Meaning as Recursive Compression_ Impact, Significance, and Persistence Under Constraint

Abstract This paper proposes a structural account of meaning, impact, and significance based on recursive admissible compression. Standard approaches to meaning—semantic reference, phenomenological experience, information-theoretic reduction, and use-based accounts—do not explain why some forms carry substantially greater causal weight than others. This work introduces a constraint-first interpretation: meaning is the result of compressing a high-dimensional candidate space into a lower-dimensional form that preserves invariant structure under admissibility constraints and persists across recursive reuse. Impact is defined as the continued reuse of such compressed forms as substrate for subsequent operations, and significance as the ratio of condensed causal structure to representational cost. Biological evolution, intellectual history, and (more tentatively) physical phase transitions exhibit this same structure. The framework does not claim new physical laws or reduce subjective experience to structure; it provides an organizing lens for understanding why some forms persist and continue to cause while others dissipate.