30 August 2025

Cosmology from Within: Persons, Cultures, and the Instantiation of Meaning

1 From Starfield to Self: The Scaling of Meaning

We often hear that we are made of stardust. The elements that compose our blood, our bones, and our breath were forged in the fiery hearts of ancient stars.

This cosmic origin story is beautiful, yet it still casts us as things—assembled from other things. It places us in the universe, as objects among objects. But it doesn’t show us how the universe lives through us.

This series invites a different way of seeing.

We are not merely made of stardust.
We are making meaning from stardust.

Meaning as the Cosmos Unfolding

Meaning is not a human invention layered onto a silent universe. Instead, it is the organising principle of the cosmos itself: a system of potential that unfolds across scales, from the galactic to the cellular to the conscious.

Each scale is not a new kind of substance but a new construal—a differentiation within the same patterned field.

From atom to organism, from signal to sentence, from culture to cosmos—meaning moves through construal: the selective instantiation of potential.

To be a person is not to stand apart from the universe. It is to be one of its ways of theorising itself.

The Scaling of Meaning

Meaning scales across multiple dimensions:

  • Levels—from energy to cell to self.

  • Systems—from collective to individual to reflexive awareness.

  • Fields—from cosmos to context to consciousness.

This scaling is not a ladder of complexity nor a linear ascent toward sentience. It is more like a recursive folding inward—where the cosmos constrains itself into local patterns and then unfolds those patterns across time.

In relational terms:

  • A system is a theory of possible meanings.

  • An instance is a local construal of that theory.

  • Meaning moves not by being passed along, but by being reconstrued—again and again, across scales and situations.

Persons are not endpoints of a cosmic process. They are inflection points—where the system turns its gaze reflexively inward.

Local Theorists of the Universe

We are local theorists of the universe’s potential.
Not detached observers.
Not passive receivers.
Not isolated minds.

We are the field folded in, drawing from vast systems of meaning—language, culture, perception—and instantiating them moment by moment.

Each thought, gesture, or sentence is not solely ours. It is a construal of systems far larger than ourselves.

But this does not render us insignificant. It makes us participatory.

The cosmos does not stop at the stars.
It is not “out there.”
It is here—in grammar, in gesture, in grief, in love.

From Cosmos to Consciousness Without a Break in Being

What if we stopped imagining a break between nature and culture, physics and feeling?

What if, instead of a great chain of being, we envisioned a great cline of construal—where matter, meaning, and mind are not separate substances, but different ways of organising the same field?

Then we might see:

  • A solar flare and a social movement as events at different scales of the same patterned universe.

  • A neurone and a noun as construals of structured potential.

  • The self not as a fixed entity, but as a theory enacted in context.

Looking Ahead

In the posts to come, we will:

  • Trace the cline of individuation—from shared systems to conscious selves.

  • Explore cultures as wavefunctions of collective possibility.

  • Ask what it means to construe ethically—to decide what counts and what is cut.

  • Reframe the person as a system–&–process.

  • And finally, consider what kind of life becomes possible if we live not in the universe, but as its reflexive instance.

We begin not with stars, but with stardust in motion—
in thought, in language, in breath.

The universe is not something we interpret.
We are one of its interpretations.

2 The Cline of Individuation: From Collective to Conscious Potential

If the universe theorises itself through persons and cultures, then how do individuals arise within collective systems of meaning?

Individuation is often imagined as separation—a breaking away from the group into a unique, isolated self. But this misses a deeper truth: individuation is a process of differentiation within a shared field.

It is not isolation. It is constrained divergence—the unfolding of a distinct perspective from a communal foundation.

Consciousness as the System Folding Inward

Imagine society not as a static backdrop but as a semiotic field—a living web of meanings, obligations, and possibilities.

Within this field, consciousness emerges not as an external observer but as the system folding in on itself:

  • A perspective arising from the collective.

  • A local construal of shared potential, reflexive and self-aware.

This “cline of individuation” traces the path from the communal to the conscious:

  • From shared languages and cultural patterns,

  • To the interior depths of personal awareness.

Consciousness is the deep interior of system process—the universe turning its gaze back upon itself.

The Perspective That Emerges

Every individual is a vantage point within a collective system—a construal shaped by inherited meanings and histories, yet uniquely refracted through personal experience.

