Worlds Within Meaning: resonance

Showing posts with label resonance. Show all posts

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.

29 September 2025

Myth as Construal: Rereading Campbell through Relational Ontology

Preface: From Monomyth to Relational Worlds

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces has long been celebrated for unveiling the “monomyth,” a universal narrative arc underlying global mythologies. Across cultures and eras, Campbell traced a single heroic itinerary: departure, initiation, and return. His work promised a unifying vision of myth as the manifestation of timeless psychic patterns.

Yet this universalising lens obscures a fundamental ontological distinction: the stories themselves are not instances of a preordained archetype, but situated, collective, and contingent acts of symbolic construal. Each myth phases its community into alignment, projects the collective into relational landscapes, and opens possibilities for action and imagination. The patterns Campbell detects are echoes — recurrent solutions to relational tensions — not proof of a singular, eternal monomyth.

This series, Myth as Construal, undertakes a relational rereading of Campbell. Its six posts trace a careful progression:

The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data – distinguishing Campbell’s universalising model from the plural, situated ontology of the myths themselves.
From Archetype to Reflexivity – reframing archetypes not as psychic essences but as effects of collective reflexive alignment.
From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures – dissolving the singular hero’s journey into heterogeneous construals of collective being.
Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process – exploring how each telling stages collective alignment through time.
Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes – showing how myths scaffold understanding across social, ecological, and symbolic horizons.
From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis – synthesising the series to foreground myth as the architecture of possibility, and Campbell’s monomyth as artefact.

The guiding move of this series is a relational cut: to treat myth not as a reflection of a timeless inner truth, but as an active, plural, and phasing construal of collective possibility. In doing so, it reframes Campbell’s project, highlighting the richness, heterogeneity, and creative dynamism of myth as it is actually enacted, rather than as it is universalised into theory.

By the end, the series invites readers to inhabit myth not as a static template of the psyche, but as a symbolic instrument, a field in which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their worlds. Campbell’s monomyth is a mirror; relational ontology invites us to step off the mirror and into the plurality of mythic life itself.

1 The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is often celebrated for uncovering a universal pattern at the heart of mythology: the so-called “monomyth,” or hero’s journey. His comparative lens spans continents and centuries, stitching together myths from Greece to India, Polynesia to Sumer. What results is a grand synthesis, a single archetypal itinerary of separation, initiation, and return.

But this ambition conceals a crucial slippage: the ontology of Campbell’s model is not the ontology of his data.

The myths Campbell draws upon are symbolic construals, each situated within its own collective horizon. They are not “instances” of a timeless archetype; they are ways of aligning a community through shared symbolic potential. A Navajo emergence story, a Polynesian voyage tale, and a Greek heroic cycle each construe different relations of collective, individual, cosmos, and possibility. Their meanings are grounded in their social-symbolic contexts, not in an abstract, transcendent psyche.

Campbell’s model, by contrast, is not relational but archetypal. Anchored in Jungian psychology, it treats myth as an expression of timeless psychic structures. Similarities across myths are gathered into a universal narrative sequence, which is then taken as the truth of myth itself. In doing so, Campbell conflates the patterned potential of symbolic construal with the absolutised structure of a monomyth.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is the decisive cut: the data are plural, situated, and collective; the model is singular, universalising, and psychic. Campbell mistakes the resonances of symbolic construal across cultures for proof of an underlying universal form. The relational move is to resist this collapse, and to treat myth instead as a field of heterogeneous construals — each staging possibilities for being-together, none reducible to a single archetypal template.

In this series, we will reread Campbell through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than a monomyth of timeless individuation, myth will be approached as symbolic construal: the staging of ontological possibility, the phasing of collective alignment, the architecture of what a world can mean.

2 From Archetype to Reflexivity

At the core of Campbell’s model lies the concept of the archetype. Myths, in his account, are symbolic expressions of deep psychic patterns: timeless forms residing in the collective unconscious. The hero’s journey is not a cultural invention but a universal structure of the psyche, surfacing again and again in different guises.

This is where Campbell’s ontology reveals its essentialist foundations. Archetypes are conceived as givens — eternal forms that precede and determine symbolic expression. Myth, in this view, is not a situated act of meaning-making but a coded manifestation of an inner truth.

A relational ontology cuts this differently. It denies the existence of timeless, pre-given forms. Instead, it understands meaning as construal: the perspectival shaping of potential into symbolic actuality. From this vantage, what Campbell calls an “archetype” is not a psychic essence but an effect of reflexive alignment.

