We Invented Words. Then They Started Organising Us.

In brief: We tend to think humans create meaning and use language to express it. But language may do something more interesting: once words become shared across millions of people, they form larger systems of meaning, such as money, marriage, nations, religion and success, that begin shaping the people who created them. Perhaps meaning does not live entirely inside individual minds, but emerges between us, in language, culture and the networks of shared ideas we inhabit.

Robert Wright’s new book, The God Test, sent me down a side road, which is often where I find the better scenery.

Wright was describing something strange about artificial intelligence. Nobody sits down and explains to a large language model what every word means. The model is given enormous amounts of language and trained, rather mundanely, to predict what comes next. Yet somewhere in that process it develops surprisingly rich patterns connecting words, concepts and ideas. Wright describes this, with suitable qualifications, as machines in some sense discovering how meaning is represented through language.

That made me wonder whether we have the story backwards.

Perhaps humans don’t simply put meaning into language.

Perhaps language became one of the places where meaning could emerge.

Before words

Obviously, meaning did not begin with language.

A gazelle does not need a vocabulary to find a lion meaningful. An infant does not require the word mother before its mother matters. Living creatures have been detecting significance for hundreds of millions of years. Food matters. Danger matters. Sex matters. Losing contact with the group matters.

So language didn’t invent things mattering.

It did something stranger. It allowed things to matter collectively and symbolically.

We don’t know exactly how human language began. But at some point our ancestors became exceptionally good at sharing attention and intentions, and at using signs that others understood. That capacity appears to have been important in the development of language, cooperation, norms and culture.

Once that trick worked, it could scale.

A sound could refer to an object. Sounds could be combined. Words could refer not only to things that were present, but to things that had happened yesterday, might happen tomorrow, or existed only in our heads.

And that changed everything.

When words escaped the object

A word like tree is relatively well behaved. There are trees in the world. We point to them. Children eventually work out what the noise refers to.

But humans didn’t stop there.

We developed words like justice, marriage, success, sin, money, nation and God.

Try pointing at justice.

You can’t. You can point at a courtroom, a prison, a law book or someone being treated unfairly, but justice itself exists across all of them. Its meaning lives in a network of stories, rules, memories, emotions and agreements shared between people.

And those meanings don’t sit neatly inside any single head.

Nobody owns the complete meaning of marriage. A newlywed, a divorce lawyer, a priest, an anthropologist and someone whose parents spent thirty years shouting at each other over breakfast will carry rather different versions.

Yet somehow the word still works.

That is beginning to look suspiciously like emergence.

When more becomes different

Emergence is what happens when interacting parts create a property that none of the parts possesses alone.

Individual neurons aren’t conscious. Yet somehow, from their interactions, consciousness emerges at the level of the brain.

Individual birds don’t contain a murmuration. The pattern exists at the level of the flock.

Perhaps something similar happens with meaning.

Individual humans produce words, stories and symbols. Those interact across thousands or millions of minds, sometimes for thousands of years. Certain meanings stabilise. Others disappear. Some mutate. Some combine.

Eventually you get culture.

Biogenics is particularly interested in this change of scale because culture does something peculiar. We create it, but once created it starts organising us.

Money is a spectacular example.

There is nothing intrinsically meaningful about a number in a bank database. But once millions of people share the system of meaning surrounding that number, it can determine where you live, what you eat, what work you do, and whether you spend afternoons reading essays about emergence or filling in tax returns.

The shared meaning has acquired causal power.

The same applies to nations, religions, professions, laws and social status. They depend on human minds to exist, but no individual human controls them. We produce them collectively, inherit them individually, and then spend much of our lives responding to the structures they create.

Humans made the symbols. The symbols helped make the human world.

The neuron problem

A neuron contributes to a thought but presumably has no idea what the thought is. It operates locally. The meaning exists at a scale above it.

What if humans have a milder version of the same problem with culture?

I know what I mean when I use the word success. At least I think I do. But that word comes loaded with centuries of assumptions about work, wealth, status, family, morality and achievement. I didn’t create most of those associations. I inherited them.

Every time I use the word, I may reinforce some parts of that network and weaken others. Millions of other people are doing the same thing.

The meaning keeps moving.

This is close to what Biogenics calls Emergent Ignorance: parts of a complex system can participate in creating a higher-order pattern while having only limited access to the pattern they are creating.

That doesn’t mean the pattern is mystical or permanently unknowable. Sociologists, historians, linguists and anthropologists spend their careers trying to make these structures visible.

It simply means there may be an awkward limitation built into participation.

You can’t easily stand outside something while you’re one of the things making it.

So where does meaning live?

I don’t think meaning lives entirely in words. It certainly doesn’t live entirely in individual brains either.

Perhaps shared human meaning exists in the relationships between brains, words, memories, emotions, objects, institutions and history.

Language provides some of the scaffolding. Culture keeps rebuilding it. And we live inside the result.

This is why Wright’s observation about AI interests me. Language models can extract extraordinary semantic structure from the accumulated language humans have left behind. That does not prove machines experience meaning as we do. It might reveal something almost as interesting.

Perhaps there was vastly more structure sitting inside our collective language than any individual speaker realised.

For thousands of years, each of us has been contributing a few sentences to something nobody can read in full. We started with sounds because we needed to coordinate with each other. Those sounds became words. Words became stories. Stories became religions, laws, money, nations and cultures.

We are still doing the talking.

I’m just less certain who is doing the organising.