The brain and the carrot: Meaning making and symmetry restoration

A self-organizing system constitutes its systemic closure by actively differentiating itself from the environment. In the case of interacting systems, this process of differentiation results in an asymmetry of perspectives. This built-in asymmetry hinders the possibility of coordinating the systems' perspectives and therefore the possibility of patterning a communicated signal as a meaningful event. The paper discusses meaning-making in living systems from a phenomenological perspective and argues that actively moving in a phenomenal space or the ability of a system to reorganize itself around a stimulus, is a necessary condition for symmetry restoration and meaningmaking.