Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts

03 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Philosophy

1 Being as Relation, not Substance

Philosophy often begins with the question: what is real? Traditionally, answers have centred on substance — what endures behind change, the hidden “stuff” of the world. Yet, in certain strands of thought, reality is anticipated not as substance but as relation.

Heraclitus declared, “Everything flows,” highlighting that the world is defined by change and interaction, not by static entities. Parmenides emphasised unity, but not as atomistic being — rather as the interdependent whole of existence. Even Plato, in his theory of Forms, hints that reality is structured not merely as objects but as patterns of relation — the forms acquire meaning through participation and interconnection.

Much later, process philosophy, especially in Whitehead, explicitly rejected substance as primary. Entities are “actual occasions,” constituted through their relations, events, and interactions. Being is not a static thing but a network of relations in continual flux.

From a relational ontology perspective, these anticipations are profound. Being is not first substance, then relation; being is relation. Entities exist only in perspectival alignment with other entities and potentialities. Reality is cut, instantiated, and sustained through relational structuring.

Philosophy’s early and modern anticipations thus echo the core moves of relational ontology: the world is not an assembly of independent things, but a patterned constellation of interdependencies. Substance is never ultimate; relation is constitutive. Being is always already relational.

2 Knowledge as Construal

If being is relational, then so too is knowledge. Philosophy has long anticipated that we do not encounter “raw” reality, but only reality as it is construed through relational frameworks.

Kant made this explicit: phenomena are always mediated by the structures of cognition. We do not know things-in-themselves; we know them as they appear through the organising patterns of the mind. Husserl extended this insight with intentionality: consciousness is never a passive mirror of reality but an active constitutor of objects, always relationally directed.

From a relational ontology perspective, these moves anticipate the principle that meaning is not a property of things themselves, but of their instantiation in a network of potential and perspective. Knowledge is not merely representation; it is a perspectival cut, a symbolic alignment between the knower and the known.

Even contemporary philosophy of science echoes this: observations, models, and measurements are constrained by the conditions of the system and the observer. Knowledge emerges not in isolation but in the relational interplay of observer, observed, and horizon of possibility.

Thus philosophy anticipates what relational ontology insists upon: phenomena are always construed, and reality as we engage it is inseparable from the relational conditions of its instantiation. Knowing is not uncovering an independent world; it is participating in the alignment of relational potential.

3 Individuation and the Social Horizon

If being is relational and knowledge is construed, then the self itself is never isolated. Philosophy has repeatedly anticipated that individuation emerges only in relation to a collective horizon.

Hegel’s notion of recognition (Anerkennung) makes this explicit: the self achieves selfhood through acknowledgment by others. Identity is not a private possession but a relational phasing, realised in the interplay of self and social whole. Dewey and pragmatist thinkers echo this: meaning, action, and value emerge through coordinated engagement within communities, not from isolated reasoning.

From a relational ontology perspective, these insights prefigure a core principle: individuation is perspectival. The individual is a node in a network of collective potential. Personal growth, ethical responsibility, and social agency are phased through the alignment of individual and collective horizons.

This reading dissolves the classical dichotomy of individual versus society. The self does not precede relation, nor is it subordinated to the group. It is a perspectival articulation along the cline between collective and individual potential, continually staged and re-staged.

Myth anticipates this relational phasing in heroic cycles; philosophy anticipates it conceptually. In both, individuation is never a solipsistic unfolding, but a symbolic or conceptual alignment within the larger field of relational being.

4 Contingency and the Limits of Absolutes

Philosophy, like myth, often anticipates the insight that order, law, and meaning are contingent rather than absolute.

Nietzsche argued that values, morality, and “truths” are perspectival constructions, arising from historical, cultural, and relational conditions. There are no eternal moral absolutes; each system of value is provisional and context-dependent. Derrida extended this critique to the very structures of language and thought, showing that any system of meaning is contingent, always open to reinterpretation, inversion, or deconstruction.

From a relational ontology perspective, these philosophical moves prefigure the trickster logic of myth: every order is a cut, but no cut is final. Horizons of meaning, once established, are never impermeable; they remain open to revision, disruption, and realignment. Contingency is not weakness — it is the ontological fact of relational being.

This insight resonates with relational ontology’s core principles: systems are perspectival, alignments are provisional, and reality is always open to re-cutting. Philosophy anticipates this through the conceptual recognition that absolutes are always contingent, and that understanding, being, and value emerge only in context and relation.

5 Reflexivity, Cycles, and the Web of Being

Philosophy, in certain traditions, has anticipated the deeply relational and reflexive character of reality.

Eastern philosophies such as Madhyamaka Buddhism, Daoism, and Huayan thought emphasise interdependence, non-substantiality, and infinite mutual reflection. The Huayan Net of Indra, for example, imagines each phenomenon reflecting all others, producing an infinite web of relationality — a cosmos without discrete, self-contained entities.

Western thinkers, too, have anticipated these insights. Cybernetics, autopoiesis, and systems theory treat entities as nodes in self-organising, feedback-rich networks. Knowledge, meaning, and being are sustained only through reflexive interaction; nothing exists in isolation.

