Fields of Meaning: Scientific Modelling Through a Relational Lens

1 What Is a Model?: From Compression to Construal

Scientific models are often thought of as simplified representations—“maps” or “pictures”—of reality, tools that help us navigate complexity by reducing it to manageable form. But within a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), models can be understood far more profoundly: not as static mirrors, but as dynamic instances of meaning potential that both compress and construe the unfolding coherence of phenomena.

Compression as Coherence

At their core, models are compressions of relational processes and fields of unfolding. Just as particles emerge as compressed patterns within continuous fields, models condense vast webs of interaction and variation into structured, accessible forms. This compression is not arbitrary but is shaped by coherence: the patterned relations that hold together phenomena across dimensions of space, time, and causality. Models extract and amplify these coherences, enabling observers to grasp and work with them.

Construal as Meaning-Making

But compression alone is not modelling. For a model to function as a semiotic system—one that is meaningful and usable—it must be construed by conscious agents within communities of practice. This construal draws on value systems, purpose, and shared conventions to interpret the compressed patterns as meaningful configurations, whether numerical, visual, conceptual, or linguistic.

Models as Semiotic Instances

This perspective reframes models from static “pictures” to semiotic instances: dynamic, interpretable construals arising from material coherence but transcending mere physicality. Models are not simply “out there” but are enacted through the interaction of observer, community, and the phenomena under study. They instantiate meaning potentials shaped by cultural, cognitive, and methodological systems.

Implications

Understanding models as compressed and construed relational processes invites a new epistemology: one that foregrounds the role of the observer, the semiotic system, and the collective meaning potential from which models emerge. It also opens paths to explore how models evolve, how they relate across domains, and how they mediate the unfolding of scientific knowledge.

2 The Model in Practice: Interactions, Limits, and the Ecology of Knowledge

Building on our understanding of models as compressions and semiotic construals, we now turn to the practical dimensions of modelling in science and knowledge-making. How do models operate within fields of interaction? What are their limits? And how do they participate in the broader ecology of knowledge?

Models as Interactional Processes

Models are not isolated artefacts; they emerge, evolve, and function through ongoing interactions among observers, instruments, data, and phenomena. Each iteration—whether a mathematical formula, a conceptual framework, or a computational simulation—is shaped by this relational interplay. Models adapt to new observations, refine predictions, and respond to challenges, reflecting the dynamic and situated nature of knowledge.

Limits and Boundary Conditions

Every model embodies constraints—boundary conditions that define its domain of applicability and the assumptions it carries. These limits are essential: they acknowledge that models compress complex realities and that no model can capture every detail. Recognising these boundaries prevents the conflation of second-order semiotic reality (the model) with first-order material reality (the processes being modelled), and invites continual critical engagement and revision.

The Ecology of Models

Models coexist within an ecology of knowledge, interacting with other models, theories, and practices across disciplines. This ecology is not hierarchical but networked, with models influencing and transforming one another. Interdisciplinary dialogues reveal complementarities and tensions, highlighting how models mediate meaning across contexts.

The Role of Meaning and Value

As semiotic construals, models also carry meaning potentials that extend beyond empirical fit. They embody values, priorities, and interpretive frameworks that influence how phenomena are understood and acted upon. Awareness of these dimensions enriches the practice of modelling, situating it within human purposes and cultural contexts.

Towards Reflexive Modelling

Informed by a relational ontology, reflexive modelling acknowledges the mutual shaping of models and observers. It encourages openness to alternative perspectives, iterative refinement, and the embracing of complexity without succumbing to reductionism.

3 Compression and Coherence: Modelling as Meaning-Making

Having explored models as relational construals and situated practices, we now turn to the underlying dynamics that allow models to function at all: compression and coherence. In the relational ontology we are developing, these are not just technical or cognitive processes — they are meaning-making activities, unfolding within and across fields of potential.

Compression: From Process to Pattern

To model is to compress unfolding phenomena — to abstract patterns from complex processes. This is not simplification for its own sake, but a necessary condition of intelligibility. Just as language compresses experience into meaning, models compress relational unfoldings into selective representations. A model, then, is not a mirror of reality, but an enactment of coherence within constraint.

Compression does not negate complexity; it manages it. By selecting what differences make a difference, models allow us to interact meaningfully with the world — to anticipate, to question, to interpret. But every act of compression implies exclusions: unmodelled variables, unacknowledged assumptions, unseen interactions.

Coherence: Holding Meaning Together

If compression makes a model functionally possible, coherence makes it meaningful. A model must hold together across its internal structure and its external deployments. It must cohere with other models, with empirical observations, and with the broader systems of knowledge in which it operates.

Coherence is not reducible to consistency or predictive success. In a relational ontology, coherence is the resonance of a model within a field of meaning — its capacity to stabilise intelligibility across instances. A model coheres when it enables understanding, links phenomena, and supports purposeful action, even if it is partial or provisional.

The Model as Semiotic Instance

From this perspective, each model is an instance of meaning — not a derivation from reality, but an actualisation of meaning potential in a particular relational configuration. It is a semiotic act, grounded in material processes but structured by symbolic systems. This holds whether the model is a graph, a mathematical expression, a verbal explanation, or a simulation: all are instances of construal.

This view also dissolves the divide between scientific and everyday models. The child’s mental model of gravity, the engineer’s stress diagram, and the physicist’s field equations are all compressions of potential into instance, meaningful because they resonate within their contexts.

A Modelling Ethic

If models are acts of meaning, they carry responsibility. We must attend not only to how well a model works, but also to what it foregrounds, what it hides, whom it serves, and how it might evolve. Modelling, then, is not just a methodological activity — it is an ethical and ontological one.

Reflective Coda — Modelling as Construal, Relation, and Responsibility

Throughout this trilogy, we have re-examined scientific modelling through the lens of relational ontology: not as a search for ultimate reality, but as a patterned unfolding of meaning. Models, in this view, do not depict things-in-themselves but instantiate relational coherences — selective construals of experience within specific fields of potential.

We began by reframing models not as mirrors of reality, but as relational construals: semiotic instances that emerge from the activation of social and cognitive potentials. These construals are not arbitrary. They compress patterned regularities across processes, stabilising meaning within a shared context of interpretation.

