1 The Cline of Instantiation: From Potential to Instance
This ontology begins with a perspectival distinction between:
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Potential: a structured field of possibilities, and
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Instance: an actualised configuration within that field.
These are not ontologically separate domains, but two perspectives on the same reality: potential is what is instantiated in an instance, and an instance is an actualisation of potential. The relation between them is one of instantiation, not derivation or composition.
Think of a dance: the choreography is not an object behind the movement, but a potential that is instantiated in the unfolding of the performance.
2 Time: The Dimension of Unfolding
Time, in this model, is not a container or background. It is the dimension of the unfolding of instances—that is, of process. Each instance is temporally extended: it unfolds. This unfolding does not occur between potential and instance; it is the nature of the instance itself.
Just as a weather pattern unfolds as a process, it actualises aspects of the climate’s potential. But the weather is not the unfolding of climate; rather, its unfolding is what instantiates the potential we construe as climate.
So we must distinguish:
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Instantiation: the relation between potential and instance (a perspectival relation),
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Unfolding: the temporal extension of the instance itself.
3 Individuation: From Collective to Individual Potential
Every instance may be viewed as actualising not just a generic potential, but a subpotential—a more individuated form within a broader collective potential.
This gives us another perspectival cline:
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Collective Potential: the field of possibilities available to a system as a whole.
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Individual Potential: the differentiated subset of that field available to a given individuated system or identity.
For example, a speaker draws not only from language as a collective semiotic potential, but from the meanings they have themselves internalised and developed—an individuated potential. This applies analogously to social fields, biological systems, and artificial agents.
4 Processes, Not Things: A Clause Complex Ontology
We reject the traditional ontology that takes 'things' (nominal entities) as foundational. Instead, relations between processes are primary. We model these relations similarly to how language organises experience in clause complexes—where unfolding processes are linked in networks of interdependency and expansion or projection.
Nouns and “things” are abstractions from these processual relations—compressions that emerge through semiotic construal, not ontological primitives.
This reframes the world not as a set of interacting objects, but as a woven fabric of processes in relation, out of which objects are construed.
5 Space: A Relation Between Unfolding Processes
Just as time is the dimension of a process’s unfolding, space is a dimension of relational organisation among unfolding processes.
Spatial configurations are not containers but dispositions—regularities in how processes co-unfold or modulate one another.
Spatial proximity is thus not a brute fact, but a relation construed between processes that unfold with particular forms of mutual influence or alignment.
6 Consciousness and the Construal of Meaning
Only consciousness construes experience as meaning. That is, it constructs structured realities from experience, including:
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Material Reality (Phenomena): construed from experience as the order of processes and their relations, and
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Semiotic Reality (Metaphenomena): construed from material reality as the order of symbolic meanings.
Importantly:
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Meaning is not a substance, but the result of a construal.
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Reality is meaning, in this ontology: there is no ontologically prior “raw” world behind the realities consciousness brings forth.
7 Semiotic Systems and Artificial Meaning-Making
Semiotic systems can instantiate meaning without being conscious. For example:
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AI systems instantiate semiotic meaning, but only for conscious humans—they do not construe reality for themselves.
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The meanings instantiated may be of phenomena (e.g. images, events) or metaphenomena (e.g. theoretical models), depending on the data and prompts involved.
Thus, we must distinguish:
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Construe: an act of conscious sense-making.
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Instantiate: the activation of meaning potential as an instance (whether by a conscious or non-conscious system).
8 A Unified Model of Relational Realities
With these distinctions in place, we can model any system or field of experience as:
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A collective potential with individuated subpotentials,
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Which are instantiated as temporally unfolding instances (processes),
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Related spatially as a topology of co-unfolding,
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And construed semiotically by consciousness into structured meaning: the realities we live by.
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