From a relational ontology perspective, these ideas anticipate the insight that reality is co-constituted across scales: events, entities, and meanings emerge through ongoing alignment, reflection, and relational phasing. There is no final cut, no static cosmos; all is dynamically interdependent.

Philosophy, like myth, gestures toward this relational horizon. In thought, as in story, reflexivity, cycles, and infinite relationality are recognised as constitutive of being. Knowledge, action, and existence are never self-contained but always enacted within the web of being.

Coda: Philosophy as Experimental Construal

Taken together, these philosophical anticipations form a striking pattern: reality is relational, knowledge is perspectival, individuation emerges within collective horizons, orders are contingent, and being is reflexively constituted.

Just as myths stage relational experiments symbolically, philosophy stages them conceptually. Heraclitus’ flux, Kant’s mediation, Hegel’s recognition, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Net of Indra all explore, in different registers, the same insight: there is no unconstrued phenomenon. Being, knowing, and meaning are always instantiated through relational cuts, alignments, and phasings.

Philosophy, therefore, is not only a search for timeless truths; it is an ongoing experiment in relational construal. Concepts are cuts, arguments are alignments, theories are reflexive projections. Each philosophical system constitutes a horizon within which reality is made intelligible — always provisional, contingent, and interdependent.

Reading philosophy in this way reveals an echo of relational ontology across time and tradition. It is a reminder that the questions we pose, the distinctions we draw, and the patterns we discern are themselves part of the unfolding web of being. Philosophy, like myth, invites us to construe anew, to re-align, and to participate in the continual making of worlds.

30 September 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Value to Cosmos

1 Myth as Adaptive Semiotic Technology

Myth has too often been burdened with essentialist weight — universal archetypes, eternal patterns, psychic blueprints. What if we took another approach? Rather than searching for mythical constants across cultures, we might ask: what work does myth do?

Seen through a relational ontology, myth emerges as a technology of construal: a cultural means of bringing value-orientations into the domain of meaning. Following Gerald Edelman, we can distinguish value systems — biological regulators of adaptive behaviour — from semiotic systems, which create meanings and meanings-of-meanings. Myth stands precisely at this junction.

In ritual, trance, and altered states, perception is loosened, bypassed, suspended. These are not errors of the senses but different cuts into potential, where deep value-orientations surface unfiltered. Left unshaped, they remain fleeting intensities. But when narrated, dramatised, chanted, storied, they are semioticised — given symbolic form that can be shared, remembered, and transformed.

This is the adaptive work of myth: to take the orienting pull of value, and weave it into systems of meaning that align a collective. Myths are not eternal; they are provisional symbolic architectures, adaptive semiotic technologies that let communities survive, flourish, and re-align in shifting worlds.

Dreams offer a hint of this work. In Campbell’s famous aphorism, “dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.” Stripped of its archetypal undertones, we might hear this differently: dreams are private experiments in symbolic construal, while myths are collective architectures of the same process. Both cut into value-laden orientations beyond perception; both shape them into symbolic meaning.

In this way, myth can be seen not as universal story but as reflexive cultural adaptation — an ongoing negotiation between the values that orient life and the meanings that organise worlds.

2 Bypassing Perception: Altered States and Symbolic Access

In everyday life, perception construes the world for us. It is tuned to survival: selecting what is relevant, filtering what is not, delivering a stable horizon of meaning. Yet perception is also a narrowing. It keeps us oriented in the familiar, but it occludes other possibilities.

Mythic practice begins precisely where perception loosens. Across cultures, ritual, trance, dream, and vision have long been cultivated as technologies of altered state. These are not accidents or failures of cognition, but deliberate suspensions of the perceptual cut. They open onto potentials otherwise inaccessible.

In these states, value-orientations rise to the surface. The emotional intensities, the urgencies of desire, fear, and awe — the deep regulators of adaptive life — appear unmediated. Not yet tied to everyday construals, they pulse as raw orientations. But left alone, they vanish as soon as waking perception reasserts itself.

The genius of myth is to catch these intensities in symbolic nets. Through chant, dance, story, and image, altered-state experience is shaped into semiotic form. What was fleeting becomes narratable; what was ineffable becomes shareable; what was private becomes collective.

This is why myths so often bear the marks of altered states: their dreamlike illogic, their kaleidoscopic transformations, their refusal of ordinary causality. They are not faulty stories, but symbolic echoes of perception’s suspension. By bypassing perception, myth accesses orientations otherwise hidden; by symbolising them, it aligns a community around new meanings.

In this sense, altered states are not departures from reality but different relational cuts into it. They access potentials beyond ordinary construal. Myth is the cultural practice of bringing those potentials back into the semiotic weave of collective life.

3 From Value to Meaning-of-Meaning

To understand the unique work of myth, we need to distinguish between two very different systems: value systems and semiotic systems.