We then examined the situated practices through which models are produced and refined — not as neutral activities, but as forms of social semiosis shaped by tools, traditions, constraints, and purposes. The scientist does not merely extract truth from the world but configures meaningful relations within it. Modelling, like all meaning-making, is a material and symbolic process.

Finally, we turned to compression and coherence as fundamental operations in modelling. Compression renders complexity tractable; coherence holds meaning together across time, context, and application. Modelling is thus always perspectival: it selects, relates, omits, and reframes. Its power lies not in its completeness, but in its meaningful partiality.

This relational approach does not weaken the epistemic power of science — it situates it. By understanding models as semiotic acts within unfolding systems, we gain a clearer view of both their capacity and their limits. We can ask not just whether a model works, but how and why it means what it does, for whom, and with what consequences.

The implications are both theoretical and ethical. To model is to construe. And to construe is to take a stance within a world of unfolding relations.

Beyond the Particle: Matter, Meaning, and Relational Physics

1 From Fields to Particles — Unfolding and the Appearance of Discreteness

In the traditional ontology of physics, particles are understood as fundamental entities—discrete units of matter and energy, each with defined properties and behaviours. But when viewed through the lens of our relational ontology, this framework is upended. The ontology we’ve developed does not begin with things. It begins with unfolding processes, with fields of potential that give rise to instances of coherence. In this view, what we call a “particle” is not a basic building block, but a compressed pattern—a local coherence within a field of unfolding.

Just as language users select features from a meaning potential to instantiate a clause, so too do physical processes instantiate coherent patterns from physical potentials. A particle is not “there” until it emerges as a stable instantiation within a wider network of relational constraints. Its apparent discreteness is an effect, not a premise.

Fields as Meaning Potentials

The Standard Model of particle physics is built on the notion of fields. Each particle is associated with a quantum field that permeates space. What we observe as a particle is an excitation of the corresponding field—an instance of potential becoming actual. This fits naturally within the relational ontology:

• A field is a structured potential—like a system network in SFL.

• A particle is an instance of that potential, actualised in unfolding processes.

• The stability of a particle is the resonance of that instantiation across time—its recursive compatibility with the wider field relations.

Importantly, there are no isolated “things”. The ontology recognises only relational patterns—fields as structured possibilities, and particles as coherent instantiations that endure (however briefly) in the unfolding.

Compression and Coherence

When a pattern of unfolding compresses into a coherent configuration—localised, stable, and recurrent—we name it a particle. This compression is not imposed from the outside, nor does it involve a hidden substance underneath; rather, it is a self-organising dynamic. Much like how a melody takes shape from the interplay of musical values, a particle arises as a local coherence in a relational field.

In this view, mass, charge, and spin are not intrinsic properties, but features of the coherence—ways of modelling the nature of the instantiation and its interaction with other fields. This has profound consequences:

• Mass is not a substance, but a measure of how strongly the coherence couples to the unfolding gravitational potential.

• Charge is a pattern of relational interaction within the electroweak potential.

• Spin is a topological feature of the field's unfolding around the instantiation.

Each of these can be modelled not as intrinsic traits, but as relational qualifications of a compressed field instance.

From Discreteness to Disposition

This model helps us reframe a longstanding philosophical tension: how do continuous fields give rise to discrete particles?

In the relational ontology, this isn’t a metaphysical mystery. Discreteness is a construal—a categorisation of recurrent instantiations. We treat a stable field compression as an individual for the purposes of scientific modelling, but this does not mean it is a self-sufficient entity.

We no longer need to ask “What is a particle made of?” but rather:

How does a particle instantiate relational coherence from a field of potential?

This subtle shift has major implications for how we understand matter, interaction, and the role of modelling itself. It repositions physics not as a catalogue of fundamental things, but as a semiotic system that construes patterned instances of unfolding.

2 The Electron as a Relational Instance

In classical and even early quantum physics, the electron is treated as a particle: a negatively charged point mass orbiting a nucleus, scattering through space, or probabilistically “smeared” across a field. But from the perspective of our relational ontology, the electron is not a thing but an instance—a patterned coherence within a field of potential. To understand the electron, then, is to trace how its recognisable features emerge from and participate in relational unfolding.

Electron Potential and Instantiation

The electron field is a quantum field that spans what physics construes as space. In standard formulations, this field can be excited to produce a quantum—an electron—which interacts with other fields according to fixed rules. In the relational ontology, we reframe this process:

• The electron field is a structured potential, defined not by space but by its topology of interaction—the dimensions along which its potential can be instantiated in unfolding relation.

• An electron is a local coherence within this topology—an actualisation of the field that attains stability across a region of unfolding.

This instance is not separate from the field. It is the field, in a particular configuration—compressed, resonant, and qualified by its relational position. What we call the “electron” is a token of this coherence: something we recognise and semiotically distinguish across contexts.

Charge, Mass, and Spin as Relational Effects

In standard physics, the electron is said to have intrinsic properties: a negative electric charge, a specific mass, and a half-integer spin. In relational terms, these are not substances or hidden essences but relational qualifications:

• Charge arises from how the electron field couples to the electromagnetic field. The electron is negatively charged because its instantiation resonates in a specific way within the electroweak potential. The sign and magnitude are systemic features—values selected within the broader field grammar.

• Mass is not a thing the electron “has,” but a measure of its inertial relation—how tightly or loosely the electron’s instance coheres across the gravitational unfolding. In this view, mass is the degree to which unfolding is resisted, compressed into a consistent pattern of activation.

• Spin is a topological property of the field’s mode of unfolding. In the relational model, it indexes how the coherence circulates around itself in spacetime-like interactions. It is a pattern of relation, not a literal rotation.

These qualifications don’t define what an electron “is”—they describe how its instantiation relates to other fields and patterns. The electron is thus not a miniature marble with a charge label, but a knot in the relational fabric—a recurrent field pattern with certain dispositional effects.

Individuation and Generalisation

Every electron instantiation is singular—it unfolds in a particular context. But its recognisability comes from its participation in a collective potential. There is a meaning potential of “electronhood” within the field—a set of system features that are reliably selected and instantiated.

This duality maps cleanly onto the ontology’s clines:

• Individuation: Each electron instance is individuated—it is a local construal of a broader potential. But it is also generalisable, as it instantiates the same features across contexts.