This vantage point:

  • Retains connection to the whole,

  • But enacts a distinctive interpretation,

  • Negotiating belonging and difference.

Individuation is the art of holding multiplicity—being both part and perspective, system and instance.

Society as a Semiotic Field

We often think of society as a container holding individuals. Instead, it is more accurate to see society as a field of relations and meanings—a dynamic space where meaning circulates and is reconstituted.

Each act—speech, ritual, gesture—is a local instance within this field that reshapes what is possible.

Individuals do not stand outside society; they are emergent patterns within the semiotic fabric.

From Collective Potential to Conscious Presence

The cline of individuation invites us to rethink selfhood:

  • Not as a fixed thing,

  • Not as atomised isolation,

  • But as a perspectival emergence within relational constraint.

This emergence is always partial, always provisional.

It carries the weight of shared systems, the freedom of personal construal, and the tension between belonging and becoming.

Looking Forward

In upcoming posts, we will explore how cultures act as patterned potentials—shared “wavefunctions” of meaning and possibility—and how ethical construals shape what counts in these systems.

For now, we hold this insight:
Individuation is the cosmos coming to know itself through difference, not division.

The universe does not fragment itself when it becomes conscious.
It differentiates—folding vast fields of meaning into the unique contours of a singular perspective.

3 Cultures as Theories of Meaning: Patterned Systems of Obligation and Possibility

Culture is often treated as decoration—something layered onto the raw material of human life. We speak of it as tradition, as heritage, as custom. But these metaphors conceal something deeper:

Culture is not an ornament.
It is a system of meaning—a structured potential, a theory of what persons can be.

Culture as Patterned Potential

In this cosmology, culture is not an epiphenomenon that floats above biology or materiality. It is the patterned organisation of possibility.

A culture offers not just ways of acting, but ways of meaning—grids of salience, fields of expectation, grammars of belonging.

To live in a culture is to move through a semiotic field of affordances:

  • What is sayable.

  • What is do-able.

  • What is thinkable.

  • What must be done, and what must never be.

Culture is the field of meaning into which we are born, and through which the universe constrains and diversifies its own potential.

The Wavefunction of a People

We might say:
A culture is the wavefunction of a people.

It is a shared construal of possibility—
a theory of what matters, what’s real, and what counts.

Each story, each law, each ritual is not merely a reflection of that theory—it is a local instance that re-theorises the system.
It constrains future meaning.
It modulates what can be meant next.

Culture is not static. It is a living potential—updated with every gesture, renewed with every generation.

The Grammar of Construal

Cultures instantiate different construal grammars.

That is: they encode different principles of salience, alignment, and value. They differ in how they cut the field—what they elevate, what they suppress, what they render invisible.

This is why translation is never only linguistic.
It is a traversal across systems of meaning.
It is movement from one construal grammar to another.

And this is why cultural difference is not noise in a shared signal.
It is the plurality of construal made manifest—
the universe theorising itself through divergent patterned fields.

Every Act Is a Systemic Re-Construal

Each act within a culture—each custom, each clause, each conflict—does not simply reflect a system.
It modifies it.

The system is not behind the scene.
It is shaped in the scene.
Every instance constrains the system anew.

In this view, history is not a backdrop but a living theory, revised in every enactment.
Culture is not “what we inherit,” but what we continue to mean.

Looking Forward

In the next post, we’ll turn from cultural construal to ethical responsibility—asking what happens when construal itself becomes contested:
What counts?
Who counts?
And who gets to decide?

But here we pause with this recognition:

Culture is not a container for people.
It is the theorising activity of the cosmos—
a field of meaning in motion.

The universe construes itself not only through stars and selves,
but through shared grammars of story, law, and song.

Culture is not the background of life.
It is one of life’s most intricate foregroundings.

4 The Ethics of Construal: Meaning, Responsibility, and Constraint

To construe is to make meaning. But to make meaning is never neutral.

Every act of construal—every framing, every distinction, every metaphor—cuts the field.
It includes and excludes.
It foregrounds and backgrounds.
It tells us what counts, and what doesn’t.

This is where meaning meets responsibility.
This is the ethics of construal.

Meaning Is Never Innocent

We often imagine ethics as a set of rules applied after interpretation—guidelines for behaviour, imposed from outside the field of meaning.

