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I recently watched this Joe Rogan episode featuring British physicist Brian Cox, here’s the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc7OHXJtWco&t=1012s
Somewhere amid the cosmology and particle-physics digressions, the conversation drifted toward meaning. Cox made a simple but striking claim: meaning does, in a very real sense, exist—because it exists for us. It is not written into the architecture of the cosmos; it arises within biological organisms capable of experiencing it.
In his view, meaning is a property of complex, living systems. It emerges from the workings of the human brain. That word—emerges—caught my attention. Emergence suggests a phenomenon that is neither fundamental nor externally bestowed, but one that arises when matter becomes sufficiently intricate to reflect upon itself.
My own thinking aligns with this naturalistic picture. Meaning blooms out of neural activity the way sound arises from vibrating air molecules. It has no independent presence without the organ that produces it. When we say that meaning emerges from a living, physical brain, we are acknowledging its conditional nature. If the brain ceases to function, the meaning contained within its folded tissue—every memory, every aspiration, every personal narrative, everything that makes you you—vanishes with it.
Meaning cannot be set on a table like a paperweight. It is not a property of stars, mountains, galaxies, or the stubborn geometry of spacetime. It is a phenomenon generated by a mind aware of itself. Without that mind, no trace of meaning would remain to be found. The universe neither supports nor contradicts our valuations; it is simply indifferent to them, because they do not inhere in the universe at all.
This does not make meaning false. It places meaning where it has always lived: in conscious experience. A sunrise contains no beauty; beauty arises when a brain interprets wavelengths of light as something profound or pleasing. Likewise, achievements, relationships, moral convictions, and even our sense of purpose arise only when a sufficiently complex nervous system assigns significance to its world. Meaning is not an illusion—it is real in the same way pain, joy, colour, and memory are real. But these things are real only for the organism experiencing them.
And so meaning stands revealed as an emergent feature of the human condition: undeniably present within the mind, yet wholly absent from the cosmos at large. There is no script written into the stars, no cosmic objective waiting to be discovered. If meaning exists anywhere, it exists in us—temporary biological patterns inhabiting a vast, silent universe. As my friend Comicus and I have been saying for years between us:
“We are a cloud of atoms configured in a particular albeit fluid pattern”
Cox’s formulation—that meaning exists simply because human beings exist—has an appealing neatness to it. But it is also, in a sense, anthropocentric. It treats the appearance of meaning as a kind of metaphysical milestone, as though the universe becomes meaning-bearing the moment a creature capable of contemplating meaning shows up.
My hesitation is this: if meaning emerges from the human brain, then its existence is inseparable from the machinery that produces it. Meaning does not suddenly permeate the universe just because we are here. It exists for humans, not in reality at large. To say that meaning “exists because humans exist” risks implying that human subjectivity confers some special ontological upgrade upon the cosmos—as though our presence changes what the universe fundamentally is.
But the universe is what it is regardless of who is around to witness it. Meaning arises in a creature, not in the world. To insist otherwise is to smuggle a faint trace of cosmic significance back into a worldview that claims to have dispensed with it. It makes human beings the arbiters of whether meaning exists or doesn’t, as if the universe were waiting for our arrival to acquire a new property. And that is what religious meta-narratives provide in abundance.
A cleaner view, to my mind, is this:
Meaning is real for us, but it is not a feature inherent in the universe. It is a feature of minds—contingent, biological, temporary. The universe does not become meaningful when humans appear. Humans become meaningful to themselves. The cosmos, meanwhile, continues exactly as it always has: vast, ancient and indifferent.
