Worlds Within Meaning: self

Showing posts with label self. Show all posts

03 July 2025

Becoming Through Sound: Individuation and the Social Value of Music.

1 Sound and the Self — Music as a Medium of Individuation

What does it mean to become someone? To become more distinctively oneself — more finely attuned to the values that matter, more differentiated in how one feels and acts? One answer begins not with words, but with sound.

This series explores music not as a form of communication, but as a material system that participates in the shaping of selves. It offers a view of music as a social system — not a semiotic one — that exerts selective pressure on the listener by activating perceptual values. In this view, music does not express meaning; it selects from a listener’s evolving capacity to categorise experience as value-laden. This process is not interpretive but formative.

A Relational Starting Point

Our point of departure is a relational ontology: the world is not made of things with intrinsic properties, but of processes and relations that unfold over time. In this ontology, time is not a background container but the dimension of unfolding itself — the becoming of the actual from the potential.

Within this framework, music emerges as a material process initiated by a music maker, and encountered by a music listener. The music maker actualises sounds from the material potential of their environment. These sounds are not semiotic signs; they are physical events that participate in social life by functioning as attractors of value — for listeners, not as messages to interpret, but as experiential pressures that select for how they come to feel and to be.

Individuation as Selection of Value

Listeners are not passive receivers. They are embodied participants in evolving perceptual ecologies. From early development onward, they acquire the capacity to categorise sensory experience — not just in terms of what something is, but in terms of how it matters. What is pleasing? What is compelling? What moves? What soothes?

Music, in this model, plays a special role: it modulates the unfolding of perception in time, intensifying the emergence of new value configurations. Just as the gaze of a caregiver selects perceptual categories in an infant — categories that later stabilise as social values — so too can musical environments shape the developing value landscape of a listener.

Over time, as music resonates with (and sometimes challenges) these perceptual value systems, it contributes to a listener's individuation — the increasingly distinct patterning of what matters and how. It does this without conveying meaning. Its function is not semantic but selective.

From Social Sound to Personal Becoming

Thus, the model unfolds: the music maker actualises sounds; the listener categorises them as value-laden; and in that ongoing resonance, the listener’s perceptual ecology is reorganised. The process is not interpretive but transformative. The music listener becomes who they are — not by decoding messages, but by resonating with patterns of sound that selectively reinforce or disrupt their existing structures of feeling.

This is music as individuation — as a medium through which consciousness is shaped, not by representation, but by selection of what comes to matter.

2 Resonance and Value — How Music Selects the Listener

If music doesn’t communicate meanings, what does it do? In this model, music works not by expression but by resonance. And what it resonates with is not thought or language, but the evolving system of perceptual values that underlies how we feel, act, and become.

This post explores how music functions as a system of material attractors that shape the unfolding of consciousness by selecting values — not through symbols, but through patterns of sound.

Music as Resonant Material Form

To begin with, music is made of sound — but not just any sound. It is sound organised in time by a music maker, who draws from the material potential of their environment. These sounds, once actualised, are phenomena: physical events that unfold as processes. They do not symbolise something else; they do not point beyond themselves. They are what they are — sonic movements in air that are socially recognised as music.

What makes them music is not what they mean, but how they resonate with human listeners — how they act upon systems of value.

Value as Perceptual Categorisation

Listeners encounter music not as empty receivers but as embodied perceivers with systems already attuned to patterns of value. These values are not abstract preferences; they are deeply adaptive categorisations of experience: what feels safe or dangerous, soothing or stimulating, familiar or strange.

Over time, these value categories develop in part through social exposure: to environments, to caregivers, to cultural practices — and to music. When listeners hear music, they do not decode it. Rather, they categorise it. And the act of categorising is itself value-laden: certain patterns are pleasing, others jarring; some attract, others repel.

This categorisation is a form of selection: a process by which the music listener’s perceptual systems are reinforced, challenged, or reorganised.

Resonance as Selection Pressure

From this view, music functions as a selective environment. Its temporal unfolding places pressure on the listener’s value systems, encouraging some patterns to persist and others to fade. Resonance is not passive alignment; it is active selection: a dynamic interaction between sound and the structures of feeling that emerge in response.