• Instantiation: The field has a continuous potential. The electron is a point of actualisation—a construal that has coherence.

From this view, the idea of a “fundamental particle” gives way to a typology of stable relational instances. The electron is not a substance under the microscope, but a recurring semiotic event in the field grammar of physics.

3 From Particle Zoo to Relational Grammar

The Standard Model of particle physics has long been described as a “zoo” of particles—a crowded menagerie of quarks, leptons, bosons, and more, each with a catalogue of properties and interactions. But within the relational ontology we’ve been developing, these particles are not elementary things. They are instantiations of structured field potentials, and the so-called zoo is better understood as a grammar of unfolding relations.

Particles as Instantiations

In this framework, each “particle” is a coherence pattern—an instance of particular features selected from the potential of one or more fields. These patterns become salient in relation to other unfolding processes. Their apparent discreteness (mass, charge, spin, etc.) is not ontological but semiotic: they are recognisable tokens of patterned relational dynamics.

• A quark is not a part of matter but an instance of the quantum chromodynamic (QCD) potential, qualified by colour charge and confined within broader relational structures (like baryons).

• A boson is not a particle that “carries force” but an instance of a mediating potential—an unfolding relation that enables interaction between cohering field patterns.

What we call a “particle” is thus an abstraction from process—a construal that stabilises certain qualities of relational unfolding into repeatable roles.

The Grammar of Fields

Instead of treating particles as fundamental and fields as their backdrop, the relational model reverses the hierarchy:

• Fields are the structured meaning potentials of physical reality. They define dimensions along which relational patterns can be instantiated.

• Particles are instances—coherences actualised within these fields in a way that persists long enough to be individuated, named, and measured.

This allows us to treat the Standard Model not as a list of ingredients but as a semiotic grammar: a set of system networks whose features instantiate as relational configurations with particular consequences.

• The electroweak grammar governs how weak and electromagnetic interactions unfold and co-qualify their instances.

• The QCD grammar governs how colour charges interact, giving rise to confinement, gluon dynamics, and hadron formation.

• The mass grammar arises from how the Higgs field constrains the coherence of field configurations, rather than "giving mass" as an ontological act.

In this way, the Standard Model becomes a relational semiotic—a system of structured potentials from which recognisable, individuated patterns (particles) can be instantiated and organised.

From Measurement to Meaning

When physicists describe particles through their interactions—via cross-sections, decay channels, or collision signatures—they are tracing meaning instances: selections from a potential field system, rendered measurable through technology.

But just as meaning in language cannot be reduced to lexicogrammar, the coherence of particles cannot be reduced to numeric outputs. What’s measured is not a thing but a token of relation—an actualised point in a topologically unfolding system.

This reframes physics itself as a construal of meaning: not a discovery of fundamental building blocks, but a disciplined semiotic system for naming, measuring, and modelling unfolding relational processes.

Reflective Coda

Across this trilogy, we have sought to move beyond inherited metaphors that portray the world as made of things — discrete, independent particles in fixed space and time — and instead foreground an ontology of unfolding: where what we call “particles” are compressions of processual relations, and what we take as “matter” is the patterning of coherent interactions across fields of potential.

This shift matters. It reconfigures the very premises of physics, not by discarding its achievements, but by re-situating them in a broader account of meaning, instantiation, and consciousness. From this perspective, the so-called building blocks of nature are not ultimate entities but phase-bound construals — semiotic compressions of value, stability, and transformation within unfolding systems.

We have reframed quantum fields not as abstract mathematical surfaces but as relational potentials — structured landscapes of possibility, instantiated by processes and patterned by coherence. And we have traced how apparent “particles” emerge not as atoms of substance, but as the crossings and recursions of fields in relation.

This is not a new physics, but a new orientation toward physics — one that places observer, meaning, and relational process at the heart of the model. It asks not what things are, but how coherence unfolds, and in doing so, it clears ground for a more integrated view of science, semiosis, and self.

To go beyond the particle is not to deny its usefulness, but to recognise its place: not as the foundation of reality, but as a symbolic compression within the unfolding of relation.

Relational Ontology and the Quantum Field of Meaning

Introduction: Why Quantum Physics Needs a New Ontology

Quantum theory remains the most successful predictive framework in physics — yet its foundations remain unresolved. The famous puzzles of uncertainty, entanglement, and wavefunction collapse have led to decades of interpretive controversy, often centring on the nature of observation and the role of the observer.

At the heart of these puzzles is a deeper problem: the ontology assumed by most interpretations of quantum mechanics. Traditional physical theories often presume a world of objectively existing entities — particles and fields — with properties defined independently of any observer. In such a framework, it becomes paradoxical that an observer’s measurement seems to affect the outcome. How can an electron know whether it is being watched?

This series proposes a shift. Rather than trying to resolve these puzzles within an object-based ontology, we approach them from a different standpoint: a relational ontology grounded in systemic potential, actualisation, and the dynamics of observation. This is not a metaphysical sleight-of-hand or a poetic metaphor. It is a rigorous account of reality as constituted by relations, not things — and by instances, not substances.

Our framework draws on a conception of potential and instance developed through systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and informed by neurobiological theories of consciousness. But it is not restricted to semiotic systems. The same principles can be extended to the material domain — including quantum systems — when we treat potential as structured, and actualisation as relational.

In this series, we will revisit each of the classic interpretive challenges in quantum mechanics through this lens:

1. How should we understand uncertainty when position and momentum are not hidden properties, but mutually exclusive potentials?

2. How can entanglement be seen not as spooky action, but as the co-structured potential of a relational field?

3. What really happens in measurement, when the wavefunction collapses to an outcome?

4. What is the role of the observer, if not a detached subject or external cause?

5. And how does all this relate to the processes of individuation, where systems of potential are differentiated into distinct fields of meaning?

By reframing these questions in a relational ontology, we aim to show that the strangeness of quantum mechanics is not a sign of its incompleteness — but of a mismatch between its insights and the assumptions we bring to its interpretation. When we shift from a substance-based to a relation-based ontology, what once appeared as paradox may instead become intelligible — not as knowledge of what the world is, but as insight into how the world unfolds.

1 Uncertainty and the Structure of Potential

The uncertainty principle is often misinterpreted as a statement about human ignorance — as though the act of measurement disturbs an otherwise well-defined reality. But the principle is more radical than that. It does not say we can’t know both the position and the momentum of a particle. It says they cannot both be actualised in the same instance.