Value systems, as Gerald Edelman describes them, are biological regulators. They orient behaviour by amplifying what is adaptive and suppressing what is not. Hunger, fear, desire, attachment — these are not meanings, but biases in action, ensuring that life turns toward viability. They are adaptive, not interpretive.

Semiotic systems, by contrast, do not orient behaviour directly. They generate meanings, and even more crucially, meanings-of-meanings — symbolic architectures that reflect on, refract, and reorganise what construal can be. Semiotic systems make worlds, not just moves within them.

What myth does is to bridge these two strata. In altered states, value-orientations surface: intensities without symbolic form. Through story, chant, and ritual, they are semioticised — drawn up into symbolic patterns that can be shared and remembered. In this way, myth turns adaptive orientations into symbolic horizons.

This is why myths are not just stories about the world but stories about the meaning of the world. They do not merely map terrain; they map how terrain itself comes to matter. They are reflexive, second-order constructs: meanings-of-meanings that give value-laden orientations a symbolic architecture.

Consider how myths encode fear: not simply as a reaction, but as a cosmic order of danger and protection. Or how they encode desire: not as raw appetite, but as narratives of quest, union, or transformation. Myth transposes value into meaning, and then folds meaning back into the collective as an organising horizon.

This reflexive turn is the heart of myth. It does not universalise archetypes, nor reveal timeless essences. Instead, it functions as a cultural semiotic technology, transforming value into symbolic meaning-of-meaning, aligning collectives to new adaptive horizons.

4 Myth as Collective Alignment

If myth transforms value into meaning-of-meaning, then its real power lies in collective alignment.

A biological value is individual — hunger, fear, desire, attachment. Myth amplifies and transposes these orientations into shared symbolic patterns that organise not just personal behaviour but the very horizon of collective being.

Ritualised myth brings this into effect. Through chant, dance, story, or spectacle, individuals are not only exposed to symbolic construals — they are synchronised by them. Myth functions as a phase mechanism: it binds many bodies, many perspectives, into a shared symbolic rhythm. The telling is never private. Even when recounted alone, the myth orients the teller within a larger symbolic horizon that already belongs to the collective.

This is why myth is central to early social formations. It does not just explain the world, nor simply entertain. It aligns collectives by:

Synchronising value orientations: fear becomes taboo, hunger becomes ritual feast, desire becomes covenant.
Scaling experience: individual dilemmas are reframed as cosmic dramas, situating each life within a larger order.
Staging possibilities: myths articulate what can and cannot be done, who one may become, and how the world itself might unfold.

Seen this way, myth is not a “public dream” in Campbell’s sense — an archetypal structure projected into communal life. Rather, it is a symbolic architecture of alignment, continuously remade in performance, synchronising individual orientations into a shared horizon of possibility.

Myth thus phases the collective: it turns value into meaning-of-meaning, and then uses those meanings to hold together, orient, and project the social whole.

5 Myth as Reflexive Cosmos

When myth aligns a collective, it does more than coordinate social life. It projects an entire cosmos — a world reflexively structured through meaning-of-meaning.

A cosmos is not simply “the universe” as physical environment. It is the symbolically construed horizon within which beings, relations, and possibilities take shape. Myth generates such horizons. It binds together natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations into a single symbolic weave.

In this sense, myth is cosmogenetic. It does not merely describe the world but actively brings a world into being for a collective. Mountains and rivers become ancestors, stars become guides, animals become totems. Social orders are not grounded in brute force but in symbolic alignment with cosmic patterns. The cosmos is not external backdrop; it is a reflexive projection of collective construal.

What makes myth distinctive here is the reflexive turn:

Value-orientations surface in altered states.
These are semioticised into meanings-of-meanings.
Through collective performance, they align the social whole.
That alignment is then mirrored back as a cosmos — a world that seems always already there, but is in fact the projection of collective construal.

The cosmos of myth is thus a reflexive reality: it appears to precede the collective, but is continually constituted through its symbolic practices. The divine order, the ancestral lineage, the cycle of life and death — these are not discovered truths but symbolic architectures that organise existence.

This is why myth can endure across generations. It is not just a narrative but a cosmological infrastructure, sustaining reflexive reality itself. The cosmos of myth is the collective seeing itself, its values, and its possibilities, refracted and stabilised in symbolic form.

Coda: Myth without Archetype

What, then, remains of myth once we set aside archetypes, universal essences, and timeless psychic structures?

Not absence, but clarity.

Myth appears not as a coded expression of eternal forms but as a symbolic technology of life itself — a way of transposing value into meaning, synchronising collectives, and projecting worlds. Its power lies not in universal sameness but in situated resonance, each myth staging horizons of possibility unique to its collective.

We have traced three moves:

From value to meaning-of-meaning: myth semioticises adaptive orientations, giving form to intensities that perception cannot grasp directly.
From individual to collective alignment: myth phases bodies and voices into synchrony, binding many into one symbolic horizon.
From alignment to reflexive cosmos: myth projects those horizons outward, making a world appear as given — a cosmos reflexively constituted through symbolic practice.