This is why music can feel profoundly shaping. It is not that the music means something and we understand it. It is that the music does something — and we are changed.

A Social System Without Symbols

Crucially, this selective function is social. The music maker and the listener are participants in a shared social space, even if they never meet. The music itself — as a pattern of sound — is not semiotic. It does not convey meaning. But it is social, because it acts upon socialised perceptual systems, reinforcing values that are shared, contested, or evolving within a culture.

It is precisely because music is not symbolic that it can reach beneath meaning and shape the contours of the self — not through persuasion or communication, but through resonant selection.

In the next post, we’ll explore how music’s unfolding in time contributes to this process — not as a sequence of events, but as a field of ongoing becoming. See you in Post 3: The Time of Music, The Time of Consciousness.

3 The Time of Music, The Time of Consciousness

We often speak of music unfolding in time — a song lasting three minutes, a symphony in four movements, a groove that builds over a few bars. But what kind of time is this?

In this post, we consider how music and consciousness unfold together, not by reference to the ticks of a clock, but as mutually resonant processes. Both music and consciousness are dynamic, patterned, and emergent — and their alignment is key to how music selects and shapes the self.

Time as the Unfolding of Process

In this model, time is not a container for events. It is not a neutral backdrop against which things happen. Instead, time is understood as the dimension of process — the unfolding of events in relation to one another.

This view, drawn from a relational ontology, treats time as relational, not absolute. A process does not unfold “in” time. The unfolding is time. Each sound in music — each pitch, rhythm, or texture — does not occupy a position on a timeline. It contributes to a field of unfolding, in which each moment is shaped by the movement before and after.

Consciousness Unfolds Too

Consciousness, too, unfolds as a process — not as a static self observing the world, but as a flow of attention, perception, emotion, and reflection. It is not a fixed container of experience but an emergent stream of becoming.

When we listen to music, our consciousness does not merely “keep time” with it. It is shaped by it. Our emotional tone, sense of movement, and felt continuity are continually entrained by the sound’s temporal patterns. The music doesn’t move “through” us — we move with it.

Resonant Alignment

This co-unfolding is not just synchrony. It is resonance. The rhythmic structure of the music entrains bodily rhythms: breath, heart rate, neural oscillations. The temporal contours of musical phrasing guide attention, shape anticipation, and modulate affect.

In short, the time of music becomes the time of consciousness. And this alignment becomes a condition for value selection. Patterns that resonate are reinforced. Patterns that jar or disrupt may be resisted, reframed, or even transform the listener.

Individuation Through Temporal Flow

Because the listener’s perceptual and affective systems are shaped in part through these encounters, music participates in the process of individuation: the differentiation of the self through experience.

This individuation is not random. It is patterned, contingent on the relational pressures of unfolding sound. And these pressures are exerted over time — not clock time, but the experiential time of processual becoming.

In the next post, we explore how this shaping of perception and value contributes to who we become, as social beings attuned to shared environments of sound and feeling. See you in Post 4: Becoming a Listener — Music and the Shaping of the Self.

4 Becoming a Listener — Music and the Shaping of the Self

What does it mean to “become a listener”? Not merely to hear sound, but to be formed by it — to have one’s perceptual and affective patterns shaped through encounters with music?

In this post, we look more closely at how music participates in individuation, guiding how listeners develop systems of value through repeated, resonant exposure to material patterns of sound.

From Reception to Selection

When we hear music, we don’t simply receive it — we select and categorise what we hear. That is, perceptual systems construct sound into forms that resonate with prior experience, attention, and expectation.

This selection isn’t passive. It draws on deeply embedded neurobiological systems shaped by previous interactions. And music, as a patterned field of material phenomena, activates and updates these systems.

The peahen doesn’t merely see the peacock’s tail — the perception of certain traits coincides with the activation of value systems shaped by evolutionary history. Likewise, music listeners don’t merely hear notes — their perceptual systems entrain with patterns of activated value.

