Research on meaning-in-life provides several findings and theoretical proposals relevant to the structural account, but it does not converge on a single account of meaning. Philosophical accounts remain divided. Wolf’s (2010) ‘fitting fulfillment’ view holds that meaningful lives involve active engagement with projects of genuine worth; Metz’s (2013) ‘fundamentality’ account emphasizes orientation toward what is comparatively fundamental. These accounts share some broad themes of engagement and value while disagreeing about their ground. The structural account offers another interpretation of those themes; empirical or philosophical overlap does not by itself confirm its structural model or settle whether meaning is an irreducible third evaluative dimension.

Empirical psychology confirms the shape from a different angle. Baumeister and colleagues (2013) find that meaning, distinct from happiness, tracks integration across time, connection to others, and orientation toward projects larger than the self — exactly the three coordinates the structural argument predicts, and exactly the three features that evolutionary psychology has independently identified as correlates of persistence and reproductive fitness in social organisms (Tooby and Cosmides 1990; Buss 2019). Meaning and survival correlate in the empirical record because they share a structural ground — the persistence of a self-modeling subject whose continuation depends on integrated orientation toward what sustains it. This does not reduce meaning to reproductive fitness: the persistence at issue is the persistence of the subject's exchanges with its medium, not narrowly its gene-propagation, and the empirical correlations track the broader structural fact rather than the narrower evolutionary one. Reproductive success is one specific subset of the broader persistence-pressure; meaning tracks the broader pressure.

Frankl’s (1946) observations in the Nazi concentration camps make the link unmistakable. In conditions where starvation, cold, forced labor, arbitrary violence, and systematic dehumanization had collapsed every other component of wellbeing, meaning persisted wherever orientation persisted — and wherever orientation persisted, the probability of survival rose. The correlation is not accidental. Meaning is the internal aspect of the orientation that sustains a person against what threatens them: a model of a future that has not yet arrived, a relational interval between the self and what the self reaches toward, and a substrate that continues under conditions designed to erode it. Meaning tracked T, S, and Φ (the three structural roles derived through Modal Identity and Conditions-as-Nature, §[§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>)–2.7) before the framework was named, and tracked them in their role as conditions of persistence.

Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan 2000) reaches the same structure through motivational psychology: autonomy (an agent with causal reach), competence (the reach connecting to what matters), and relatedness (a relational interval between self and other). The three basic psychological needs are the three structural conditions of orientation, restated in motivational vocabulary.

Comparative cognition extends the prediction across species. Animals reach toward what sustains them through orientations that involve real relational intervals — mate selection, territory maintenance, bond formation, the long-running attachments documented across mammals, birds, and cephalopods. Meaning in the structural sense — the internal registration of one's direction within the medium — obtains wherever a self-modeling subject registers its own reach, regardless of substrate. What human meaning adds is not the registration but the depth at which the registration takes itself as an object: articulating directions, naming projects, transmitting purposes across generations through language and culture. Birds returning to last season's nest and humans returning to a vocation are running the same operation at different recursive depths.

These literatures offer partial points of contact with the structural account, but their methods, constructs, and normative commitments differ. Their overlap is suggestive background for the model rather than confirmation that the structural argument predicts the settled shape of meaning.


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← [8.8.3 What is Predicted](<8.8.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [8.8.5 What is Concluded](<8.8.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