In this light, Campbell’s claim that “myths are public dreams” can be reframed. Dreams are not private myths, and myths are not collective dreams. Dreams are idiosyncratic symbolic events of the sleeping body; myths are collective semiotic architectures that turn value into world. Their relation is not one of equivalence but of scale: both are reflexive construals, but only myth stabilises them into the symbolic infrastructure of a cosmos.

This is myth without archetype: not eternal, not universal, not psychic essence — but semiotic reflexivity. A cultural technology for making values into meanings, meanings into alignments, and alignments into worlds.

To study myth in this key is to study how collectives construe themselves into being, again and again, by telling the world into form.

Postscript: Beyond Campbell, Beyond Consciousness

One striking implication of this relational reading of myth is that consciousness — as introspective experience or psychic interiority — is not required to understand myth’s power. Myth operates through value-oriented intensities, semiotic transformation, and collective alignment, not through private reflection or archetypal recognition.

This moves myth studies into a new terrain:

Away from Campbell’s psychic universalism and Jungian archetypes.
Away from models that treat myth as a projection of individual or collective consciousness.
Toward an understanding of myth as a distributed, relational, adaptive practice: enacted, shared, and phasing across collective horizons.

In this light, myths are best seen as symbolic infrastructures, coordinating life and projecting worlds, regardless of whether any individual consciously apprehends their full import. Consciousness is neither a cause nor a necessary substrate; it is just one node among many in the network of relational construal that myth enacts.

This perspective opens a path for a more ecological, socially embedded, and adaptive study of myth, one attentive to how symbolic practices shape life itself, rather than how inner psychic patterns are mirrored in stories.

26 September 2025

The Evolution of Possibility

1 Possibility Before Being

We have become accustomed to thinking of possibility as derivative — as something that arises once the real has already taken shape. A tree stands, and we imagine the other forms it could have taken. A person acts, and we imagine what else they might have done. In this framing, possibility is posterior: it trails behind actuality like an echo, like the shadow of what was.

But what if we invert the frame?

What if possibility comes first — not just logically, but ontologically? What if the real is not a given but a cut — an actualisation within a wider field of structured potential? In this view, to exist is not to be in the absolute sense, but to unfold from a system of possible construals.

This is the vision we pursue here. Not a metaphysics of substance, but a relational ontology of unfolding potential — in which meaning, far from being a by-product of biological evolution or cultural contingency, is the very condition for the differentiation of what-is. The symbolic animal — that peculiar creature who lives through language, ritual, system, and self-reflection — is not the climax of evolution but a phase in the evolution of possibility itself.

From the Real to the Possible

In classical metaphysics, Being is primary. The world exists, and our task is to understand it. Possibility appears only as a secondary operation: hypothetical, imaginative, subjunctive. But from the standpoint of relational ontology, this order is reversed. There is no 'thing' apart from the construal that brings it into view — no ‘given’ that precedes its relational actualisation.

This means possibility is not subordinate to the real. Rather, the real is a particular construal within the space of the possible.

The shift is subtle but radical. Where classical thought speaks of emergence — of mind from matter, language from brain, culture from organism — we speak instead of instantiation: a cut from system to instance, from possibility to perspective. In this model, evolution is not a ladder or a tree. It is not progress or contingency. It is the repatterning of potential — the evolving shape of what could be meant.

Not a Story of Origins

This is not a return to myth as the story of beginnings. We are not looking for the first gesture, the first word, the first meaning. Those are illusions, products of a linear imagination. What we seek instead is a way of understanding how meaning itself evolves — not as the product of external forces, but as the system through which unfolding becomes thinkable at all.

To think in terms of possibility before being is to think before time, before form, before separation. It is to imagine not a primal chaos, but a structured openness — a space not empty, but pregnant with relational tension. Not a void, but a system. Not a big bang, but a relational field waiting to be cut.

And from this cut, this construal — not imposed, but immanent — comes experience, perspective, history, world.

The Road Ahead

In this series, we will trace the evolution of possibility across multiple phases of construal. From pre-semiotic fields to the emergence of ritual and symbolic system. From gesture to grammar. From biologically-oriented coupling to the symbolic reflexivity of myth, ethics, and theory.

At each phase, we will ask: What kind of possibility becomes available here? And what is required for such possibility to be enacted, inhabited, constrained, or opened?

Ultimately, we will suggest that evolution is not about life adapting to a pre-given world — but about meaning systems evolving to construe a world that could not otherwise exist.

This is not a philosophy of life. It is a mythos of possibility.

And we begin not with what is, but with what might become.

2 The Pre-Semiotic Cut

Before meaning, before symbols, before even the semblance of communicative coordination — there is difference. Not the difference between things, for there are no things yet. But the differentiation of potential within a relational field: a tension that allows something to be distinguished from what it is not, even before it has any name.

We call this the pre-semiotic cut — the most primitive gesture of construal, where the possibility of meaning begins to take shape. It is not symbolic, not cognitive, not even sentient in any familiar sense. But it marks the first alignment of potential, the earliest tension between system and instance.

