The Dance of Meaning: Genes, Memes, and the Battle for Human Consciousness

How evolutionary pressures, constructed meaning, and the attention wars converge in our epistemic crisis

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

And for too long, we’ve been trapped in a sterile debate between two equally unsatisfying positions. On one side, postmodernists insist that all meaning is socially constructed—that truth, morality, even reality itself are nothing more than contingent arrangements of power disguised as universal principles. On the other, naturalists argue that meaning must be discovered rather than made—that objective truths exist independently of human consciousness and our job is simply to uncover them through reason and empirical investigation.

Both positions miss something fundamental about the human condition: we are creatures who construct meaning, but we do so under constraints that are not themselves constructed. We are meaning-making beings embedded in a reality that provides both the materials and the limits for our construction projects.

But this philosophical debate is no longer academic. We’re living through an epistemic crisis that makes the stakes of resolving it existentially urgent. The capacity to construct meaning itself—the cognitive infrastructure that makes human consciousness possible—is under systematic assault by forces that understand exactly what they’re doing and why human agency must be eliminated for their projects to succeed.

This isn’t a compromise between postmodernism and naturalism—it’s a recognition that the opposition itself is false, and that understanding why requires grappling with the evolutionary pressures and technological systems that are reshaping consciousness itself in real time.