Abstract
What is the role of meaning and value in the cosmos? This talk presents the core argument of The Evolution of Meaning, a three-volume work tracing the growth of meaning-making from the physical cosmos through life, mind, and culture. Its central thesis is that meaning is not a human add-on to an indifferent universe but a real product of thermodynamic and evolutionary processes. Open systems that use energy flows to build and maintain improbable organization must learn about their environments to stay viable, and that learning generates meaningful information and value. On this view, evolution and learning are two sides of one process, and the resulting complexification of meaningful information unfolds across a nested series of emergent strata, each building on and reorganizing what came before.
The talk then turns to human meaning-making specifically, where this complexification process can be measured directly for the first time. Drawing on models from developmental psychology, I present quantitative data on the complexification patterns of individual meaning-making structures. These findings were obtained with the Lectical Assessment System, a validated, domain-general metric of developmental complexity. Using the same metric, I then turn to culture and assess the structural complexity of humanity's major worldviews through a Lectical analysis of representative historical texts. The analysis covers six meaning systems: Tribal, Archaic, Axial, Modern, Postmodern, and Integrative. Applying one scale to both individual and collective meaning systems makes it possible to compare psychological and cultural development directly. It also shows how measured increases in complexity track major transitions in humanity's collective self-understanding. I close with what this framework suggests about our present moment: the global metacrisis, the search for an integrative worldview, and the arrival of artificial intelligence as part of a new layer in the evolution of meaning.
About the Speaker
Brendan Graham Dempsey is Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM), an international applied-philosophy network developing integrative metatheoretical frameworks for complex civilizational problems. His work sits at the intersection of developmental psychology, complexity science, philosophy of mind, and religious studies. He is managing editor of Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice.
Practical
This seminar is taking place online through Microsoft Teams. Join here.