This is where the evolution of possibility begins.

Before Representation: Construal Without Symbol

Much of our intellectual heritage assumes that meaning begins with representation: a mark stands for a thing, a sound names an object, a gesture signifies an intent. But this view already presupposes a symbolic order. It assumes the existence of separable entities — sign and referent, form and content, self and world.

Relational ontology offers a different path. It does not begin with the symbol, but with construal: the perspectival cut that allows experience to be organised.

In the pre-semiotic field, there is no subject to experience and no object to be experienced. There is only the system of potential tensions, through which certain alignments become more likely than others. These are not yet meanings, but they are proto-meaningful: configurations of potential that, when constrained in particular ways, will become meaning.

In other words, possibility is already structured before the symbolic emerges.

Attunement Without Intentionality

To speak of this phase is necessarily paradoxical. We are describing what cannot yet be observed or expressed — a phase prior to expression itself. But we can gesture toward it.

We can imagine, for example, an organism whose coupling with its environment is not yet mediated by signs, but is nonetheless shaped by patterned responsiveness. A molecule “prefers” one bond over another. A cell “follows” a gradient. A nervous system “settles” into rhythms. These are not metaphors. They are actualisations of pre-semiotic potential.

What we see here is attunement without intentionality: coordination without symbolisation. No meaning is yet made, but the conditions for construal are evolving. The world is not yet known, but it is coming into knowability.

The Cut That Prepares the Cut

Why call this a "cut" at all, if nothing is being named, pointed to, or distinguished as such? Because even here, we find the incipient separation of a perspective. Not the perspective of a subject, but the differentiation of a system into zones of relative stability and flux. A proto-instance. A tension in the field. A directionality within potential.

This is the precondition for meaning. And it is already a form of evolution.

Not the evolution of life adapting to fixed conditions, but the evolution of possibility itself: a shifting in what can be enacted, aligned, inhabited. The symbolic animal will emerge much later, but its ground is already being laid in these pre-semiotic alignments — these cuts that do not yet know themselves as cuts.

Beyond Mechanism, Before Mind

This model asks us to think beyond both mechanism and mind. Not a mechanical system blindly following laws, nor a conscious subject navigating a world. But a field of potentialities gradually stratifying into systems and constraints, from which both mind and world will eventually emerge.

Before symbol, before syntax, before subject — there is a world in the making. Not a chaos waiting to be ordered, but a structured openness evolving toward reflexivity.

And that is where we turn next: to the first stirrings of systemic coordination — the phase in which difference becomes patterned, and possibility begins to take on semiotic form.

3 From Alignment to System

Meaning does not erupt fully formed into the world. It unfolds through phases — slow, recursive differentiations of what is possible. In the previous post, we explored the pre-semiotic cut, where construal begins not as representation but as attunement within a field of potential. Now we move to the next shift: from alignment to system.

Here, the world is not merely reacted to — it is patterned. Alignment becomes regularity. Tension becomes constraint. And through this stabilisation of coordination, a new kind of potential emerges: systemic possibility.

Patterning as a Precondition of Meaning

To say that meaning depends on pattern is not to reduce it to regularity, but to acknowledge the precondition for construal: without some degree of recurrence, no semiotic system can evolve. But this recurrence need not be rigid or mechanical. It is better seen as a tendency — a drift toward attractors in a field of interaction.

When these patterns constrain what can happen next, the field begins to articulate itself. A difference now makes a difference, not only because it happens, but because it conditions what may follow. This is the beginning of system — not as a fixed totality, but as a theory of its own instances.

And with it comes the first glimpse of meaning potential.

The Emergence of Systemic Constraints

Let us imagine a population of organisms — primitive, without symbolic communication, but embedded in patterned interaction with their environment and each other. Over time, certain couplings are reinforced, not by intention but by consequence. Certain sequences stabilise. Certain reactions feed back into their conditions of possibility.

This is not yet semiosis, but it is already systemic: the field is no longer a loose collection of alignments, but a dynamic ecology of constraints.

Such constraints do not suppress possibility; they generate it. They transform an undifferentiated field into a structured one — a topology of what can be enacted. System, in this view, is not a mechanism of control but a medium of meaning.

System as Evolving Theory

This brings us to a key insight of relational ontology: a system is a theory of the instance. It is not a collection of parts or rules, but a structured potential — an orientation toward what might be actualised.

The evolution of possibility thus entails the emergence of systems that constrain and enable what counts as a meaningful act. These systems are not static. They are themselves evolving theories, adapting as their instances feed back into the potential they instantiate.

In short: possibility evolves not by increasing variety alone, but by differentiating systems of potential — systems that make new construals possible.

The Semiotic Threshold Approaches

At this point in our story, we have not yet crossed the threshold into meaning. But we are approaching it. With the emergence of systemic constraints, the field is no longer merely reacting — it is beginning to construe itself.

Whereas pre-semiotic alignments were shaped by implicit tension, systemic patterns now shape the space of potential actions. This opens the door to symbolic abstraction: the power to construe construal itself.