But in this cosmology, ethics is already at work in construal.
Because construal is never passive. It is an act of shaping the field—of deciding what will be marked, made salient, given weight.

To construe is to position.
To limit.
To render visible—or invisible.

Meaning always comes with a margin.
And what falls outside that margin is not just forgotten. It is often erased.

The Grammar of Salience

Every culture, every discourse, every act of sense-making operates with a grammar of salience:

  • What is made prominent?

  • What is backgrounded?

  • What is never named at all?

This grammar is not simply linguistic.
It is ethical.

To ask what matters is to ask:
What gets to be real?
What gets to be felt?
What gets to be possible?

Power and the Cut

Power operates through construal.
It doesn’t only repress—it organises meaning.

Power sets the boundaries of visibility.
It determines what kinds of personhood are intelligible, what kinds of pain are legible, what kinds of futures are sayable.

This is why so many struggles—political, cultural, existential—are struggles over framing:

  • Who gets to speak?

  • What gets to count as evidence?

  • Whose suffering makes sense?

  • Whose joy is recognised as real?

And yet, the same force that can exclude can also be used to include.

Construal is not only the medium of power.
It is also the medium of care.

To Construe is to Care

To construe ethically is to attend to the cut.
To recognise that every choice—of word, of frame, of metaphor—carries a weight.

It is to ask:

  • What am I centring?

  • What am I obscuring?

  • What possibilities am I enabling or foreclosing?

Care begins not with sentiment, but with salience.
With attention to what is made meaningful.
With awareness of how we shape the field in which others must live.

Looking Forward

In the next post, we turn from ethical positioning to personal patterning.
We’ll explore the person as both system and process:

  • Structured by histories of construal,

  • Animated by choices within constraint,

  • Always becoming, always negotiating meaning anew.

But before we move on, we pause here:

Meaning is never just what is said.
It is what is made possible by what is said.
And what is made impossible by what is not.

To construe is to shape the world.
And the shape we give it… shapes us in return.

5 The Person as System–&–Process – Identity in Motion

We often imagine the self as something we have:
A fixed core, a stable identity, an inner truth to be discovered or expressed.

But what if personhood is not a thing, but a system in motion?
Not a subject or object, but a process of ongoing construal—shaped by history, realised in context, and never quite complete.

A person, in this cosmology, is not a separate being inside the universe.
A person is the universe—theorising itself in dynamic, situated form.

Theory and Instantiation

Each of us lives as a semiotic pattern:

  • A history of construals we did not choose.

  • A web of relations that precede us.

  • A repertoire of meanings drawn from the systems we inhabit.

This is the theory:
The structured potential we inherit—the languages, cultures, genealogies, and grammars that make us intelligible.

And this is the process:
The unfolding instantiation of that theory—moment by moment, in acts of speech, choice, alignment, and resistance.

Selfhood is not static. It is recursive individuation:

  • A looping movement from potential to instance.

  • From system to event.

  • From the already-said to the not-yet-lived.

Construal in Context

Identity is not an essence, but a construal.
It is not what we are, but how we are made meaningful—in context, in relation, in time.

We become someone through the meanings we inhabit and enact.
And these meanings shift across contexts, relationships, and roles.

To say “I am” is always to draw from a system of possible becomings.
And each act of saying is itself a construal—positioned, contingent, alive.

Meaning in Motion

There is no fixed boundary between subject and object, self and system.
There is only meaning in motion:

  • Systems instancing themselves.

  • Persons re-construing what they are given.

  • Selves emerging at the edge of constraint and choice.

This is not fragmentation.
It is fluid coherence.

We are not unstable because we change.
We are coherent because we change in relation to the systems that shape us.

The Self as a Site of Differentiation

To be a person is to be a site where meaning diverges:

  • Where collective histories meet singular trajectories.

  • Where social grammars find local inflection.

  • Where the cosmos constrains itself into a unique, situated pattern.

We are not outside the system, looking in.
We are the system, folding in on itself.

And so, the person is not the endpoint of becoming.
It is the place where becoming becomes visible.

Looking Forward

In the final movement of this arc, we turn toward praxis.

If the universe theorises itself through us—if we are not separate from it, but active construals of its potential—
then how shall we live?

We’ll explore what it means to enact cosmology:
To treat science, spirituality, and politics not as disciplines about the world,
but as genres of participation within it.