In classical physics, properties such as position and momentum are conceived as attributes that objects possess. But quantum theory reveals that such properties are not always co-instantiable. They belong to different structures of potential, which cannot be simultaneously realised. To actualise one is to foreclose the actualisation of the other.

This suggests that we need to rethink what is meant by a “property.” From the perspective of relational ontology, a property is not a pre-existing thing that a particle carries around with it, but an instance drawn from a system of potential — one that is defined relationally, not absolutely.

The Heisenberg uncertainty relation describes the limit of simultaneous actualisability, not of precision. The wavefunction doesn’t conceal hidden variables; it expresses a structured potential that unfolds into actualities only when particular observational conditions are met. The more tightly constrained the conditions for actualising position, the less coherent the structure remaining for momentum — and vice versa.

This coherence is not noise or deficiency. It is a sign of the system’s internal organisation. A system that can be actualised as a position-instance or as a momentum-instance is not ambiguous — it is structured. But its structure is such that only one actualisation can be instantiated at a time.

On this view, uncertainty is not a flaw in our measurements, nor a result of disturbance. It is a natural consequence of how relational potentials are structured and instantiated. Each observation is a moment of selection — not of selection among equally real outcomes, but of which relation is brought into being as an instance.

The quantum world, then, is not a world of definite objects obscured by probabilistic fog. It is a world of structured potential in which some paths of actualisation are mutually exclusive. Uncertainty is not a veil over reality — it is a window into its relational constitution.

2 Entanglement as Non-Separable Relational Potential

Entanglement is famously described as “spooky action at a distance,” a mysterious link that instantly connects particles across space. Yet this mystique largely arises from our object-centred ontology — the assumption that particles are independent things with intrinsic properties, capable of existing separately and locally.

From a relational ontology perspective, entanglement reveals the fundamental structure of quantum systems as relational fields of potential. The entangled particles do not possess separate, independent states; instead, they jointly instantiate a single, unified system of potential that cannot be decomposed into isolated parts.

When two particles become entangled, their possible states become co-structured — the potential outcomes for one particle are inseparably linked to those of the other. This co-structure forms a holistic field, a relational pattern that transcends classical separability.

Measurement of one particle actualises a particular relation in this field, collapsing the range of potential outcomes for both. Rather than sending a signal or influencing the distant particle, measurement transforms the relational structure as a whole, instantaneously updating what remains to be actualised.

This is not “action at a distance” but the unfolding of a relational potential that is fundamentally non-local and irreducible. The space between particles is not empty but filled with relational meaning and structured potential that cannot be split without losing essential coherence.

Entanglement challenges the classical notion that reality consists of discrete, independently existing entities. Instead, it points toward a deeper reality constituted by relational fields whose parts are defined only through their mutual relations and co-instantiation.

This relational view opens a new way of understanding the quantum world — not as a collection of isolated things but as an interconnected web of potential, where the unity of the system precedes and determines the instantiation of its parts.

3 Measurement as Actualisation, Not Discovery

Measurement in quantum mechanics is often portrayed as a passive act of revealing pre-existing properties of particles. However, this view quickly runs into paradoxes: if properties are not definite until measured, what does it mean to measure? And how can the observer influence what is observed?

The relational ontology reframes measurement not as discovery but as actualisation — the selective instantiation of one among many possible relations within a structured potential.

The quantum wavefunction describes a system’s potential: a structured set of possibilities that exist relationally, not as concrete realities. Measurement is an interaction between the system and a material apparatus (including observer and environment), which together define the conditions under which one particular potential is instantiated as an actual event.

In this sense, measurement is a process — a relational unfolding in which the system’s potential is partially actualised. The outcome is not revealed but generated, through the relational constraints imposed by the measurement context.

This perspective dissolves the paradox of “wavefunction collapse” by seeing it as a transformation of potential into instance, mediated by relational conditions rather than a sudden, mysterious physical event. The wavefunction does not “collapse” like a physical object; it is restructured by actualisation.

Importantly, the apparatus is not a neutral observer but an active participant, providing the relational context that defines what counts as an outcome. Different apparatuses instantiate different aspects of the system’s potential.

Measurement also highlights the context-dependence of quantum phenomena. The actualised property is meaningful only within the relational field that includes the system, the apparatus, and the observer. There is no “property” detached from this context.

In sum, measurement is a creative, relational event — an actualisation of meaning from structured potential — rather than a passive uncovering of hidden facts. It is a moment where possibility becomes reality, shaped by the dynamics of relational fields.

4 The Observer as a Situated Field of Systems

Traditional interpretations often cast the observer as a detached, external subject — a “god’s eye view” perceiving a world of independently existing objects. This perspective struggles to account for the active role of observation in quantum phenomena.

A relational ontology repositions the observer as an embedded, situated system — itself a complex relational field composed of material, semiotic, and cognitive processes. The observer is not outside the system but entwined within it.

Consciousness does not “cause” wavefunction collapse in a mystical sense. Instead, it participates in the actualisation of meaning within relational fields. Observation is a dynamic process in which the observer’s state and the observed system co-define what becomes instantiated.

The observer’s semiotic systems — language, concepts, and sensory apparatus — shape the relational potential, influencing which relations are actualised. Observation thus transforms both the system and the observer, a mutual process of individuation.

This perspective aligns with neurobiological theories that view consciousness as the emergent product of neuronal group selection, where dynamic, selective processes instantiate meaning from potential. The observer’s field is itself a system of potentials and actualisations, resonating with the relational structure of the quantum system.

Rather than a passive watcher, the observer is a participatory agent, whose situatedness and embodiment condition the unfolding of quantum events. Objectivity emerges not from detachment but from the coherence of relational processes shared across observers.

By recognising the observer as a situated field of systems, we bridge the divide between subject and object, and understand observation as a fundamental relational event — a co-actualisation of potential in both system and observer.

5 Rethinking Objectivity, Causality, and Knowledge

Quantum mechanics challenges classical notions of objectivity, causality, and knowledge — concepts often taken for granted in everyday experience. A relational ontology invites us to rethink these ideas in light of structured potential and actualisation.

