–as is the case with consciousness–simpler organisms have simpler, prototypical features of meaning.
Basal Meaning - Part 1 - Meaning deserves a proper origin story
Whenever we notice a useful function–memory, vision, audition, emotion, language, abstraction–we should be immediately reminded that this function followed a long and wending path to be so ubiquitous that we notice it at all. Much has been said about the origins of these and each has sparked a