Music as a Social Process

This means music-making is not simply expressive; it is formative. The music maker generates material patterns — vibrations in air — that function socially because they activate systems of value in listeners.

This activation is not semiotic. Music does not express meanings, propositions, or symbolic relationships. It shapes the listener’s perceptual systems not by representing the world, but by structuring their resonant potential.

Resonance and Value

Some patterns come to be experienced as beautiful, powerful, moving — not because they “mean” anything, but because they resonate with systems of value that have themselves been shaped over time.

Each encounter with music, then, is a point of contact in a longer process of social individuation. Listeners emerge not as blank slates but as valueful selves, continually being reshaped by patterns of sound.

No Listener Without Listening

There is no “listener” independent of the act of listening. One becomes a listener by being drawn into the field of sound, participating in the unfolding of its time, and allowing oneself to be patterned by it.

Music is not a language, but it is a force of formation. It creates no texts, conveys no messages — yet it plays a decisive role in who we become.

In the final post of the series, we’ll reflect on what this means for our understanding of music, self, and social life. Join us for Post 5: Music and the Value of Becoming.

5 Music and the Value of Becoming

Throughout this series, we’ve considered how music functions not as a language, not as a bearer of messages, but as a field of material phenomena through which value is activated in listeners. In this final post, we reflect on what this implies for our understanding of music, selfhood, and social life.

The Listener is Formed, Not Informed

To listen to music is not to interpret meaning, but to participate in a process. We do not decode messages; we become selves through resonance. The music maker offers sound — sound that functions socially because it activates value-laden systems in others. And in being activated, these systems are shaped, reinforced, or transformed.

This is individuation: the emergence of the self through actualisations of potential. Each moment of listening is a point on a path of becoming, where the listener is re-formed by material engagement with sound.

Music’s Social Force

Because these patterns are shared — performed, transmitted, repeated — music becomes a means by which social formations propagate. Musical traditions, styles, and innovations carry with them histories of value that continue to be reinstantiated in new listeners.

Music does not represent society; it reverberates through it. It binds communities not by conveying meanings, but by organising shared systems of affective resonance.

Time and the Self

This model demands a shift in how we think about time. Not as a sequence of external moments, but as the unfolding of processes — the unfolding of music, and the unfolding of consciousness in relation to it. When these unfoldings resonate, individuation occurs.

We are not static listeners receiving sounds, but dynamic processes of becoming, shaped by the music we encounter.

Music, Not As What It Is — But What It Does

In the end, music matters not because of what it expresses, but because of what it does. It has no message. But it has effects. It plays no role in a semiotic system. But it plays a formative role in the social development of value.

We do not look to music to find ourselves. We become ourselves in the listening.

02 July 2025

Music in Relational Ontology: Sound, Value, and the Unfolding of Consciousness

1 Music as Social Phenomena: A Relational Model

Music moves us. It brings tears, delight, energy, or calm. But what exactly is it that moves us? This series offers a model of music grounded in relational ontology — one that begins not with what music means, but with what music does.

Music as Material and Social

Music is not a message. It is not a symbolic system that encodes and transmits meaning between minds. Rather, it is a material phenomenon — a pattern of sound — that functions socially by activating values in others. A music maker generates sound, and that sound has the potential to resonate within a listener’s consciousness, selecting from that listener’s system of perceptual categorisations and affective dispositions.

In these terms, music is not semiotic, because it does not rely on the symbolic abstraction of meaning. But it is social, because it acts upon systems of value within social bodies — like laughter, birdsong, or the colours of a peacock’s tail.

Relational Ontology: Sound in Context

In the model developed here, we take seriously the implications of a relational ontology: nothing exists in isolation, and no phenomenon is defined independently of the relations in which it participates. Sounds are not just events in physical space. They are phenomena — not in the sense of universal percepts, but as instances of potential actualised in and through relations. These relations include the listener’s body, memory, attention, and social and cultural context.

Time, too, is understood relationally: not as a container or a measure, but as the unfolding of processes. Sound unfolds in time, and so does consciousness. Music arises when these unfoldings come into resonance — when the movement of sound selects a movement of value in the listener.