When a collective tells a myth, it symbolically projects itself into form. This projection aligns individual and collective experience within a shared horizon. The figure of the hero, for example, does not derive from an eternal archetype of individuation; it arises as a symbolic construal of how individuation can be oriented within a particular collective. The hero is not an archetype of the psyche but a reflexive articulation of possibility.

This shift matters. Archetype freezes myth into essence; reflexivity restores myth as event. Archetype says: the hero’s journey is eternal. Reflexivity says: this telling stages individuation against the collective whole here, now, within this symbolic horizon.

From a relational perspective, then, Campbell’s archetypes are not the source of myth but its retrospective abstraction. They are second-order readings of recurrent symbolic construals, elevated into timeless universals. Myths themselves do not reveal archetypes; they enact reflexivity.

In other words: myth does not express the unconscious. It constitutes the horizon of the possible.

3 From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures

Campbell’s “hero’s journey” presents a sweeping narrative: separation, initiation, return. Across cultures, he finds the same beats, the same archetypal itinerary. The monomyth promises universality: one path, one sequence, one story of individuation.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is precisely the move that flattens myth into abstraction. The monomyth treats similarity as essence, pattern as law, and recurrence as evidence of universality. It neglects the situated, collective, and contingent work that myths perform within their own horizons.

Relational ontology reframes this: there is no single journey, only plural mythic architectures. Each myth constructs a horizon of possibility for its collective, shaping alignment, scaling individuation, and orienting action. The apparent “recurrences” that Campbell notes are not proofs of a universal plot; they are resonances — structural echoes that arise whenever certain relational tensions are negotiated in symbolic form (life and death, self and collective, known and unknown).

In this view:

The hero’s journey is not a template but one construal among many. A Polynesian navigation epic, a Greek tragedy, and a Navajo emergence myth do not share a hidden “monomyth” but instead instantiate different solutions to recurring relational challenges.
Myth is an architecture, not a map. It scaffolds collective experience, guiding what a community can imagine, enact, and align toward, rather than reporting an eternal psychic itinerary.
Plurality is fundamental. Each telling opens a new trajectory of being-together; the multiplicity of myths is not noise against a universal signal but the terrain of possibility itself.

From the relational vantage, Campbell’s monomyth is a model imposed upon the richness of plural construals. By universalising, it abstracts away the reflexive, contingent, and collective dimension of mythic action. The monomyth dissolves; what remains are heterogeneous mythic architectures — patterned potentials, staged alignments, and symbolic spaces in which collectives orient themselves toward what they can become.

The move from monomyth to plural architectures is thus more than critique: it is a reorientation. Myth is no longer a map of the psyche; it is the scaffolding of collective possibility.

4 Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process

Campbell’s monomyth presents myth as a sequence — the hero departs, faces trials, and returns transformed. Time, in his model, is linear and universal: myths follow a preordained itinerary, regardless of context or culture. In this framing, the narrative is a template, and the story’s phasing is derivative, secondary to the archetype.

Relational ontology cuts differently. Myth is not a static pattern traced over time; it is a process of phasing — an enactment of collective alignment, unfolding within the temporality of the telling. Each telling of a myth does more than recount events: it coordinates the present, anticipates potential futures, and aligns participants to shared symbolic horizons.

Key insights from this perspective include:

Temporal Relativity of Myth: Myths do not exist outside the moment of their telling. The same narrative can be enacted differently across occasions, emphasising different relational tensions, guiding different alignments, and opening distinct trajectories of collective possibility. The “sequence” of events is not fixed but flexible, contingent upon the horizon it phases.
Phasing Social Formation: Each telling structures a collective’s experience, scaling individual action against the whole, synchronising symbolic projection, and orienting what the group perceives as possible. Myth thus functions as a temporal scaffold: a way to order experience, not to illustrate an eternal pattern.
Iterative Reflexivity: Mythical phasing is reflexive. As the collective engages with a story, it adapts and realigns its symbolic horizon, which in turn reshapes subsequent tellings. Myths evolve through practice, not by appealing to a timeless monomyth.
Staging Possibility: Every act of storytelling is a construal of what could be. Myth does not describe what must occur; it maps potential, showing how the collective might navigate uncertainty, tension, and relational challenge.

