Meaning Dynamics: A Research Programme

Seven papers develop a unified account of meaning-experience across scales: from the phenomenological structure of individual significance-attribution, through population dynamics under stochastic perturbation, to the civilisational consequences of meaning-infrastructure erosion. The central claim is that meaning-experience is structurally constrained to feel discovered rather than constructed — the phenomenological inversion — and that this constraint is an evolutionary optimum derivable from a fitness landscape under competing selection pressures. A dynamical-systems model yields a non-trivial negative result: linear mean-field social coupling on a continuous state space structurally forbids phase transitions, predicting gradual erosion rather than sudden collapse of shared meaning. The framework generates testable predictions at individual, population, and civilisational levels, and is applied to deaths of despair, AI-generated content, and religious deconversion. This paper maps the architecture of the argument, the connections between its components, and the empirical agenda it opens.