Objectivity is not about detachment or viewing the world from an external vantage point. Instead, it is about the coherence of relational processes across multiple situated perspectives. When observers share relational fields and contexts, their actualisations align, producing consistent accounts of phenomena. Objectivity, then, emerges from intersubjective resonance, not from observer-independence.

Causality in the quantum realm cannot be understood as simple, linear transmission of influence between independent objects. Instead, causality is the temporal unfolding of relational fields — a co-evolution of potential and instance within systems. The cause-effect relation is embedded in the dynamics of actualisation, where potential relations are instantiated in time.

Knowledge arises not from uncovering pre-existing facts, but from the structured actualisation of potential into meaningful instances. It is an emergent property of relational fields that includes observer, system, and context. Knowledge is inherently contextual and situated, shaped by the conditions of actualisation.

This reframing dissolves classical paradoxes and reveals quantum phenomena as natural expressions of relational reality. Rather than problems to be solved, these challenges become windows into the deeper structure of how reality unfolds.

By embracing a relational ontology, we gain a more coherent, integrated understanding of objectivity, causality, and knowledge — one that honours the dynamic, participatory nature of observation and existence.

6 Individuation and Quantum Fields

Building on our relational ontology, the process of individuation — how entities come to be distinct yet connected — finds a profound expression in the nature of quantum fields.

Quantum fields are not assemblages of isolated particles but fundamental relational structures encompassing all potential instances of particles and their interactions. Each particle is an individuated pattern emerging from the continuous field of potentiality.

Individuation is a process of differentiation within this holistic field, where relational potentials selectively actualise as distinct entities while maintaining their intrinsic connections. The boundaries between particles are not absolute separations but dynamic thresholds within the relational web.

This perspective aligns with the understanding of quantum entanglement as the non-separability of relational potentials, and measurement as the contextual actualisation of individuated instances. It reveals a universe woven from interdependent processes of co-instantiation and co-individuation.

In this light, quantum fields are not mere physical substrates but dynamic landscapes of potential meaning and relation, constantly shaping and reshaping the identities of their constituent parts.

Individuation within quantum fields exemplifies the fundamental relationality of reality — where distinctions arise not from isolation but from the patterned interplay of relational potentials, actualised through measurement, observation, and interaction.

Resonant Systems: Music, Value, and Meaning

In our ongoing development of a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), we’ve taken a fresh look at the nature of music—what it is, what it does, and how it means.

A key clarification in this view is that music is not itself a semiotic system. It does not consist of signs that symbolise meanings in the way language, mathematics, or gesture do. Rather, music is a social system that selects and activates patterns of biological value. These values are inherited biases in neural functioning—evolutionarily selected tendencies that guide attention, behaviour, and learning according to what has proven adaptively advantageous to our ancestors. Musical sound targets the functioning of value systems directly.

So while music does not construe meaning in the sense used in SFL, it does activate the systems from which symbolic meaning can be construed. It brings somatic potential into shared social space, where consciousness may interpret its effects through the lens of emotion, memory, or other mental processes. In doing so, music participates in the broader ecology of meaning—not by encoding messages, but by resonating across bodies and contexts in ways that matter.

This resonance is not symbolic but somatic: a functional synchrony between two complex systems operating in time. The patterned material dynamics of music unfold in ways that can entrain the listener’s own biological rhythms—heart rate, breath, neural oscillation. When these dynamics resonate with the dynamics of value systems, they amplify or modulate value-category activations. These activations are the basis of what consciousness later construes as feeling, emotion, or drive.

Emotion, in this view, is a mental process that interprets these activations semiotically. And when language enters the scene, it gives symbolic form to these construals—projecting them into shared meaning and memory.

This account allows us to preserve the crucial distinction between symbolic systems (like language) and value-selecting systems (like music), while also recognising that both are part of the complex network of meaning-making in human life. Music, in this view, becomes a site where biology, culture, and consciousness meet—not in signification, but in activation and resonance. It operates not by representing meaning, but by resonating with the very systems from which meaning is ultimately construed.

Voicing Value: Music, Meaning, and the Semiotic Voice

1 The Value of Music: From Neural Bias to Social Resonance

What is music, and why does it matter? In the relational ontology we’ve been developing, music is not a universal language, nor a symbolic system of meaning like language itself. It is something else entirely — something rooted in our biology, shaped by our societies, and activated in real time by acts of performance and listening. In this view, music is a social system that instantiates a particular kind of material potential: the biological value systems evolved in the human brain.

Value as Biological Potential

Drawing on Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, we take value to refer to evolutionarily selected biases in neural functioning. These values are not meanings in themselves. Rather, they are biases or propensities for particular kinds of bodily or behavioural responses to experience.

These value systems form a core part of our biological potential — that is, the structured capacities of living bodies to act, feel, and respond. But these potentials do not express themselves automatically. They must be instantiated, and they are instantiated differently depending on context. Music is one such context.

Music as a Social System for Instantiating Value

Music is not just a form of individual expression. It is a social system: a set of collectively organised practices and roles that provide structured opportunities for instantiating biological value. Like dance or ritual, music enables humans to co-ordinate feeling and action — not through symbolic language, but through shared affective resonance.

Music’s organisation of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and pattern gives form to the unfolding of value-laden processes in time. These unfoldings are actualised in performance and listening, where neural systems respond, entrain, and adapt — not randomly, but according to socially patterned structures that have evolved with culture.

Music therefore activates biological potential in a social setting, enabling it to function as part of the social order — not just the biological one. This is how music contributes to social reality: not by symbolising it, but by modulating its underlying biological substrates in collective ways.

From Activation to Meaning: The Role of Consciousness

Value itself is not meaning — it is the biological substrate from which meanings can be construed. It is only when consciousness interprets the activation of value that it may become felt as emotion or as another kind of mental process. In this view, emotion is not raw feeling, but an act of semiotic construal: a meaning projected by consciousness onto activated biological processes.

Thus, the value of music is not simply emotional impact. It is its capacity to instantiate biological potentials in ways that can be socially shared and consciously construed — a process that is simultaneously material, social, and semiotic.