From this vantage, Campbell’s linear monomyth becomes a shadow of myth’s real function. It abstracts sequence into universality, freezing temporal phasing into archetypal necessity. Relational ontology restores myth as a dynamic, iterative, and contingent process — a temporal choreography of symbolic alignment that unfolds differently each time it is enacted.

In short: myths are not maps of the psyche or the universe. They are temporal instruments, phasing collectives into alignment with their symbolic and relational possibilities.

5 Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes

Beyond sequence and timing, myths operate across relational landscapes. They are not only temporal phasings but also symbolic architectures that structure how collectives inhabit, navigate, and understand their worlds. From a relational ontology perspective, every myth functions as a lens through which a community construes its environment, its relations, and its possibilities.

Myths as Spatial and Social Scaffolds:
Myths map symbolic relationships across social and natural landscapes. A hero’s journey through a forest, across seas, or into the underworld is not merely narrative decoration; it stages relations between the collective and its environment, between individual roles and collective expectations. Myth constructs an experiential geography where actions, values, and relational tensions are meaningfully aligned.
Reflexive Projection:
Each myth projects the collective into symbolic form, allowing it to see itself from multiple vantage points simultaneously: the individual’s perspective, the collective’s stance, and the horizon of potential futures. This reflexivity is not introspection of a universal psyche but the enactment of collective self-construal.
Alignment Across Horizons:
Through repeated tellings, myths synchronise understanding across dispersed or heterogeneous participants. They create shared symbolic coordinates, so that disparate members of a collective can navigate tensions consistently, orient their actions coherently, and inhabit the same symbolic horizon. Myth, in this sense, is an instrument of social coordination, not a mere recounting of archetypal patterns.
Dynamic, Heterogeneous Landscapes:
The landscapes of myth are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, ecological, and historical contingencies. A myth adapts to new circumstances, producing multiple, overlapping trajectories of meaning. Campbell’s universal model erases this heterogeneity; relational ontology foregrounds it, revealing myth as plural, adaptive, and contextually grounded.

In sum, myths are simultaneously temporal and spatial instruments. They phase collective alignment through time, scaffold understanding across relational space, and reflexively project the collective into the symbolic horizon it inhabits. They do not mirror a timeless archetype; they constitute the terrain of possibility, showing communities how to live, act, and align within the worlds they inhabit.

6 From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis

Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has captivated generations by offering a singular, universal path through the landscape of human imagination: the hero departs, undergoes trials, and returns transformed. Its appeal lies in simplicity, coherence, and the promise of timeless truth. Yet, from a relational ontology perspective, this very appeal masks a critical ontological distortion.

The Monomyth as Artefact
Campbell’s synthesis abstracts, universalises, and essentialises. It treats recurrence as law, similarity as essence, and pattern as proof of an underlying psychic reality. In doing so, it collapses the plural, situated, and contingent nature of mythic practice into a single, flattened narrative. The “hero’s journey” becomes less a reflection of lived symbolic activity than a projection of theoretical desire — a map imposed upon terrain that is, in reality, richly diverse and dynamic.

Relational Ontology Restores Plurality
In contrast, myth itself is heterogeneous, iterative, and phasing. Each telling:

Aligns collective and individual experience within a symbolic horizon.
Projects the collective into temporal, social, and ecological landscapes.
Scaffolds possibilities for being-together, coordinating action, meaning, and expectation.
Evolves reflexively with each retelling, producing layered, context-sensitive architectures of understanding.

From this vantage, myths are not templates for inner transformation but instruments of symbolic construction — shaping what a collective can imagine, orient toward, and enact. The “archetypes” and “monomyths” of Campbell are therefore second-order abstractions: reflective readings of recurring construals, elevated into universalist theory. They are artefacts of comparison, not inherent features of the data.

The Decisive Cut
Relational ontology draws the critical distinction: the ontology of Campbell’s model ≠ the ontology of the myths themselves. The former is singular, universalising, and psychic; the latter is plural, situated, and collective. By preserving this cut, we reclaim myth as an active, temporal, reflexive, and spatially rich phenomenon.

Concluding Insight
Myth is not a path laid out by the unconscious; it is the architecture of possibility. It stages collective alignment, phases experience across horizons, and opens trajectories for becoming. In short, myths are not timeless patterns to be discovered; they are the relational instruments by which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Campbell’s monomyth, while elegant, is a mirror of our desire for universals. Relational ontology invites us instead to inhabit the plural, contingent, and creative reality of myth as it actually functions — as construal, alignment, and possibility in action.

