Psychology Today | 26.01.2026 20:31
How does meaning arise from matter? This is Part 2 of a four-part series exploring how the brain generates meaning. In Part 1, I argued that meaning emerges from relations among neural patterns, evolutionary history, learned associations, and goal-directed action. But that leaves the hardest question unanswered: how do electrical signals in your brain become about apples, dangers, and desires? How does the "aboutness" of meaning emerge from purely physical circuits? Here, in Part 2, we confront the mechanisms directly.
