Worlds After Meaning: 5 Living Systems and the First Worlds

If physics shows how worlds can be made to hold through measurement and formal constraint, living systems show something more primordial. Long before laboratories, instruments, or equations, worlds were already being enacted. Life does not wait for representation. It makes worlds by living.

This post turns to living systems in order to locate the earliest form of world-making: not in description, but in viability.

Life before description

A living system does not encounter an already given environment and then form a picture of it. It survives or fails. It maintains itself or collapses. What matters to a living system is not what exists in general, but what makes a difference to its continued viability.

This difference is crucial. An environment is not a world. A world is the subset of environmental possibilities that can register as relevant within a system’s constraints.

For a living system, to have a world is to have stakes.

Constraint as viability

The constraints that define a living system are enforced relentlessly. They are not methodological or conventional, as in physics, but existential. A breakdown in constraint is not an error; it is death.

This gives living worlds their distinctive character. Phenomena are not merely stable; they are urgent. Distinctions are not merely intelligible; they are consequential.

A nutrient is not an rememberable fact. A predator is not a data point. They are world-defining phenomena because they bear directly on viability.

Meaning without symbols

Living systems enact meaning without symbols, language, or representation. A stimulus matters because of what it enables or threatens, not because it stands for something else.

This is meaning in its most basic sense: constrained responsiveness that makes a difference to what can continue.

Nothing here requires interpretation in the semiotic sense. The system does not ask what something means. It acts.

The first worlds

Seen this way, the first worlds were biological. They were enacted wherever systems maintained themselves against entropy by carving up possibility into what mattered and what did not.

These worlds were narrow, local, and fragile — but they were worlds nonetheless. They had horizons, saliencies, and exclusions. They were not representations of reality; they were ways of holding reality open just enough to persist.

Continuity, not reduction

Recognising living systems as world-makers does not reduce human or cultural worlds to biology. It establishes continuity without collapse. Later worlds inherit and transform earlier constraints, layering new cuts atop old ones.

What changes is not the presence of worlds, but the sophistication of their constraint architectures.

What follows

If living systems enact the first worlds, then language does not create worlds ex nihilo. It modifies, narrows, and stabilises worlds that are already in play.

The next instalment turns to language as a world-making practice of a very particular kind — one that trades existential urgency for portability and coordination.

Worlds did not begin with thought.

They began with life.

Worlds After Meaning: 4 Physics as One World-Making Practice

Physics has long occupied a privileged position in our understanding of reality. It is often treated as the discipline that tells us how the world really is, beneath appearances, interpretations, and perspectives. Other domains may offer partial views, but physics is assumed to speak from closer to the foundations.

This post argues for a different framing. Physics is not the final arbiter of reality. It is one highly disciplined practice of world-making, distinguished not by its access to the world itself, but by the severity and precision of its constraints.

What physics does

Physics does not begin with the world in its fullness. It begins with carefully engineered situations: experimental setups, instruments, formalisms, and protocols. These are not neutral windows onto reality. They are cuts — configurations that sharply limit what can count as a phenomenon.

Within these cuts, physics achieves extraordinary stability. Measurements repeat. Predictions hold. Phenomena behave lawfully. This success is often taken as evidence that physics has stripped away perspective.

What it has actually done is enforce it.

Measurement as cut

A measurement is not a passive reading of a pre-existing property. It is an act that establishes which distinctions matter and which do not. To measure is to constrain a system so tightly that only certain outcomes can appear.

Once this is recognised, the mystery surrounding measurement dissolves. There is no need to ask how an observer intrudes upon an otherwise complete world. The measurement is the world-making event. It actualises a particular slice of possibility as determinate.

Different measurement practices enact different physical worlds, even when they target what is nominally the same system.

Formalism and possibility

The mathematical formalisms of physics do not describe reality in general. They articulate spaces of constrained possibility. A formalism specifies what can vary, what must remain invariant, and how transitions are permitted.

This is why multiple formalisms can coexist, overlap, or even compete while remaining empirically successful. Each imposes a different cut on possibility, yielding a different but coordinated physical world.

There is no uniquely forced formalism because there is no system-independent world demanding a single description.

Objectivity without foundations

Physics exemplifies objectivity not by transcending perspective, but by disciplining it. Its claims are objective because the constraints that sustain them are explicit, repeatable, and externally enforced through instruments and practices.

This objectivity is real — but it is local. It holds within the world that physics enacts. To extend it beyond those constraints is not realism; it is overreach.

Recognising this does not weaken physics. It clarifies its power.

Physics among worlds

When physics is treated as one world-making practice among others, longstanding tensions dissolve. Biology no longer needs to be reduced to physics to be legitimate. Human experience no longer needs to be dismissed as merely subjective. These domains enact different worlds under different constraints.

Where their worlds align, coordination is possible. Where they do not, no amount of insistence will force convergence.

What follows

If physics is not foundational but exemplary, then the task is to examine other systems that make worlds in different ways. The next instalment turns to living systems, asking how worlds are enacted not through measurement and formalism, but through viability and action.

Physics does not tell us what the world is.

It shows us how a world can be made to hold.