Coda: Dwelling in the Relational Horizon of Myth

As we conclude this series, it is worth pausing not to summarise, but to reflect on the implications of a relational reading of myth. If Campbell’s monomyth invites us to see a singular path — the hero’s journey of individuation — relational ontology invites us to inhabit plural horizons of possibility. Myths are not mirrors of a timeless psyche; they are instruments through which collectives enact, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Each telling is a temporary cut into the vast field of potential: it phases alignment, projects relational possibilities, and shapes the collective’s horizon. Across cultures and epochs, the diversity of mythic form is not deviation from a universal pattern, but the very texture of symbolic life. The hero departs, yes — but the paths, landscapes, tensions, and resolutions are as varied as the communities who tell them.

In dwelling with myths relationally, we recognise the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of symbolic activity. We see that alignment and reflexivity are not metaphors, but operative processes that structure possibility. Myths are not discoveries of hidden truth; they are enactments of what a collective can become.

This perspective does not diminish the power or beauty of myth; rather, it deepens it. By attending to plurality, contingency, and process, we honour the creative and collective work that myths perform. We are invited to read myth as an architecture, to inhabit it as a landscape, and to participate in it as a living field of relational possibility.

Campbell’s vision, compelling though it is, reflects our desire for universals. The relational lens reframes that desire, allowing us to dwell instead in the rich, contingent, and evolving horizon of myth itself — a horizon in which every telling is both a projection and a possibility, and in which the collective imagines, aligns, and becomes.

In the end, myth is not a path to truth; it is the space in which truth is construed, rehearsed, and renewed. To engage with myth relationally is to dwell in that space, attentive to the plurality, phasing, and reflexivity that make collective life meaningful.

"Step lightly into the tales.
Notice the paths, but do not follow them as lines of destiny.
Attend instead to the spaces they open,
the alignments they perform,
the possibilities they call into being.
Here, myth is not a map, but a horizon —
and you are invited to dwell within it."

02 September 2025

The Logic of Aliveness: Music and the Value of Life

1 The Social Power of Music Without Meaning

Why does music move us so deeply, so reliably, and so universally—when it doesn’t mean anything?

Music doesn’t refer. It doesn’t name objects, state facts, or assert claims. It doesn’t signify in the way language does. And yet it fills our lives with joy, sorrow, power, intimacy, beauty. It compels us to move, to sing, to cry, to connect. It shapes collective feeling and carves out the deep rhythms of our inner life. All without a single word.

This is the puzzle that opens our series. If music isn’t a semiotic system—if it doesn’t mean—then how does it work? How does it exert such rich and reliable effects, both personally and socially?

Our working hypothesis is this:

Music is not a system of meaning, but a system of value.

It doesn’t tell us what to think—but it shapes what we feel. And more profoundly: it shapes how we move through feeling, how we inhabit affective states, and how we regulate the embodied tension between comfort and disruption, calm and arousal, cohesion and intensity.

In this sense, music functions as a kind of value terrain. It sets in motion felt dynamics—states of tension, anticipation, suspension, resolution—and lets us travel through them, in time. These are not metaphorical versions of emotional life. They are, quite directly, the very dynamics of embodied regulation that underwrite our emotional and social lives in the first place.

So we don’t just respond to music—we live in it. We inhabit it as a space of simulated aliveness. And crucially, we do so in concert with others. Music gives us not only a space to feel, but a shared field to move and regulate feeling together.

We might think of this as a kind of social pheromone system—a non-symbolic but highly coordinated means of aligning bodies and states. Just as ants use chemical trails to guide movement without cognition or signification, humans use music to align affect and behaviour across a group, without meaning a thing.

In this series, we’ll explore how this works. We’ll draw on the work of Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist who argued that value—not representation—is the primary driver of behavior. We'll trace how music activates the same core dynamics that govern life itself: homeostasis, threat and restoration, arousal and return, and the shaping of possibility through value. And we’ll argue that it’s precisely this—music’s ability to simulate and safely modulate life-affirming states—that makes it so powerful, so rewarding, and so central to human culture.

Music doesn’t have to mean. It just has to move.

And it does.

2 Value Before Meaning: Edelman and the Homeostatic Brain

In our opening post, we proposed that music doesn’t function through meaning, but through value. It shapes what we feel, not what we think. It activates and regulates states of tension and release, not through signs or symbols, but by modulating embodied experience itself.