Conclusion: Grounding Music in a Relational Ontology

By grounding music in this relational ontology, we avoid the pitfalls of over-symbolising it (as if all sound were sign) or over-physicalising it (as if all sound were mere vibration). Instead, we situate music in the interplay of:

• Material potential: the structured capacities of biological bodies,

• Social organisation: the collective systems that activate and coordinate these capacities,

• Semiotic construal: the interpretive processes by which consciousness makes meaning of what is felt.

Music matters because it sits at the very edge of meaning: where body meets society, and where sensation becomes significance.

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2 Voice as Instrument, Voice as Meaning

The human voice is the most ancient of instruments — yet it is more than just a musical tool. In the relational ontology we’ve been developing, voice occupies a unique intersection between the material and the semiotic: it is both biological act and symbolic expression, both value-instantiating sound and meaning-bearing sign. To understand the voice in music, we must untangle these layered dimensions.

The Voice as Material Potential

At its most basic, the voice is a function of biological systems: breath, larynx, vocal tract, and fine motor control. It is rooted in material potential — the capacity of the body to act in time and space — and shaped by biological values: preferences for patterns, tones, and modulations selected for affective communication and social bonding.

When used as an instrument, the voice participates in music as a source of sound shaped by biological potential — modulating pitch, rhythm, and timbre in ways that activate value in the listener’s neurological system. Here, the voice functions like any other instrument, contributing to the affective texture of musical experience without necessarily conveying symbolic meaning.

The Voice as Semiotic Potential

But the voice is not only a source of sound; it is also a source of language. Spoken language is a semiotic system: it operates through strata of symbolic abstraction — phonology, lexicogrammar, semantics — to realise meaning. In singing, these strata are often maintained, suspended, or transformed. Lyrics, for example, retain the semiotic potential of language, while their musical rendering introduces additional layers of material actualisation.

Moreover, many paralinguistic features of voice — such as intonation, stress, and vocal tone — function semiotically in speech but can be recontextualised in music to serve a purely affective or aesthetic function. In song, these features may blur the boundary between sign and sound, making the voice a site of convergence between the semiotic and the material.

Dual Potentials, Dual Roles

To analyse music that features the voice, we must consider two complementary roles:

• The voice as an instrument, instantiating material potential through the embodied production of sound — shaped by the biological and social potentials of performance.

• The voice as a bearer of meaning, instantiating semiotic potential when it activates systems of symbolic abstraction — especially in the presence of language.

These roles do not merely coexist; they interact dynamically. For instance, the emotional impact of a sung phrase may arise not from its lexical content but from the affective shaping of its vocal delivery — the pitch bend, the breathiness, the vibrato. Conversely, a lyric may carry semantic weight that reframes how the listener interprets the surrounding musical elements.

From System to Instance: Actualising Voice in Performance

In each performance, the voice draws on multiple systems — biological, social, and semiotic — and actualises them in particular instances. These instances are always relational: shaped by the genre, the cultural context, the social roles of singer and listener, and the real-time affordances of the moment.

What is heard, then, is never the voice in general, but a singular instantiation of its potentials — a moment where meaning and value intertwine, not always distinguishably, but always relationally.

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3 Voice, Instrument, and the Situatedness of Meaning

In this final post of the series, we turn to the question of context: not just how voice functions as instrument or sign, but how these functions are always situated in specific social, cultural, and material conditions. The relational ontology we have developed allows us to see musical meaning not as something intrinsic to the voice itself, but as something that emerges through relations — between systems, roles, and moments of actualisation.

Three Systems in Convergence

Every musical voice draws on at least three distinct but interwoven systems:

1. Biological systems: the voice is a process of the body, governed by neuromuscular coordination, respiratory control, and inherited value biases.

2. Social systems: the voice participates in patterned social activity — in performance roles, genre conventions, aesthetic norms, and interpersonal dynamics.

3. Semiotic systems: the voice may realise symbolic meaning — especially when language is involved — through the stratal architecture of language (phonology, lexicogrammar, semantics).

These systems are not merely layered; they are relationally instantiated in performance. A jazz vocalist scatting, a classical soprano performing an aria, a protestor chanting slogans — each draws differently on these systems and configures them according to their contextual relevance.

The Situatedness of Performance

Musical performance is never general; it is always particular — a situated instance of multiple potentials. And that situatedness matters.

For the musician, the voice is actualised through biological potential (breath, muscle control), shaped by socially patterned styles and techniques, and — where applicable — oriented toward the semiotic projection of meaning (e.g. lyrics, affective gesture).

For the audience, the voice is encountered not as raw sound, but through systems of value and meaning already shaped by experience, culture, and history. The same musical utterance may instantiate different meanings in different listeners — not because meaning is arbitrary, but because it is co-constructed through relational instantiation.

Meaning as Emergent Relation

From this perspective, meaning is not what the voice contains, but what it becomes in relation. It emerges from:

• The values activated by the sound (biological),

• The roles performed and recognised (social),

• The meanings construed and interpreted (semiotic).

Importantly, these relations are not fixed. A wordless vocal may become a sign of mourning in one context and pure aesthetic texture in another. A phrase from a song may become a rallying cry, a nostalgic memory, or a simple melody. In every case, the meaning is not “in” the voice — it is made through situated processes of instantiation.

A Relational Understanding of the Voice

Our ontology helps us to see that the voice in music is not reducible to a single system or function. Rather, it is a site of dynamic interplay — where material and semiotic, biological and social, converge in the unfolding of processes.

And like all such sites, it is open-ended: the meanings it can instantiate are not predetermined, but continually shaped by the systems it draws on and the situations it is embedded within.

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Coda: The Voice as a Site of Relation

Across this series, we have explored the voice in music not as an object or a code, but as a site of relations—a nexus through which different forms of potential are brought into actualisation. Whether functioning as instrument, symbol, or something in between, the voice reveals its meaning only in context, only through its role in a relational system of values, roles, and recognitions.

At every point, we have seen that meaning is not given; it is instantiated. It unfolds through processes grounded in biology, shaped in society, and projected through symbolic systems. The voice does not carry meaning like a container—it becomes meaningful when its activation resonates with the systems it inhabits.

This perspective allows us to analyse, perform, and experience music more attentively—not by asking what does the voice mean, but rather how does it mean in this particular moment, this particular setting, this particular relation?

In doing so, we find that the voice—so often taken for granted—is not a thing at all, but a process: of making, of doing, of becoming. And in that process, it reveals not just sound, but the unfolding of human life as meaning.