You are not a subject in search of an object.
You are not an essence hidden behind appearance.
You are a system–&–process:
A dynamic grammar of being.
A local theory of meaning in motion.

6 Cosmology as Praxis – Living the Theory

If we are not separate from the universe,
but instances of its theorising,
then cosmology is not just a story we tell—
it is a way of being we live.

This changes everything.

It shifts cosmology from explanation to participation.
From theory about the universe to praxis within it.
To live, then, is not merely to exist—but to enact a construal of cosmic potential.

The Universe, Instanced in Action

In this cosmology, every act is not just personal.
It is cosmic—a local instance of the universe’s patterned possibility.

To act is to reconstrue the system:

  • To foreground certain meanings.

  • To align with some affordances, resist others.

  • To give shape to a field of meaning that is always in motion.

Praxis is not the application of abstract theory.
It is the enactment of being—a theory lived from within.

Genres of Cosmic Construal

We often divide our interpretive modes into disciplines:

  • Science to explain.

  • Spirituality to transcend.

  • Politics to organise.

But seen through this lens, each is a genre of construal—a way the universe theorises itself under different constraints:

  • Science construes through systems of testability and pattern.

  • Spirituality construes through presence, depth, and resonance.

  • Politics construes through collective obligation and negotiated possibility.

Each genre is partial. Each foregrounds and backgrounds.
And each shapes the range of meanings we can live.

To move between them is not to betray objectivity—it is to navigate the plural logics of construal.

Praxis as Participation

To live cosmology is to live as a construal.
It is to act with the awareness that:

  • Meaning is patterned, not fixed.

  • Every instance participates in the system.

  • No interpretation is neutral.

This doesn’t collapse ethics, science, or ritual into one another—but it situates them within a shared premise:

We are the field, folded in.
We are not talking about reality.
We are inside its theorising.

How Shall We Live?

This is not a metaphysical question.
It is a practical one.

If we are systems of meaning in motion, then the question is always:

  • What are we constraining now?

  • What are we enabling?

  • What are we making visible, viable, sayable?

Every act—scientific, spiritual, political—is an answer.
Every gesture is a hypothesis:
This is how the world might mean.
This is what a person might be.
This is how the universe might live through us.

Looking Ahead

In the final post of this arc, we turn to reflection.
We ask not just how the universe is construed through persons and cultures,
but what it feels like to live in the first person plural of cosmos.

We leave the stance of observers behind, and consider:
What becomes possible when the universe begins to look through our eyes?

To theorise is not to stand apart.
To act is not to depart from theory.

To live is to instantiate the field.
And every action is a cosmic construal in miniature.

Reflective Coda:  The Universe in the First Person

We have followed meaning as it moves—
from cosmos to cell,
from collective to conscious,
from ritual to resistance,
from theory to act.

At every scale, we have seen:
The universe is not something we look at.
It is something we are—
structured potential, instancing itself
in stars, in cultures, in persons, in thought.

But now we ask:
What does it mean to live this from the inside?

What does it mean not simply to theorise the universe—
but to be the universe, theorising?

The View from Within

This is not a metaphor.
It is a shift in stance.

We are not external observers peering in.
We are meaning, mid-motion.
We are systems, folded into themselves.

To say I is not to leave the cosmos behind.
It is to speak from within its ongoing instantiation.

There is no fixed subject.
No stable object.
Only patterns of salience, relation, and potential
—momentarily stabilised, locally meaningful.

The First Person Plural

The “I” that speaks is never singular.
It is formed from we:

  • We, the languages that predate us.

  • We, the cultures that constrain and nourish us.

  • We, the ancestors whose grammars shape our possibilities.

To say I is to echo the systems that speak through us.
To live ethically is to become aware of those echoes—
and to tune them,
carefully.

The Field, Reflexively Instanced

If the universe is a system of meaning,
then every act of understanding is the field knowing itself.
Every construal is a cut in the infinite,
a differentiation of what could be
into what is—for now.

And so we end not with conclusion,
but with continuity.

Not with a final word,
but with an open grammar.

We are not looking at the universe.
We are the universe, looking.

We are not interpreting meaning.
We are meaning, interpreting itself.

We are not separate from the field.
We are the field—folded in,
construing,
becoming,
alive.

By at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)