1 Before Meaning: Value as Biological Orientation
Why do we move toward some things and not others? Why do certain sights, sounds, or movements feel good — or right — even before we have words for them? Long before language, reason, or culture, living organisms evolved systems that orient them within their environments. These systems are not neutral: they are suffused with value. Value, in this view, is not something added to perception — it is the very basis of how perception works in biological systems.
In this opening post, we trace the concept of value as it appears not in philosophy or economics, but in biology — especially in the theory of Gerald Edelman. According to Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, perception and action emerge from the ongoing selection and reinforcement of neuronal patterns that have proved useful to the organism. But crucially, this selection is not random. It is steered by what Edelman calls value-category systems: neural systems that distinguish between more and less favourable outcomes and reinforce those that promote survival or coherence.
These systems — including the hypothalamus, brainstem, and limbic structures — assign valence (positive or negative value) to patterns of sensory input. In doing so, they generate the orientation of the organism toward or away from certain possibilities. Importantly, this happens before conscious thought, conceptual reasoning, or linguistic categorisation. The organism does not need to know that something is “food” or “danger” in order to act; its value systems have already made the call.
This means that value is not simply a judgement made after an event, nor merely a cultural construction. It is biological orientation in action — the very condition for responsiveness and adaptation. In this model, consciousness is not detached from value but saturated with it: to perceive is already to lean toward or away.
We might call this kind of value pre-semantic, or even proto-experiential. It is not yet “meaning” in the semiotic sense — but it is the ground from which meaning can later be shaped. A baby turning toward a human face, a bird leaning into a particular pitch contour, or a listener drawn into the groove of a beat — all these are movements of value-orientation, long before explicit interpretation arises.
In this post, then, we begin with the biological genesis of value — its function in orienting living systems within fields of possibility. Later posts will build toward cultural, social, and symbolic elaborations. But here we stay close to the biological ground: value as the dynamic force that bends attention, sensation, and action toward what matters — even before we can say what that is.
2 From Valence to Pattern: The Rise of Embodied Meaningfulness
In the biological view we explored in Post 1, value is not an add-on to perception — it is a condition for perception. But how do these raw tendencies toward or away from stimuli begin to give rise to patterns that feel coherent, meaningful, or even expressive?
The transition begins with the coalescence of valenced perception into recurrent, embodied patterns. These are not yet signs or symbols. Rather, they are dynamically stabilised experiences — sensory-motor routines that are repeated, reinforced, and shaped by the organism’s interactions with the world. In Edelman’s model, these patterns emerge through a process of reentrant signalling: multiple neural maps feeding back into each other in complex loops, shaping what is perceived and how it is felt.
Over time, the organism develops what we might call value-attractors — clusters of perceptual-motor activity that carry a strong orientation toward survival, coherence, or reward. These attractors do not represent external objects in a fixed sense. Instead, they are dynamic regions in the field of possibility toward which the system is drawn again and again. They are felt as meaningful, even though no symbolic interpretation is yet involved.
This is the basis of embodied meaningfulness. The feeling of wholeness, stability, or rightness that can arise in the body — whether in movement, sound, or touch — stems from the convergence of perception and value. For example, a rhythm that entrains bodily movement may feel “good” not because it refers to something else, but because it stabilises and enhances sensorimotor coherence. The body leans in.
What we are describing here is a transition: from raw biological valence to patterned responsiveness — from pure orientation to the beginnings of recognition. These recognitions are not yet reflective or linguistic. They are felt gestalts, rooted in the body and shaped by repeated experience. In this sense, we might say that value precedes meaning, but prepares the ground for it.
Importantly, these embodied patterns can begin to spread socially. Infants do not learn to dance or sing by logic — they are drawn into patterned interactions that feel right or satisfying in shared time. Through these interactions, early value-attractors become interpersonal: coalescing into rituals, games, motifs, and eventually, traditions.
As the posts in this series unfold, we will see how these bodily attractors — forged in the crucible of biological value — provide the substrate upon which social and cultural fields build. For now, we remain with the body, where feeling and movement converge in the early formation of what we might call proto-cultural meaning — the value-laden shapes that make sense even before we can say why.
3 Emergent Fields: From Individuals to Collective Attractors
In the previous post, we considered how embodied patterns of value can stabilise within an organism as attractors — recurring configurations of perception and action that feel meaningful from the inside. But how do these individual attractors begin to take on collective form? How do they become part of a shared cultural world?