Music and the Materiality of Value: A Relational Ontology

1 The Value of Music: From Neural Bias to Social Resonance

In this series, we propose a new account of music, grounded in a relational ontology that understands reality as composed of processes and potentials. Here, music is not a symbolic or semiotic system — it is not, in itself, a system of signs or meanings. Rather, music is a material system that acts on the listener by activating biological values, shaped over evolutionary time, and given new functions within social roles and settings.

This post lays the foundations for the model by introducing the key distinctions: between material and semiotic systems, between value and emotion, and between the roles of musician and audience.

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Biological Value and the Neural Grounding of Affect

We begin with a basic claim: value is biological before it is social. Following Gerald Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, we understand value as a system of inherited neural biases — tendencies for certain neural pathways to be more easily activated due to their adaptive success in evolutionary history. These values are not ‘meanings’ in themselves, but biological potentials for shaping perception and action.

In Edelman’s model, such values guide how attention is allocated, how stimuli are selected or ignored, and how coherence is achieved in neural processes. They are part of the biological infrastructure that makes any kind of consciousness — and eventually meaning — possible.

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Music as a Material System of Value Activation

Music acts directly on this infrastructure. It consists of patterns of sound — rhythm, pitch, timbre, dynamic variation — that, through repetition, tension, surprise, and resonance, can activate neural biases and modulate them over time. These activations instantiate value within the listener’s system. They do not constitute symbols or signs, and they do not convey meaning unless or until consciousness construes them as such — for example, as feelings, moods, or memories.

Thus, music is not a semiotic system like language. It does not rely on arbitrary signs governed by codes. Instead, music belongs to the material order of reality, where potentials are biological and instantiated through physical processes.

We can say that music is material potential, a subtype of social system potential, because the production and reception of music occur within socially differentiated roles: that of musician and audience. The musician organises sound materially; the audience becomes the field in which value is activated and instantiated.

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Value Is Not Emotion

A common confusion in theories of music is the assumption that music expresses or communicates emotion. This assumes a semiotic model. But in our ontology, emotion is not communicated; rather, it is a mental process — a construal of biological value by consciousness.

The music does not carry emotion; it activates value. That value may be construed consciously as emotion, or it may remain at a more bodily, affective level, such as arousal, tension, or a shift in mood. Importantly, the emotion is not in the music, nor is it passed from musician to audience. It emerges in the listener’s system as a mental construal of material activation.

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Roles in the Field: Musician and Audience

The social dimension of music arises not from symbolism but from differentiated participation. In any musical setting, there are roles: those who produce the material phenomena (the musician), and those who receive them (the audience). These roles are not symmetrical. The musician acts materially; the audience acts neurobiologically. Music thus becomes a shared field in which values are instantiated — but instantiated differently, according to role.

The audience draws on their own biological potential, and this potential is shaped not only by species-level evolution but also by social histories, cultural patterns, and individual biographies. Different audiences will instantiate different values from the same musical event. This leads, eventually, to individuation: the emergence of individualised potentials within a collective field.

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Conclusion: Setting the Frame

Music, in this model, is a process of material activation of biological value, shaped by social differentiation, and construed — when it is — through mental processes like emotion. This is not a theory of music as meaning, but of music as value instantiated materially and made meaningful through consciousness.

In the next post, we turn more closely to the roles of musician and audience, and examine how musical experience arises from their differentiated contributions to a shared field of potential.

2 Resonance and Differentiation: The Musician and the Audience

In the previous post, we introduced a new foundation for understanding music: not as a semiotic system of signs and meanings, but as a material system that activates biological values in social fields. These values — neural biases shaped by evolutionary and personal history — are not meanings in themselves, but potentials for meaning, instantiated materially by music and construed, if at all, through mental processes such as emotion.

In this post, we focus on how musical experience arises through the differentiation of roles — the musician and the audience — within a shared field. This differentiation gives music its social character, and allows material activations of value to become socially significant events.

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Differentiated Roles in a Shared Field

Music is always social — not because it communicates ideas or represents shared codes, but because it unfolds within a field of differentiated roles. At a minimum, this includes a musician, who acts materially to shape sound in time, and an audience, who is subjected to those sounds and thereby participates in the instantiation of value.

The relation is asymmetrical. The musician acts; the audience responds. But both participate in a shared field of potential. The musician's bodily actions — gestures, breath, motion — organise sound structures in space and time. These sound structures, in turn, act on the biological potential of the audience, activating patterns of neural value that shape perception, feeling, and attention.

This dynamic is not symbolic. The music does not “stand for” something. Rather, it does something: it resonates with the embodied systems of the listener, instantiating values that have no fixed meaning until — or unless — consciousness construes them through mental processes.

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Resonance and Activation: The Social Field as Coherence

What gives music its power is not the presence of “content,” but the production of coherence across bodies. The musician’s material actions create patterns that select and reinforce values in the audience’s biological system. These values, when co-instantiated across a group, give rise to what we might call social resonance: a shared field of attunement, in which different bodies instantiate similar patterns of value.

This is not communication in the linguistic sense, nor is it emotion transfer. It is the emergence of synchrony — of patterned biological coherence — across multiple organisms within a field. And this synchrony becomes the basis for any further construal: whether emotional (joy, sadness), or cognitive (“this reminds me of…”).

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The Musician’s Role

The musician's role is not to encode meaning, but to organise material phenomena in ways that activate biological potential. This involves bodily mastery, sensitivity to timing and variation, and awareness (sometimes tacit) of how patterns act on the bodies of others. The musician draws on their own embodied potential — sensorimotor skills, learned constraints, and individual experience — to create processes that will instantiate values in others.

In this sense, the musician is not a communicator but a value catalyst: someone who brings about particular activations of neural bias in a field of bodies, under conditions shaped by social roles.

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The Audience’s Role

The audience, for their part, are not passive recipients but active fields of potential. Each listener brings their own history of neural selection, cultural learning, and social individuation to the musical event. What is instantiated as value in one body may not be in another. But where patterns of resonance emerge, these can form the basis for new social coherence — a shared attentional or affective field.

If and when these values are construed, they are construed by consciousness as mental processes — such as emotion, cognition, or desideration. These construals are not part of the music, but of the semiotic order construed by the listener of their experience.