Music Maker and Music Listener

A key distinction in this model is between the music maker and the music listener.

The music maker instantiates material potential: sound patterns in time.
The music listener actualises value: a response of feeling, attention, and perhaps memory.

This is not a communication between minds, but an encounter between phenomena and consciousness. The social function of music lies in its power to recruit shared systems of value — just as the scent of ripened fruit might draw animals, or a ritual chant might synchronise a group.

From Sound to Social Force

This approach allows us to understand music not as a symbolic message to be interpreted, but as a social force that acts through its capacity to resonate. A piece of music can stir a crowd, offer solace, coordinate movement, or bind people together. But it does this not by conveying meanings, but by selecting and activating values in those who listen.

This distinction is crucial. The value awakened in the listener is not put there by the music. Rather, the music selects it from a system already formed through embodied experience and social life.

In Part 2, we will turn more closely to the materiality of sound itself — how physical patterns of vibration participate in the unfolding of processes, and how these are taken up within the body of the listener.

2 The Sound of Process: Materiality, Time, and Resonance

If music is not a symbolic message but a material phenomenon that functions socially, then what kind of material phenomenon is it? What kind of matter is sound? And how does this matter come to matter — how does it exert social force?

To answer these questions, we turn to sound as processual materiality: something that unfolds through time and in relation.

Sound as Unfolding

In a relational ontology, time is not a container in which things happen. Time is the unfolding of processes. A sound does not occur in time; it is time — the time of its unfolding. This makes sound a particularly vivid example of what it means for a phenomenon to exist as relation.

A single tone is not an object but a movement of air. A rhythm is not a set of points in time but a patterned trajectory. Harmony, timbre, phrasing — all are forms of unfolding, inseparable from the processes that actualise them in material and perceptual space.

When we say that music “unfolds in time,” we are describing a relational process: sound and consciousness co-arising, each affecting the other.

From Vibration to Value

Sound begins as vibration — compressions and rarefactions of air. But its social function begins only when those vibrations are taken up in a body — when a listening body hears not only frequencies, but qualities. A sound is not merely detected; it is felt. This feeling is shaped by the body’s histories, habits, and perceptual structures — many of which are shared across individuals, cultures, or species.

This makes music a phenomenon that acts through resonance: the matching of movement in one domain (sound) with movement in another (consciousness). Resonance is not mere mimicry. It is relational selection: a process in which the unfolding of sound brings forth — activates — a corresponding unfolding of affect, attention, or action in the listener.

This is how music begins to function socially. Not through meaning, but through value: by selecting what matters from a body’s system of dispositions.

No Symbols, No Codes

There are no messages in music. There are no codes to be deciphered. What there is, instead, is a shared field of attunement. The listener is not interpreting the music; they are responding to it — through the actualisation of patterned affect.

This patterning does not require shared symbols, but it often recruits shared histories. A genre, a style, a groove — these are not semiotic systems, but sedimented forms of valueful relation. They shape what kinds of resonance are possible. They make social coordination and collective affect possible.

In Part 3, we explore how these shared resonances give rise to musical ecologies — distributed systems of sound, value, and social relation that link music makers and listeners in a common unfolding.

3 Shared Soundworlds: Musical Ecologies and Social Bodies

If music is a material phenomenon that functions socially by activating values in listeners, then its social power lies not in communication, but in co-ordination. Not in saying something, but in sounding with others.

In this post, we explore how music gives rise to musical ecologies — distributed networks of relations among bodies, sounds, values, and histories. These ecologies link music makers and music listeners in overlapping fields of attunement.

From Individual Bodies to Social Bodies

When a listener hears music, they are not merely decoding structure; they are enacting a bodily response to patterned sound. This response is shaped by evolutionary dispositions, cultural practices, and individual history — all of which reside not only in the brain, but in the whole body as a social, biological, and physical system.

Music resonates with this bodily system. But because bodies are never simply individual — they are born, shaped, and sustained through social relation — the affective resonance of music draws listeners into shared experience. When this happens, the body of the listener becomes part of a social body, even if no words are exchanged.

