But in our lived experience (that’s going to be an important term for us, so let’s hold on to it), we intuitively associate information with meaning.

Claude Shannon, the genius inventor of modern information theory, intentionally excluded discussion of purpose so he could make progress toward his goal, which was understanding how strings of symbols get pushed through communication channels. What’s explicitly missing from this description of information is meaning. A zero appearing in an endless string of zeros would not be very surprising and would carry little syntactic information. This is a complicated way of saying syntactic information is about surprise. “Syntax” is used here because this kind of information begins with ideas about a generalized alphabet and asks about the frequency with which characters from that alphabet appear in possible strings (that is, “words”). But these miraculous machines are all based on what’s called syntactic information. In the midst of computers and cell phones and a zillion other forms of digital technology, we are all familiar with the idea of information. Recently, my colleagues and I (at the University of Rochester, Dartmouth, and the University of Tokyo) began a project to explore the role of what’s called semantic information in living systems. To unpack these rather lofty claims, let me start with something more narrowly focused. There is, I believe, a very different story we can tell about meaning, and it’s a narrative that can rewire how we think about the Universe and our place in it. Just as important, it misses what science has been trying to tell us about us and the world together over the last century. I think it misses some of the most fundamental aspects of our experience of the world. It is matter that matters in this tale, not meaning.I am not satisfied with this story. It’s just an epiphenomenon, an add-on, to all the purely physical and more fundamental things happening with the fundamental particles. In this story, meaning is not very important.

Then, in that world and in the heads of one particular kind of creature, neural activity allows for thoughts. On at least one of those planets - Earth - living organisms evolve. From then on, the story leads inevitably and inexorably to larger physical structures like galaxies, stars, and planets. After a while, you are left mostly with protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons. As the Universe expands and cools, these particles combine (or don’t). Each field is associated with a quantum particle. In this telling, the cosmos begins with the Big Bang and a soup of quantum fields. There is one way to tell the story of the Universe in which meaning doesn’t matter.

The flow experience arises out of