To ground this idea more precisely, we turn now to the work of Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist whose theory of consciousness and cognition centred not on representation or logic, but on value-driven dynamics.

For Edelman, the most basic fact about life is this: organisms must stay alive. And staying alive means maintaining a set of internal conditions—temperature, hydration, oxygen, nutrients, social bonding—within viable bounds. These are not just passive baselines. They are actively regulated states, managed by systems he calls homeostats.

Each homeostat is governed by what Edelman calls a value system—a biologically grounded mechanism that evaluates states of the body and environment and triggers actions to restore balance when those states drift too far. This value system is not about meaning. It’s about directionality: it biases behaviour toward life-sustaining outcomes.

The key insight is this:

Value precedes categorisation. Feeling comes before knowing.

Or, in Edelman’s own terms:

“Categorisation is not the same as value, but rather occurs on value.”

In other words, we don’t begin by identifying and labelling the world. We begin by feeling it—by sensing whether things are good or bad for us, whether they move us toward or away from equilibrium. Meaning emerges only later, as a developmental elaboration on top of these primary value systems.

This has major implications for how we understand behaviour, experience, and—crucially—music.

Categorisation on Value

Edelman argues that most of what the brain learns doesn’t arise from direct genetic coding, but through a process he calls somatic selection. Neural groups are generated with a great deal of variability, and through experience—under the influence of value—they are selected, strengthened, and stabilised. What matters is not the symbolic content of a stimulus, but how it affects the body’s homeostatic trajectory.

So categorisation—the formation of stable response patterns to the world—is not purely cognitive. It is an epigenetic event, shaped by the body's evaluative feedback. It doesn’t occur unless the system has value-based circuitry to guide the selection process. But that circuitry, on its own, doesn't determine the outcome. It merely sets the conditions for development—a kind of potential field upon which neural experience will carve its actual shape.

Edelman again:

“Without prior value, somatic selectional systems will not converge into definite behaviours.”

This means that value systems don't just direct behavior—they also shape what becomes meaningful in the first place.

From Value to Experience

So: all action, perception, and learning begin in value. Not in representation. Not in concept. Not in symbol. What this gives us is a picture of a dynamic body, moving and sensing in an environment, constantly adjusting to maintain viability, guided not by what things mean but by what they do—to its equilibrium, to its potential for survival, to its felt condition.

And here we begin to see the resonance with music.

Because music, too, does not operate through representation. It does not provide categorisable input for somatic selection in the way language or image might. It offers instead a direct modulation of value states—states that resemble the body's own homeostatic fluctuations.

Rhythmic drive, tonal instability, melodic contour, harmonic tension and release—these are not signs to be interpreted. They are patterns of value fluctuation, simulated through sound, that we feel in our bodies as shifts in intensity, anticipation, relief, closure, and return.

Music doesn't tell us what’s happening. It happens to us. And that happening is governed not by interpretation, but by the dynamics of value regulation.

In the next post, we’ll explore how these dynamics unfold in time. We'll show how music functions as a simulated value terrain, staging felt states of disturbance and return, of tension and resolution, that echo the very structure of biological survival—and why it feels so profoundly good to move through them.

3 Music as a Simulated Value Terrain

We’ve seen that value comes before meaning—that biological systems are shaped by what sustains life, not by what symbolises it. Edelman’s model showed us how homeostatic regulation, grounded in embodied value systems, underpins all behaviour and perception. Music, we’ve proposed, engages these systems directly, without the detour of symbolic categorisation.

But what exactly does music do?

In this post, we develop the idea that music operates as a simulated value terrain—a landscape of dynamic states that mimic the rhythms of homeostatic disturbance and restoration. By generating patterns of tension and resolution, instability and return, music stages the logic of survival. And in doing so, it creates a felt experience of moving through threat toward safety, imbalance toward balance—an experience that is not just pleasurable, but deeply life-affirming.

Patterning the Felt: From Sound to System

Music unfolds in time. It is inherently processual, never statically present. And at every moment, it modulates the listener’s felt condition—not by naming things or describing situations, but by shaping the internal dynamics of expectation, pressure, and release.

A rhythmic pulse creates forward motion and temporal predictability.
A harmonic dissonance introduces tension—something feels unresolved, unstable.
A melodic rise builds anticipation; a cadential return resolves it.
A swelling crescendo heightens arousal, then dissipates into stillness.

