Meaning is often treated either as an intrinsic property of objects oras a projection of subjective valuation. This paper develops astructural alternative grounded in irreversible time and commitmentformation. Commitments are defined as persistent reductions ofadmissible futures within a partially ordered constraint topology.Meaning is then identified with commitment-relative significance: anentity has meaning if and only if it alters continuation conditionsunder the system’s active commitments. Prior to commitment, all optionsremain equally admissible and no entity acquires structural necessity.Commitment induces selective closure, generating asymmetries that rendersome entities enabling, others obstructive, and others irrelevant.Meaning thus emerges from state-space contraction rather than fromintrinsic properties or arbitrary projection. Meaninglessnesscorresponds to absence of active binding rather than to metaphysicalerror. The account is substrate-neutral and treats significance as aconsequence of structural relations under irreversible time.
Riaan de Beer (2026) studied this question.