That is where we turn next — to the emergence of the semiotic animal, and with it, the birth of symbolic meaning.

4 The Semiotic Threshold

We now arrive at a crucial inflection in our unfolding arc. If the earlier phases traced the emergence of possibility through pre-semiotic alignment and systemic constraint, this post turns to the next great transformation: the semiotic threshold.

Here, for the first time, a field of patterned interactions crosses a relational cut. The system begins to construe itself as system — not by reflex, but by symbolic abstraction. A new order of reality begins to unfold: the order of meaning.

What Is the Semiotic Threshold?

The semiotic threshold is not a boundary between life and language, nor a sharp division between instinct and culture. It is a perspectival shift within the evolution of potential: from acting within a system, to acting on the system as such.

This does not mean organisms become aware in a reflective sense. It means that acts become symbolic — not merely coordinated or conditioned, but interpretable within a system of construal.

What marks this threshold is not the appearance of a particular form (gesture, sound, mark), but the emergence of a relational function: the ability to mean — to construe experience as experience.

Symbolic Abstraction as Systemic Recursion

At the semiotic threshold, the system does something it has never done before: it begins to re-enter itself. Its patterns become interpretable within the system. Its instances are not only shaped by the system, but reshape the system through interpretation.

This is the core recursive move of symbolic abstraction:

To construe the construal.

This recursion is not infinite. It is layered, stratified, constrained. But it opens a new space: a metasystemic space in which meaning can evolve. This is not just the coordination of acts — it is the coordination of construals, the social evolution of symbolic systems.

The Symbolic Animal

What evolves at this threshold is not simply a new species — but a new order of being. The symbolic animal is not defined by biology, cognition, or culture in isolation. It is defined by its mode of possibility.

To live as a symbolic animal is to live within — and through — a system of construal. It is to experience reality not only as what is, but as what is meant. The environment becomes interpretable. Action becomes negotiable. Existence itself becomes semiotic.

This is not a higher rung on some evolutionary ladder. It is a cut across modes of potential — a shift from enacting the possible, to inhabiting possibility as such.

The Mythos of Meaning Begins

The semiotic threshold is the true beginning of what we might call a mythos of meaning — not in the sense of an ancient tale, but in the deep sense of a shared construal of what meaning is.

From here, evolution proceeds not only biologically, nor even culturally, but symbolically — through the expansion and differentiation of meaning potential. That is the path we now trace: from symbolic construal to semiotic system, from lived tension to reflexive mythos.

We are now fully within the domain of meaning.

And so in the next post, we turn to the dynamics of symbolic evolution — where construal becomes social, systems differentiate, and possibility itself becomes a medium of collective transformation.

5 The Symbolic Drift

Having crossed the semiotic threshold, the symbolic animal embarks on a remarkable journey: the continuous unfolding and differentiation of symbolic systems. This process is not random; it is guided by an emergent logic we call the symbolic drift — the ongoing evolution of symbolic possibility.

The Drift as Systemic Differentiation

The symbolic drift is not a linear progression or steady climb but a complex differentiation within a semiotic ecology. Symbolic systems multiply, diverge, and recombine, opening new fields of possibility while constraining others.

This differentiation is systemic. It is not just the growth of vocabulary or grammar but the reconfiguration of the entire symbolic space — new genres, new norms, new modes of orientation. Each symbolic innovation alters the landscape of meaning, shifting what can be said, thought, and enacted.

Symbolic Evolution as Repatterning

The drift is also a repatterning. Patterns that were once stable may become unstable or obsolete, while novel configurations emerge. This process is driven by internal tensions, external pressures, and reflexive reorganisation.

Unlike biological evolution, symbolic evolution is not limited by physical inheritance. Instead, it evolves through social transmission, collective memory, and ritualised repetition — processes that enable symbolic systems to carry forward, transform, and reimagine possibility.

Symbolic Systems as Medium and Constraint

Symbolic systems simultaneously enable and constrain. They are the medium through which meaning is made and shared, but they also set the limits of what can be meaningfully said.

Understanding this dual role is essential. It accounts for why symbolic systems can foster both creativity and conservatism; both innovation and tradition; both freedom and constraint.

The Mythos Grows

As symbolic systems drift and differentiate, they generate what we call a mythos of meaning — a shared orientation toward the future, grounded in historical sedimentation but always open to reimagination.

This mythos is not a fixed story but a living constellation of symbolic commitments — a systemic ecology of possibility that grounds identity, community, and action.

Toward a New Symbolic Ethics

The symbolic drift invites an ethical stance. If symbolic life is always becoming, always transforming, then our participation in meaning is a form of responsibility.

We do not merely inherit symbolic systems; we inhabit and reshape them. To live symbolically is to orient oneself within an evolving field of possibility — and to act in ways that acknowledge the consequences of that orientation.

In our next and final post of this series, we explore the mythos of meaning itself — how it sustains, challenges, and invites us to live otherwise.