The transition depends on a key relational mechanism: resonance. When two or more individuals engage in temporally coordinated interaction — rhythmic, gestural, vocal, or affective — their individual systems of embodied meaningfulness can begin to entrain with one another. This co-entrainment allows certain value-attractors to become interpersonally reinforced. A movement or sound that stabilises one person’s sense of coherence may begin to do so for another — not because of inherent properties, but because of the shared dynamics of interaction.
Over time, these mutual stabilisations can grow into collective value-attractors: recurrent patterns of behaviour, sound, or movement that carry shared affective orientation. Importantly, these attractors do not merely live within individuals. They take on a kind of distributed existence — sustained and reproduced through social practices. We might think of them as fields of embodied resonance that guide and organise participation.
This is not metaphorical. In a relational ontology, we do not treat individuals and collectives as separate layers, but as mutually conditioning processes. The stabilisation of a shared rhythm in a musical performance, for example, is not reducible to each person’s internal state. It is a relational event: a real-time negotiation of timing, tension, and flow that depends on mutual responsiveness. When such events recur, they form attractors in the social field.
These attractors are not static or rigid. They are dynamically maintained — always vulnerable to disruption, always capable of transformation. Yet when they persist, they shape the orientational readiness of future participants. A child raised in a musical tradition does not simply learn about rhythms — their body becomes attuned to the attractors of the field. These become part of what feels natural, meaningful, or emotionally salient.
In this way, collective value-attractors form the pre-semiotic substrate of culture. They are not yet conceptual or symbolic, but they structure how people move, listen, respond, and engage. They are embodied social habits, but more than habits: they are resonant fields of value, binding individuals into patterned participation.
As we move toward the next post, we will consider how these fields begin to shape not just behaviour, but identity. That is, we will ask how belonging to a field of shared value-attractors can begin to coalesce into a felt sense of who one is — a social self, shaped by the gravitational pull of collective resonance.
4 Becoming Someone: Identity as Fielded Resonance
We’ve seen how shared fields of embodied resonance emerge through co-entrained interaction — forming collective attractors of value that orient perception and action. But these fields do more than stabilise social behaviour. Over time, they begin to shape the very structure of subjectivity. That is, they participate in the genesis of identity.
From a relational standpoint, identity is not a fixed inner core, nor a private essence waiting to be expressed. It is a patterned participation in value-fields. We become who we are through selective resonance with the attractors that circulate in our social environment. These attractors may take the form of musical styles, bodily postures, forms of address, affective rhythms, or modes of attention. To identify with them is not to think about them — it is to be pulled toward their gravitational centre, to be drawn into their dynamics, to experience them as self-congruent.
Consider, for example, how a young person encountering a musical genre might feel an intense affective alignment: a sense of being seen, recognised, or expressed. This alignment is not imposed from outside, nor is it merely projected from within. It is co-emergent: a convergence between the embodied attractors of the listener and those sedimented in the musical field. In this moment, music does not just express identity — it activates and organises it.
Over time, repeated exposure to a field of resonance fosters a kind of orientational sharpening. The individual becomes increasingly attuned to the subtle cues and affordances of the field: its timing, its tensions, its values. This attunement enables participation in collective practices, which in turn further consolidate the identity-attractors. Identity, in this view, is a trajectory through resonant space — a history of alignment and differentiation across intersecting value-fields.
Importantly, these fields are not homogeneous. They carry within them gradients of value, tensions, and divergences. An individual’s orientation within the field is not neutral: it reflects a positioning in relation to the field’s structure — what it valorises, marginalises, or renders invisible. Thus, every identity carries an echo of the social field’s hierarchies and exclusions. To resonate with one field may entail dissonance with another. The multiplicity of social attractors means that identity is always partially distributed, partially unstable, always becoming.
In this view, music can play a profound role in reflexive individuation: not only shaping who we become, but helping us sense how we are becoming. The emotional charge of musical experience arises in part because it makes felt the pull of value-fields — their promise of belonging, their weight of expectation, their potential for transformation. In moments of musical intensity, we may glimpse ourselves in formation — not as fixed entities, but as participants in resonant emergence.
In the next and final post of the series, we will consider how this resonant emergence opens a space for transformation — both personal and collective — as individuals and communities seek new alignments, forge new attractors, and reconfigure the value-fields that shape their lives.