These are not signs. They are value states, construed directly by the nervous system. They signal not “what” is happening, but how it feels—and even more precisely, what kind of trajectory the body is currently on: toward restoration? or deeper into imbalance?

This is precisely how homeostatic systems operate. They don’t care about representations. They care about directionality: are we returning to equilibrium, or moving away from it? Is this condition improving or worsening? Should we act—or rest?

Music activates this same evaluative orientation—but in a simulated space, where the stakes are affective, not survival-based. It lets us rehearse the very movements that keep us alive—without risk. It models the bodily experience of feeling off-centre and then re-centred, and in so doing, amplifies our sense of vitality.

The Pleasure of Return

The pleasure of music is often the pleasure of coming back—of finding one’s way home after wandering.

This might be literal (a tonic resolution after harmonic tension) or structural (a return to a refrain or theme after variation). But in each case, the sense of restoration is not cognitive; it is felt. The body registers a return to equilibrium—a discharge of pressure, a recalibration of internal dynamics.

This is not metaphor. It is a direct experiential analogue of the body's homeostatic processes. Music makes value audible—not in the sense of moral or symbolic value, but in the sense of regulatory significance: this is stable; this is unstable; this is returning to form.

And because it all happens without actual threat—no danger, no dehydration, no death—music provides the emotional architecture of survival without its risks. It enacts the logic of living, in miniature, and allows us to feel the satisfaction of restoration, again and again.

Simulated Threat, Safe Restoration

Why do we enjoy sadness in music? Why do we seek out dissonance, instability, tension?

Because music lets us touch these affective states safely. It lets us simulate grief, danger, and longing—not to indulge in them, but to move through them. The joy lies not only in the resolution, but in the felt traversal of the terrain itself.

In this way, music becomes a kind of training ground for value regulation—an aesthetic arena in which we rehearse the very patterns of resilience that define being alive.

It creates deviation from equilibrium (through instability, surprise, suspense).
It sustains that deviation long enough to be felt.
It resolves the deviation, restoring balance and grounding.

This is not the work of representation. It is the structural mimicry of homeostatic life. And the body, attuned to these patterns from birth, knows how to feel them—long before it knows how to name them.

In the next post, we’ll make this distinction even sharper. We’ll explore how music does not mean sadness or symbolise restoration, but rather enacts those states directly. It works not through signification, but through somatic modulation. It doesn’t tell us what to feel. It gives us a place to feel it—together, in motion, alive.

4 Felt Patterns, Not Signified Messages

By now we’ve proposed that music is best understood not as a system of meaning, but as a system of value—one that simulates the very dynamics of homeostatic regulation. It stages affective states of tension, anticipation, instability, and return. It lets us rehearse survival without risk. And it does so not through ideas or concepts, but through direct modulation of embodied experience.

In this post, we clarify a crucial distinction:

Music doesn’t signify emotion—it patterns affect.
It doesn’t express meanings—it modulates states.
It doesn’t tell us what to feel—it gives us a structure in which to feel it.

This may seem like a subtle point. But it marks a fundamental divide between semiotic systems, which operate through symbolic representation, and non-semiotic systems like music, which operate directly on value-regulating dynamics.

Music as Constraint, Not Communication

We often speak of music as a “language of emotion.” But this metaphor misleads. Music does not convey emotion in the way language conveys information. There is no codebook, no grammar of reference. There is no shared system of signs that map to fixed meanings.

Instead, music works more like a scaffold for embodied states. It provides a temporal structure within which the body can experience rhythms of arousal and release, tension and return, elevation and grounding.

The effects are repeatable and socially shared—not because we interpret the same symbols, but because we participate in the same value trajectory.

A swelling crescendo doesn’t mean urgency; it feels urgent.
A descending minor third doesn’t signify sadness; it invites a posture of retreat.
A rhythmic break doesn’t stand for disruption; it creates the condition of destabilisation.

These are not messages. They are felt constraints—coaxing the body into states it already knows how to inhabit.

Beyond Expression: Music as Enactment

When a string quartet builds unbearable tension, we are not receiving an expression—we are entering a state-space shaped by the dynamics of sound.

This is why music can produce states that words cannot. It doesn’t describe grief—it enacts its temporal logic. It doesn’t narrate hope—it sets it in motion, builds it, suspends it, tests it, releases it. These states don’t require interpretation. They register—directly, affectively, somatically.

