The Evolution of Meaning, Volume 1: Cosmos to Culture
The Evolution of Meaning is a three-volume history of humanity’s engagement with matters of ultimate concern. Drawing on numerous disciplines, it presents cultural evolution as part of a broader learning process underway in the cosmos. As this process has unfolded, human conceptions of meaning, value, and the sacred have developed across the millennia.
But what is meaning? To ground this study, Dempsey offers a theory based in thermodynamics and information processing. If the acquisition of meaningful information is what enables entities to exist far from equilibrium, then learning is the basis of cosmic complexification. Tracking this process through structural, genetic, cognitive, and symbolic forms of information processing, he shows how meaning acquires greater depth and informational richness across new emergent levels. Human notions of purpose and value thus arise as extensions of more fundamental dynamics.
About the Author(s)
Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, poet, farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. He holds a BA in religious studies from the University of Vermont and a master’s in religion and art from Yale University. He is the author of the 7-volume Metamodern Spirituality Series as well as Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.
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