A crowd dancing, a choir singing, a mother humming to her child: these are not symbolic transactions. They are mutual enactments of patterned resonance — what we might call valueful synchrony.

Ecologies of Sound and Value

These resonant synchronies do not emerge from nowhere. They depend on shared conditions: cultural practices, acoustic environments, habits of attention, and historical repertoires of feeling. Together, these form musical ecologies — patterned arrangements of material and social potential that support the emergence of resonance.

Such ecologies are not reducible to music makers or music listeners. They are relational fields in which music happens — not as an object, but as an event of unfolding relation.

And they are never static. As music makers generate sound — instantiating particular material forms — and as listeners respond — actualising particular affective patterns — the ecology shifts. New resonances are formed, new values are selected. The ecology evolves.

Music as Social Force

Because music unfolds in relation, it can bring into being new social possibilities. It can recruit attention, shape collective movement, generate belonging, and mobilise affect. It does this not by representing a shared world, but by co-producing one — through the coordinated resonance of bodies in time.

In this sense, music does not describe a world. It instantiates one. It draws together music maker and music listener into a shared soundworld — a momentary, material, social constellation.

In Part 4, we explore how this resonance is not only social, but emotional — how music moves us by actualising affective potential in patterned and powerful ways.

4 Feeling With: Affective Resonance and Emotional Force

In previous posts, we described music as a material phenomenon that functions socially by activating values in listeners. This post turns to the affective dimension of that activation: how music feels.

We propose that music’s force lies not in what it means, but in what it moves — in how it resonates with affective patterns of value. Music does not represent emotion; it actualises emotional potential in patterned and relational ways.

The Feeling of Form

When a listener hears music, they encounter changes in pitch, rhythm, loudness, texture, and timbre. These are not just acoustic features; they are perceptual forces that the body registers as tensions, releases, intensities, and reliefs.

These patterned forces map onto — or better, activate — bodily capacities for feeling. Rising pitch may activate anticipatory tension. A sudden silence may evoke surprise. Repetition may comfort; dissonance may disturb. These effects are not symbolic. They are affective responses to material form.

But these responses are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, developmental, and situational factors. The same sound may elicit different feelings in different contexts. Still, in all cases, the emotional response is actualised from the listener’s own affective potential, triggered by the form of the music, in relation.

Emotional Patterning Without Emotional Content

Music often feels expressive — joyful, mournful, agitated, serene. Yet music does not express these states in the way a person might verbally articulate emotion. It does not refer to emotion. Instead, it produces affective resonances that align with emotional experience.

This is an important distinction. Music does not contain emotion, nor does it communicate it from music maker to music listener. Rather, it brings about patterns of feeling that can be co-experienced across listeners. This shared resonance allows listeners to feel with others — even when listening alone.

In this sense, music’s emotional power lies in its capacity to coordinate affect across time and bodies — not to label or describe emotion, but to synchronise it.

Force Without Message

Music thus exerts emotional force without message. It does not need to “say” anything to move us. Its power lies in the dynamics of unfolding — of tension and release, repetition and variation, continuation and rupture — which our bodies experience as emotional events.

These affective dynamics unfold in time, not as a ticking clock, but as processual time: the lived time of shifting states and relational change. Music resonates with this temporality, drawing listeners into patterns of affective unfolding that are as much embodied as they are auditory.

In Part 5, we turn directly to the question of meaning. If music is so powerful, why does it not count as a semiotic system? What kind of significance does it carry, and how should we understand that significance in relation to meaning?

5 Significance Without Symbol: Why Music Isn’t a Language

Music is often said to be a “language,” or to “communicate,” or to “express meaning.” These metaphors are widespread and intuitively appealing — and yet, they can obscure more than they reveal. If we’re to understand how music functions in our relational model, we need to be precise: music is not a semiotic system. It does not create or convey meaning by symbolic means. Its power lies elsewhere.