This is not just a metaphor. The nervous system responds to these patterns in ways that closely parallel its responses to real-world value shifts. Heart rate, breath, posture, attention—all follow the curves of the musical terrain. In this sense, music runs the simulation of living.

And crucially: it lets us rehearse how to move through it.

Non-Semiotic, Fully Social

At this point, we can return to an earlier comparison: music as a kind of social pheromone. Just as ant colonies use chemical trails to organise complex behaviour without symbolic thought, music enables humans to coordinate affective states, synchronise timing, and align attention—without signs, without referents.

In both cases, we see a system that is:

Non-symbolic (not representational)
Dynamic (unfolds through time)
Socially consequential (regulates group behaviour)
Value-driven (shapes action by modulating internal states)

Music, in this light, is not just “emotional expression.” It is a collective value system—a shared space for moving, feeling, and restoring together. It aligns bodies by activating the same rhythms that regulate life itself.

What We Learn By Listening

So when we listen to music, we are not decoding a message. We are entering a pattern. We are entraining ourselves to a series of value fluctuations that simulate—and sometimes transform—the conditions of being alive.

And this is why music feels realer than real. Because it offers us a distilled encounter with the logic of survival: the capacity to sustain pressure, to find our way through imbalance, and to return, at last, to form.

In our final post, we’ll draw the threads together. We’ll reflect on why music matters—not just as art or entertainment, but as a deeply embodied, deeply social practice that sustains the rhythms of life.

5 Why It Matters: Music as Life-Affirming Practice

Throughout this series, we’ve proposed a different way of understanding music. Not as a language. Not as a code. Not as a container of meanings. But as a system of value dynamics—a non-semiotic, embodied, relational system that simulates and shapes the rhythms of life itself.

We’ve seen that music doesn’t signify. It acts. It modulates. It sets bodies and nervous systems into motion, through patterned fluctuations of tension and release, deviation and return. These patterns aren’t symbolic. They are felt, lived, and shared.

And in being shared, they become profoundly social.

In this final post, we ask: why does this matter? What do we gain—philosophically, politically, existentially—by understanding music as a simulated value terrain? What does it help us to see?

Music Rehearses Aliveness

At its core, music is a practice of restoration. It lets us experience threat without danger, deviation without breakdown, sadness without despair. It constructs a terrain where we can traverse the forms of suffering and survival—and arrive, again and again, at return.

This is not a trivial pleasure. It is a form of affective resilience.

By staging value fluctuations in a space of safety, music lets us train the rhythms of homeostatic life:

how to endure imbalance,
how to ride the wave of rising pressure,
how to hold our breath in the not-yet,
and how to feel, with others, the joy of resolution.

It reminds us: you can go through this. You can come back. You are still here.

Music Aligns Bodies Without Words

In a world saturated with symbolic communication—where words often fail, falter, or fracture—music offers another mode of relation: alignment without interpretation.

It gives groups a shared temporal structure in which to feel. It synchronises nervous systems across bodies. It generates affective collectivity—not through meaning, but through movement, timing, co-regulation.

This is what makes it so central to ritual, to resistance, to grief, to celebration. When language breaks down, music steps in—not to explain, but to hold.

And in that holding, it sustains something deeply human: the experience of being alive, together.

Music Is Not a Mystery. It’s a System.

Perhaps the greatest insight of this model is that music’s power is not mystical. It is not ineffable. It is not a divine accident. It is a structural consequence of how life regulates itself through value.

Music mimics that regulation. It triggers the same systems. It operates at the level where bodies feel their way back to balance. And in doing so, it reminds us: you are not just a meaning-maker. You are a value-navigator. A lifeform. A rhythm in motion.

To make music, or to be moved by it, is to rehearse being alive. Not to represent it. To be it.

Coda: Music, Not Meaning

We don’t need to decode music. We need to feel it happen.

That happening is a dance through a value terrain—a traversal of affective shape and intensity, governed not by signs but by homeostatic logic. We follow the pull of resolution, the surge of dissonance, the settling of return—not because they mean something, but because they are something: states of the body, of the system, of the self in relation.

And this, perhaps, is the deepest lesson music teaches—not through telling, but through doing:

Life is not given in meaning.
It is given in motion.
And music is that motion, shaped in time, held in form, felt as value.