On Meaning, Meaning-Making, and the Human Life Well Lived

At the Artificiality Institute, we start with a fundamental proposition: everything in our universe can be considered through the lens of information and computation. This includes us. But understanding this foundation doesn't diminish what we are. Quite the opposite. We think it actually helps to reveal the extraordinary architecture of being human.

Consider this simplified ladder of emergence—recognizing that reality is much messier than any neat hierarchical model:

1. Information: The basic patterns and differences that constitute reality
2. Computation: The processing of information according to rules
3. Agency: The capacity to act upon information in service of goals
4. Intelligence: The ability to adapt computation to novel circumstances
5. Consciousness: The experience of being an information-processing agent
6. Meaning: The interpretation of information as significant to oneself

This is a conceptual scaffold, not a clean progression—these elements interact in complex ways rather than stacking perfectly. Each capacity builds on the others but represents something genuinely new. The boundaries between them remain contested terrain.

Our Position

We recognize two truths that must be held simultaneously:

• First, we humans are fundamentally information processors embedded in the natural world—not metaphysical exceptions to it.
• Second, our particular form of information processing has given rise to distinctly human capacities that transform our experience of reality.

This position requires epistemic humility. Could machines develop consciousness? We simply don't know. Might they construct their own forms of meaning entirely alien to ours? It's possible. The map we're drawing has blank spaces and many areas where our understanding remains limited.

Any framework like this is inevitably a simplification of reality's complexity. We offer it not as the final word but as a useful thinking tool to help us navigate the relationship between computation and meaning without reducing one to the other.

The value of this framework is in how it helps us think more clearly about what makes human lives meaningful despite our computational foundations.

What Makes Us Human?

Our humanity emerges from several distinctive capacities that build upon our computational foundation:

• Embodied perception: We don't just process data; we live through bodies that mediate our experience
• Mortality: We exist in time, with beginnings and endings that give significance to our choices
• Fragility: Our vulnerability creates the conditions for care, courage, and connection
• Interiority: We experience subjectivity—a sense of what it's like to be ourselves
• Intersubjectivity: We recognize others as subjects with their own interiority
• Values: We don't just have preferences; we care about what matters

This framework helps us build technologies that complement rather than replace human meaning-making. It allows us to be clear-eyed about both our continuity with and our distinctiveness from the machines we create.

We are meaning-makers whose particular evolutionary history has given us a unique relationship to consciousness, mortality, and values. Technology should respect this distinctive human capacity for meaning by understanding its roots in our embodied, social nature.