6 The Mythos of Meaning

We have journeyed from the pre-semiotic cut, through systemic emergence and the semiotic threshold, to the symbolic drift — the ongoing evolution of symbolic possibility. Now we arrive at the heart of our inquiry: the mythos of meaning.

Mythos Beyond Storytelling

“Mythos” here is not mere story or legend. It is the systemic symbolic commitment that grounds and orients a collective. It is the living architecture through which meaning takes shape, sustains identity, and generates futures.

A mythos is the dynamic horizon of possibility within which symbolic animals live. It is the shared web of construals that both enables and constrains what can be said, done, and imagined.

The Mythos as System of Possibility

The mythos is a patterned field of symbolic relations — a network of narratives, values, rituals, and semiotic resources that together shape a community’s orientation to the world and its own becoming.

It is not fixed or given, but always in motion: evolving, contested, renegotiated.

The mythos is the living ecology of meaning within which symbolic life unfolds.

Living Otherwise: Ethics and Transformation

To inhabit a mythos is to participate in a symbolic order. But because the mythos is always partial and provisional, it also invites transformation — the possibility of living otherwise.

This is the ethical horizon of symbolic life: not to be trapped by inherited construals, but to respond reflexively — to reshape the mythos through praxis, imagination, and critique.

The Evolution of Possibility Continues

The mythos is not an endpoint but a phase in the ongoing evolution of possibility. It opens space for new construals, new forms of life, new symbolic worlds.

In this sense, evolution is never finished. It is always a becoming.

Final Reflections

This series has sought to reframe evolution as the unfolding of possibility itself — not as the survival of the fittest or the march of progress, but as the evolving architecture of meaning.

We are symbolic animals living in symbolic worlds — worlds that we both inherit and invent.

Our task is not only to understand this condition but to inhabit it responsibly: to engage with the mythos of meaning not as passive recipients but as active participants and co-creators.

20 September 2025

Mythologies of Possibility: Meaning, Memory, and the Evolution of the Real

1 Myth as Systemic Potential

We are used to thinking of myth as a kind of primitive narrative—something pre-scientific, pre-rational, pre-modern. It is often treated as a historical curiosity, a cultural artefact, or a source of symbolic inspiration. But what if myth is none of these things—or rather, what if its significance lies not in its content, but in its function?

What if myth is not a story at all, but a system?

From the perspective of relational ontology and Systemic Functional Linguistics, we might begin to reconstrue mythology not as a genre of fiction, but as a modality of meaning—a patterned potential for construing experience. Myths, in this light, are not beliefs about the world, but systems through which worlds are made possible. They offer not facts, but fields of construal.

Just as language is modelled in SFL as a meaning potential—a system of choices that can be instantiated in different ways—myth too may be seen as a cultural meaning system: not a set of fixed propositions, but a semiotic architecture within which certain construals become possible. In other words, myth is not a primitive form of explanation, but a structured potential for world-making.

This is not metaphor. It is systemic.

A myth does not merely tell us what is—it organises what can be. It orients us toward certain cuts through the continuum of experience: this is how time unfolds, this is what a self is, this is what the cosmos values. It shapes the conditions of emergence. And just as importantly, it marks the limits of what may not be said, seen, or enacted.

In this sense, mythology is the social semiotics of the possible.

We might then say: myth operates in the same ontological register as context. It is not something added to experience, but something through which experience is patterned. It is not commentary on reality—it is a system that enacts reality, in all the specificity of its construed dimensions.

To treat mythology this way is not to romanticise it. It is to grant it the same systemic dignity we afford to language. Myths are not obsolete—they are ontogenetic. They do not describe a world gone by; they animate the conditions of emergence for a world still unfolding.

And perhaps this is the real challenge: to stop looking at myth as the fossil record of belief, and begin to see it as the semiotic architecture of potential—a system of affordances that, like language, is always available to be reactivated, repurposed, and re-cut.

The myth is not behind us. It is beneath us: a patterned field of possibility, waiting to be construed.

2 Evolution as Mythic Grammar

If myth is a system of potential—a semiotic architecture that patterns what may be meant, felt, or known—then its scope is not limited to ancient cosmogonies or sacred narratives. Mythic construal continues, often unrecognised, in the heart of modernity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the discourse of evolution.

We are taught to regard evolution as a biological process, a mechanism for explaining the emergence of life-forms through variation and selection. In this view, evolution is not a myth at all, but a scientific account grounded in empirical evidence. And yet, evolution functions mythically in our cultural imagination: not as a set of data, but as a grammar of becoming.

Evolution, in this sense, is not simply a theory of organisms—it is a construal of time, change, and value. It tells us what kinds of transformation are thinkable, what forms of continuity are legitimate, what counts as progress, and what does not. It provides a semiotic orientation to emergence: slow, adaptive, contingent, directional. It models the real as a temporally extended field of selection, competition, and differentiation.

In doing so, evolution enacts a mythic construal of possibility: a story of how new forms can emerge, how complexity arises, how adaptation defines meaning. It is not mythic because it is false, but because it organises potential in patterned ways. It tells us what kind of becoming is intelligible—and what kind is unthinkable.