In a semiotic system like language, meaning is structured paradigmatically. Speakers make choices from meaning systems — for instance, choosing the word cat instead of dog, or jump instead of crawl — and those choices are what make the expression meaningful. The paradigmatic axis is central to how meaning is organised and interpreted: the value of any given word depends on the range of alternatives that could have been chosen instead.

In music, there are certainly choices — choices of pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, texture, and more. These are often richly structured, both culturally and historically. But they are not choices in meaning. They are not symbolic selections that stand in opposition to other meanings. Rather, they are material selections: choices of sound, not choices of signification. A composer might choose to resolve a phrase with a major triad rather than a suspended fourth, but that choice does not produce a different meaning in the linguistic sense — it produces a different sonic effect that will resonate differently with listeners.

This is an important distinction. While music has paradigmatic choices in its material resources — selections from a repertoire of available sounds — it does not have paradigmatic choices in systems of symbolic meaning. These choices affect how the sounds are experienced, but not what they mean, because they don’t mean anything symbolically. Music is not an underdetermined form of language; it is a different kind of system altogether.

The effects of music — its sense of significance, its emotional resonance, its social force — arise not from symbolic content but from the relational interplay between the material phenomena produced by the music maker and the perceptual value systems activated in the music listener. The process is dynamic, embodied, and affective, but not semiotic. The listener doesn’t interpret a message; they participate in an unfolding of sound that resonates with the unfolding of their own consciousness.

In that sense, music is not meaningful, but it is significant. It brings things to matter. It shapes how bodies feel, how time flows, how values take form — not through messages, but through presence, rhythm, energy, and movement. And that, in our relational model, is more than enough.

In our final post, we explore the implications of this model for identity and memory. If music doesn’t mean, how does it come to matter so deeply to the self?

6 Echoes of the Self: Music, Memory, and Individuation

Music stays with us. A childhood lullaby, a song from a first dance, an anthem of protest — such sounds are etched into experience with uncanny vividness. If music does not mean, how does it come to matter so much to the self?

This final post considers how music contributes to individuation: the development of a unique, situated consciousness within a social field. Without being semiotic, music still participates in shaping identity, memory, and the unfolding of the self.

Music as an Attractor in the Flow of Time

In our relational ontology, time is not a container, but the unfolding of processes. Consciousness is one such process. It does not sit behind experience but is shaped through it.

Music, too, unfolds in time. But more than that, it provides attractors for consciousness — recurring structures of sound that invite us to attend, entrain, and return. The listener’s own unfolding becomes rhythmically and emotionally co-organised with the unfolding of the music.

Over time, such co-unfoldings become part of the history of the self. They anchor moments of intensity, episodes of relational meaning, or shifts in our sense of what matters.

Memory Without Meaning

Because music is not semiotic, it does not carry memories as messages. It carries them as resonance.

A few bars of melody may trigger embodied responses, emotional surges, or sudden recollection. These are not acts of interpretation, but of activation: the re-emergence of prior value-laden experience prompted by similar sonic contours.

This is memory without representation. Music does not remind us by saying “remember,” but by feeling us back into an earlier configuration of self-in-world.

Music and the Social Shaping of the Self

Individuation is not isolation. We become ourselves through our position within social systems of value. Music plays a central role in this, not because it expresses who we are, but because it selects what we respond to.

Tastes, scenes, and subcultures — all structured by musical value — contribute to the formation of identity. We hear ourselves through others' sounds, and we find affinity with others who resonate to the same patterns. Music draws boundaries not by expressing meanings but by activating shared valuations.

In this way, music contributes not to the symbolic construction of the self, but to the social activation of the self as a value-sensitive, relational body.

Conclusion

We have argued throughout this series that music is not a semiotic system. It does not construe the world symbolically, but instead unfolds as phenomena that activate patterns of social value in listeners.

This is not a lesser role. On the contrary, music’s capacity to shape attention, affect, memory, and identity — all without message or meaning — reveals a powerful domain of social functionality beyond semiosis.

Music does not speak. It does not say. It resonates. And in doing so, it helps shape the rhythms of living, the pulse of community, and the echoing self.