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Individuation and Value Selection

As different listeners construe musical experience in different ways, they begin to individuate. That is, they develop distinct meaning potentials from the collective potential of the musical event. These differences do not undermine the sociality of music; rather, they constitute it. Music becomes a field not of fixed meanings, but of shared value activations through which differentiated construals may arise.

Music, then, offers not a universal code, but a common material ground for individuated perspectives to emerge — perspectives that may later be communicated, symbolised, or reflected upon, but which are rooted in non-symbolic, embodied activation.

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Conclusion: From Action to Coherence

In summary, music acts on the body, not the code. It works by instantiating biological value through material sound processes, in a differentiated but shared field. The musician acts materially to shape these processes; the audience instantiates and, where possible, construes the activations as mental processes.

What arises is not a message but a field of resonance, from which meaning can emerge — not as transmission, but as construal of value in consciousness.

In the next and final post of this series, we explore how these fields of resonance function across cultural and historical time: how music comes to play a role in larger systems of value, identity, and transformation.

3 Music as Field: Value, Identity, and Cultural Transformation

In the first post of this series, we grounded music not in meaning but in material value — a system that activates biological potentials within socially differentiated roles. In the second, we explored how musical experience unfolds within a field shaped by the complementary roles of musician and audience, where resonance emerges not as communication, but as shared biological activation.

In this final post, we step back to examine the cultural dimension of music: how it functions as a field of potential across time and history, how it contributes to identity and social formation, and how it participates in the transformation of value systems across generations.

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Music as Cultural Field

Music, like all social phenomena, does not arise anew in each performance. It is embedded in fields of potential formed by prior instantiations — by musical practices, traditions, genres, performances, and expectations that have already shaped the systems of value with which people engage.

These fields are not symbolic codes but historically sedimented potentials: dynamic constraints on what can be activated, selected, or recognised as “musical” in a given context. These potentials are material — they shape the kinds of sound structures and bodily gestures that are perceived as music — and they are also social, in that they have been collectively shaped by previous generations of value activation.

In this way, music becomes a field of cultural inheritance: a system of material potentials that can be instantiated in new performances, and thereby reshaped in the unfolding of new social resonances.

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The Cultural Role of the Musician

The musician, within this cultural field, is not simply a performer of sound but a selector and transformer of value potentials. They draw on shared traditions — melodic idioms, rhythmic practices, harmonic conventions — but instantiate them in unique ways that respond to new contexts, audiences, and individuated trajectories.

Each performance is an actualisation of system potential — a point on the cline of instantiation — that both draws from and contributes to the evolving cultural field. Through these processes, the collective potential of a musical tradition is continually renewed, diversified, or challenged.

This is why musical creativity is never isolated: it is always situated within a social field of resonance, where patterns of value — including novelty — become recognisable through shared activation histories.

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Identity, Individuation, and Social Differentiation

As listeners participate in music over time, they individuate. Each listener develops their own meaning potential within the broader system — a system constituted by the historical sedimentation of cultural instantiations. These individuated potentials influence how new musical events are experienced, and what values are activated.

In this way, music and identity co-evolve. Music is not just a background to identity formation — it is a material field in which distinct value pathways are selected and reinforced, often in concert with social positioning (age, class, gender, culture, etc.). Musical practices become associated with social groups, and musical resonances become resources for social differentiation.

Importantly, this is not the transfer of meaning from music to identity, but the mutual shaping of value activation across systems — a process that can later be construed in semiotic terms, but which is rooted in the material order.

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Music and Cultural Transformation

Over time, the fields of musical potential themselves transform. As new values are instantiated in performance, new possibilities emerge for what music can be, do, or activate. The process is non-linear and historically contingent: cultural values shift, new technologies intervene, bodies and environments change.

But at its root, transformation remains tied to the same ontology: music as the material activation of value within socially differentiated systems.

This means that cultural change is not a semiotic process alone. It is not just a reinterpretation of symbols. It involves the reconfiguration of value potentials — of which biological activations are meaningful, in which bodies, and under what social conditions. When a new musical form emerges and becomes resonant, it is because it has instantiated a different field of coherence — one that may later be reflected in language, identity, or ideology, but which began as an embodied, material resonance.

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Conclusion: A Material Field of Living Value

We have traced music from its biological grounding in neural value to its social unfolding in shared resonance, and its cultural role in transforming fields of potential. What emerges is not a model of music as code, but as field: a relational, material system through which value is activated, shared, and transformed.

In this model:

• Meaning arises only through mental construal;

• Value is a biological potential selected and activated in social fields;

• Music is a material system for instantiating value across differentiated roles and across time.

This ontology allows us to reconnect musical experience to its material roots without reducing it to physics or individual psychology. It locates music in the ongoing process of field formation, where value, identity, and transformation are materially instantiated and only secondarily construed.

Coda: Music Beyond Meaning

Across this trilogy, we have traced a path from biology to culture, unfolding music not as a symbolic code but as a material field of value — one that activates, organises, and transforms the lived potentials of consciousness and collectivity.

We began by grounding music in neural bias — evolved biological systems of value that can be selectively activated in performance. We showed how music operates within social differentiation, as musicians and audiences instantiate different roles in the co-creation of resonance. And we followed these patterns into the cultural domain, where music contributes to identity, inheritance, and transformation by reshaping the fields of material potential available to a community.

Throughout, we resisted the temptation to treat music as a semiotic system — as something that conveys meanings in the way language does. Instead, we affirmed that music precedes meaning: it organises value in material form, and only becomes meaningful when that activation is construed by consciousness through mental processes such as emotion, memory, or reflection.

This distinction — between value as material activation and meaning as semiotic construal — is at the heart of the ontology we've developed. It allows us to treat music as both deeply embodied and fully social, without collapsing into either individual subjectivity or cultural symbolism.

Indeed, what music reveals is something more general about our being-in-the-world: that we are not isolated minds interpreting symbols, but bodies in resonance with others, unfolding together in dynamic fields of potential. Music, in this view, is not a representation of our world — it is one of the ways we make that world, through the activation of shared value in time.

And so, the model we’ve developed here may extend beyond music. Any system — social, aesthetic, scientific — that activates embodied values in a field of collective experience can be understood in similar terms: not as a message, but as a resonance; not as a meaning, but as an activation of potential.