Natural selection acts on emergent informational relationships that govern
the physical processes in living organisms. As complexity increases, and processes
affect other processes under the constraints imposed by natural selection, referential
information can become relational and abstract. Single-celled organisms do not
experience meaning. They have no consciousness. Nothing appears to their
consciousness in a phenomenological sense. The information that accumulates as these
organisms dialogue with the environment has a referential relationship with the
processes of natural selection. Classical Shannon’s information theory (SIT) addresses
conditions for something to convey information, but not the meaning of information.
Meaning emerges from decoding of information, which, in turn, can only occur in
reference to something external to Shannon’s information. Natural selection may
provide meaning because the processes that living organisms carry out become or
contain metainformation about natural selection itself. Meaning and abstract awareness
share the same fundamental mechanism. These considerations suggest that the loop
‘expectation.information’expectation.information realizes meaning and provides a path
towards the solution of the “aboutness” problem. The organization of information as
abstract and referential may allow for partial decoupling from underlying
thermodynamics.
Keywords: Aboutness Problem, Brain Metabolism, Decoding Information,
Entropy and Uncertainty, Evolutionary Constraints, Energy Budget, Evolutionary
Metainformation, Expectation.Information, Information About Something, Origin
of Agency, Referential Function, Realization of Meaning, Phenotype, Shannon’s
Information Theory (SIT), Thermodynamic Decoupling.