5 Reconfiguring the Field: Value, Transformation, and Creative Emergence
Throughout this series, we’ve traced how value emerges from embodied systems, sediments in cultural attractors, and finds expression through collective resonance. We’ve seen how shared fields of value do not simply reflect our identities but participate in shaping them, through patterns of co-entrainment that orient action and perception. But if value fields stabilise who we become, how is transformation possible? Can the field be reconfigured?
To answer this, we must return to the dynamism at the heart of resonance. Value is not a fixed content but a relational patterning — an attractor shaped by the embodied readiness of participants and the structure of their interaction. If the relational conditions shift, so too can the attractors. Transformation, then, becomes possible when new patterns of resonance emerge, drawing participants into different alignments, making available new orientations, new valuations, and new ways of becoming.
This kind of transformation is not imposed from outside the system. It is seeded within the field, often through a local perturbation: an aesthetic innovation, a gesture of refusal, a rupture in expectation, a moment of unexpected intensity. When such a perturbation coalesces into an attractor — when it entrains embodied attention and finds sufficient resonance with others — it can begin to reconfigure the contours of the field itself.
Music plays a special role in this process. Because it condenses value into temporal, affective form, music can act as a carrier wave for change. It can articulate unspoken tensions, conjure emergent possibilities, and prefigure alignments not yet sedimented in the broader social field. This is why marginalised groups have often turned to music — not just to express their experience, but to reshape the field in which their experience becomes visible, thinkable, or liveable.
Yet transformation does not only occur at moments of rupture. It can also unfold slowly, through a cumulative re-weighting of attractors: new forms of attention, different ways of moving together, altered distributions of intensity. A shift in tempo, a change in instrumentation, a subtle revaluation of what is considered meaningful — each of these can, over time, alter the field’s dynamics. In this way, transformation is not an external event but a process of resonant drift.
Such drift may lead to emergent coherence — a new stabilisation of shared value — or it may introduce instability, dissonance, fragmentation. In either case, the field becomes a site of possibility. Participants are not merely located within it; they are agents of its ongoing co-constitution. Through their orientations and actions, they can sustain, resist, or redirect the forces that shape collective life.
To speak of transformation, then, is not to invoke a heroic subject who overcomes the field, but to acknowledge the field’s generative plasticity — its capacity to be moved by its own tensions. Music, in particular, reveals this plasticity with acute clarity. It is both a map and a motor of value: a way of tracing how we have resonated, and a means of drawing new resonances into being.
In closing, the genesis of value is not a story of fixed norms or given structures. It is a story of living systems in relation, of fields that feel, and of attractors that evolve through the very lives they organise. To participate in such a field is to become part of its movement — not simply to inherit meaning, but to co-create the conditions under which meaning becomes possible.
Reflective Coda: Living in the Field of Value
In tracing the genesis of value, we have moved from the embodied dynamics of neural selection and affective attunement to the expansive architectures of culture, tradition, and shared resonance. At every stage, what has emerged is a view of value not as a fixed property of objects or acts, but as a relational configuration — a field effect, enacted by living systems whose orientations are shaped through interaction.
This reframing brings with it a distinctive kind of realism: a realism of embeddedness and co-constitution. Value is not “out there” to be discovered, nor “in here” to be projected. It is the shape taken by resonance within a given field of life — a field that includes our bodies, our practices, our histories, and the affordances of our environment. To live is to be oriented by such fields, even as we contribute to their ongoing transformation.
Music, in this view, is more than a cultural artefact or expressive form. It is one of the most sensitive instruments for tuning the field of value — for making patterns of resonance felt, for drawing forth the weight and contour of what matters, and for opening the space in which new patterns might arise. When people make music, move to it, or feel themselves moved by it, they are participating in an unfolding that exceeds any individual: a coalescence of embodied meaningfulness that both draws on and reshapes the collective ground.
In a world where value fields are increasingly fractured — where global circuits of mediation reconfigure our perceptual lives at unprecedented speeds — the capacity to feel, trace, and modulate resonance has never been more vital. It offers not a blueprint for consensus, but a means of orientation: a way to navigate shifting terrains, to sustain connection across difference, and to remain open to transformation.
This is the ethical horizon of the model we have sketched. It asks not only how value arises, but how we live with it: how we sustain it, how we contest it, and how we remain attuned to its emergence. It invites us to listen — not just to music, but to the fields we inhabit — and to become more conscious agents of their ongoing composition.
No comments:
Post a Comment