From a relational perspective, this is not a critique but a recognition. Myth, here, is not the opposite of science—it is the semiotic deep structure of its construals. Evolution functions as a kind of ideational mythos, a way of mapping systemic potential through time. It is a grammar for imagining emergence.

But like all grammars, it also makes cuts.

The discourse of evolution tends to privilege gradualism, adaptation, and external selection. It construes change as slow and responsive, not sudden or systemic. It tends to background construal itself: the emergence of meaning, perspective, and consciousness are often treated as epiphenomena rather than as central to the evolutionary event.

This is not a flaw. It is a systemic commitment. But it also opens space for other construals—other grammars of emergence, other mythic models of how possibility evolves.

What if we treated meaning not as something that arises after evolution, but as something that drives it?

What if evolution itself is not a story of matter becoming complex, but of systems differentiating fields of potential?

What if construal is not an outcome of evolution, but its very mechanism?

Such questions are not challenges to the scientific discourse of evolution, but invitations to see it as one mythic grammar among many—a powerful, patterned construal of becoming, whose limits reveal the possibility of other myths still waiting to be told.

In the next post, we will turn to what was lost when modernity declared the myth dead—and what we might recover by releasing it from the literalist cut.

3 Rescuing Myth from the Literalist Cut

To understand what has happened to myth in modernity, we must examine not how it has been explained, but how it has been cut—reduced, sequestered, and reclassified under a particular ontological regime. This is the regime of literalism, which emerged most forcefully in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific empiricism.

The literalist cut treats meaning as secondary: it assumes that there is a reality out there—objective, observer-independent, propositional—and that any construal of that reality can be measured by how faithfully it maps onto the "facts." From this perspective, myth becomes either a false description (and therefore obsolete) or a poetic allegory (and therefore harmless).

Either way, it is stripped of its systemic power.

This was not a neutral development. It was a reconstrual of construal itself—a shift in what kinds of meaning-making could count as real. The literalist cut severed myth from its function as a semiotic system and recoded it as a primitive error. In doing so, it reconfigured the space of possibility: what could be known, what could be imagined, what could be inhabited.

But the cut was perspectival, not ontological. Myth did not disappear. It was simply displaced, repressed, or disguised. It re-emerged in the margins: in literature, in art, in ideology, in psychology, in the narratives of progress and collapse. And it continued to function—not as entertainment, but as the backgrounding architecture of construal.

Myths never depended on literal belief. Their power was never in their "truth" as facts, but in their potency as systems—systems that enacted worlds, roles, scales, and values. When the literalist cut declared myth irrational, it also foreclosed access to one of the most ancient and sophisticated technologies of systemic meaning.

And this matters.

Because without mythic construal, we are left only with description—flattened worlds, stripped of possibility, amputated from their own conditions of emergence. We lose the capacity to think systemically across domains, to inhabit symbolic fields, to constellate meaning beyond the factual.

To rescue myth from the literalist cut is not to return to superstition. It is to restore myth as a legitimate axis of construal—as a relational grammar of the possible, grounded not in belief but in patterned semiotic potential.

It is to insist that meaning is not derivative. That what we take to be real is not given, but enacted. That the stories we inherit—whether scientific, religious, or philosophical—are not merely representations of a world, but participations in its actualisation.

In the final post, we will ask what it means to treat myth not as memory of what was, but as memory of what might have been—and still could be.

4 Myth as Memory of the Not-Yet

We often think of myth as memory—cultural memory, ancestral memory, deep-time memory. Myths recall a beginning, or a rupture, or a covenant. They mark a primal event, a heroic lineage, a forgotten order. But this view, while not wrong, may be incomplete.

What if myth is not memory of what was, but memory of what might have been?

This is not nostalgia, nor speculation. It is an ontological shift. In a relational model of meaning, what we call the past is not a fixed archive but a field of possible construals, continually re-instantiated in the present. And what we call myth is not a record of what happened, but a system through which certain virtualities are preserved—not-yets that haunt the space of the now.

In this light, myths are not stories about origins. They are traces of unactualised potential—not paths taken, but paths imagined, constrained, suspended, or foreclosed. They do not tell us what happened. They tell us what could have happened, had the world been cut differently. They are semiotic residues of alternative worlds.

This makes myth not primitive, but generative.

It makes myth not a belief system, but a field of unrealised affordances—grammars of value, relation, temporality, and agency that still wait, dormant, in the cultural system. They may lie outside the dominant construals of science, politics, or reason. But they persist as latent systems, ready to be reanimated—not as relics, but as resources.

And here we arrive at a different kind of possibility: not the possibility of prediction, or adaptation, or discovery, but the possibility of reconstrual. The possibility of seeing again. The possibility of inhabiting the real otherwise.

A myth is not a map. It is a memory of a system that might have patterned the world. And like any system, it can be re-entered, re-cut, re-instantiated. To engage myth at this level is not to return to the past, but to reopen the field of potential that was never fully closed.

The not-yet still lives. And myth is how we remember it.