The Life of Meaning: From Semiosis to Future Systems
This work has taken as its central focus the evolution of systems of meaning — how they arise, differentiate, and participate in the ongoing unfolding of complexity in the universe. Central to this inquiry has been a commitment to construing experience not in terms of isolated entities or static forms, but rather in terms of potentials and processes: what systems can do, how they change, and the contexts in which they interact.
In approaching semiotic systems, we began by focusing on semantics as system — that is, as a system of meaning potential. Like other evolutionary systems, meaning systems are emergent, arising through the interaction of simpler systems across time. Language is not an exception to this pattern but a continuation of it: a system of behavioural potential that evolved through interactions within populations of organisms, just as somatic systems evolved through interactions within populations of cells.
This leads to the view that semiotic systems — including language — are not external to life but are among its most advanced forms. Meaning is not imposed on an otherwise meaningless world, but emerges through living processes. These systems are defined by the capacity to instantiate new meaning, which is to say: to make choices in context. Meaning arises not from fixed signs, but from the negotiation of value among users — whether speakers, listeners, or other kinds of interactants. In this view, value is not intrinsic to a sign but emerges in use, in context, in variation, and in selection.
This focus on choice and potential extends into the realm of political economy, where systems of exchange and evaluation also function semiotically. Markets do not just allocate resources; they produce and circulate value. What is valued is not a neutral fact but a function of who is valuing, and under what conditions. Meaning-making is always social, and so too is value-making. Just as grammar constrains but does not determine what can be meant, economic systems constrain but do not determine what can be valued.
A critical semiotic perspective on political economy recognises that all value — economic, linguistic, social — is produced in systems of meaning and interaction. This opens a space for politicising evaluation itself: asking not only what is valued, but how and why. The future of meaning systems, then, is not simply a matter of describing them but of intervening in them, challenging and reshaping the systems through which value is construed and circulated.
Looking forward, the evolution of future systems may well depend on our capacity to understand and reshape these systems of potential. Already we see the emergence of new artefactual systems that embed semiotic and behavioural potential in technological substrates. These are not mere tools but evolving systems in their own right — systems that participate in the ecology of meaning. Just as somatic and semiotic systems embedded within previous systems have produced new capacities, so too might technological systems lead to the emergence of new forms of meaning potential. These developments, however, do not happen in a vacuum; they depend on the ongoing differentiation and selection of systems within specific ecological and social contexts.
In tracing this history, we see a consistent pattern: complexity emerges through interactions between systems of potential, with each new layer of organisation enabling new kinds of relation and difference. From subatomic systems, to chemical, to biological, to behavioural, to semiotic, and perhaps now to technological, each stage has involved the embedding of one system within another, and the interaction of those systems across populations. Evolutionary change occurs not through isolated innovation but through variation and selection within networks of relation.
(1) recombination of existing elements,(2) mutation, understood as internal recombination,(3) speciation, the emergence of differentiated subtypes, and(4) relocation or generalisation, where elements are brought into new contexts.
The model presented here is itself an instance of such a novelty. It is a variant, subject to selection by its community of potential users. If it is rejected, it provides insight into the motivations and strategies of that rejection. If it is adopted, it becomes part of the evolving lineage of meaning systems. In either case, it participates in the very processes it seeks to describe.
In this light, The Life of Meaning is not a metaphor. It is a recognition that meaning is not an overlay upon life but a form that life takes — an evolutionary system with its own potentials, its own processes, and its own capacity for creating the new. To understand meaning in this way is to see that we are not only meaning-makers but the means by which meaning comes into being. In the grand lineage of the cosmos, we are the life that meaning has.