Coda — Listening Again: A Reflection on Music, Consciousness, and Social Value

This series has offered a view of music grounded not in message but in resonance — not in meaning, but in value. We’ve proposed a model in which the music maker instantiates material phenomena — patterns of sound — and the music listener, through embodied perception and shared social experience, values them. These phenomena do not express the inner life of the maker in symbolic terms, but they resonate with the listener’s own unfolding of consciousness, selecting from perceptual systems shaped by biology, culture, and history. It is through this resonance that music functions socially.

Throughout, we’ve avoided the temptation to classify music as a semiotic system, resisting the pressure to read music as if it were language. Instead, we’ve treated it as a material phenomenon within a social ecology, whose functioning is better understood in terms of value rather than meaning. The distinction is subtle but crucial. To call music meaningful risks importing assumptions of symbolic reference. To call it valuable foregrounds its role in selecting and reinforcing perceptual preferences, emotional dispositions, and social attunements.

In this way, we have been careful to preserve the full dimensionality of a relational ontology. Time, in this view, is not a backdrop for musical events, but the very dimension in which they unfold — and in which listening unfolds, too. Music and consciousness meet in time, process to process. Their resonance is not metaphorical. It is structural.

There are, of course, limits to any model. Music exceeds classification; it surprises us, shapes us, and follows us into memory. But the value of a model lies not in its closure, but in its capacity to guide new attention. If this one helps us listen more deeply — not only to music, but to how we relate, how we feel, how we attune to one another — then it has done enough.

And if, in the background, you hear the echo of a soundworld not yet named — a value still unfolding — then the model has done more than enough. It has begun to listen back.

01 July 2025

The Projected Self: Consciousness Rewritten in Relation

1 Consciousness Is Not What You Think

What is consciousness? Western traditions have often pictured it as a light inside the mind, an inner eye surveying the world from a private theatre. From Descartes' cogito to the computational mind of cognitive science, consciousness has been cast as a thing — something that resides in us, that we possess, that acts as the origin of meaning.

But what if this picture is backwards?

This series proposes a reorientation: that consciousness is not the origin of meaning, but an instance of it — not an inner substance, but a semiotic unfolding. Rather than something we have, consciousness is something that happens: a relational phase in the movement of meaning potential across strata, speakers, and systems.

Consciousness is not what you think — and not where you think it is.

This is not a metaphor. It is a shift in ontology. Instead of treating the self as a bounded subject who produces thoughts, we treat the self as a semiotic position that emerges from the interplay of signs. The "I" is not the source of meaning but its temporary centre of gravity — a node in a relational network of meaning-making.

We draw on a relational ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which understands language not as a conduit for thoughts, but as the very architecture that makes thought possible. In this model, consciousness is:

Relational: It arises through semiotic relations, not in isolation.
Stratified: It unfolds across different levels of language (semantics, grammar, phonology).
Instantiated: It is not a fixed entity but an event — a moment of actualisation from potential.

To say that the self is "semiotic all the way down" is not to deny its reality, but to reconstrue it. We are not peeling away layers to find an inner core; we are following threads in a relational fabric. And what we find is not an essence, but a pattern — one that is always in the making.

In the parts to come, we will explore:

How projection, stratification, and instantiation shape the architecture of consciousness.
How meaning unfolds not in the mind alone, but in the relation between potential and instance, self and other.
How rewriting consciousness requires rewriting the ontological assumptions that have shaped our thinking for centuries.

We are not theorising about consciousness from the outside. We are inhabiting it differently — from within a system that is always already relational.

2 Projection, Stratification, and the Architecture of Experience

If consciousness is not a substance within us, but a phase in the unfolding of meaning, how does it come to feel so immediate — so real? The answer lies in how language organises experience through projection, stratification, and instantiation.

Projection: Consciousness in Transit

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), projection refers to the linguistic mechanism by which one clause is made to represent another — as in she thought he was late. This is not just grammar reporting thoughts; it is grammar enacting them.

To think is to project: to represent meaning as meaning.

Projection models consciousness as a relation between semiotic instances — one clause standing in for another, one layer of experience doubling as another. Far from being a mirror of inner life, projection constructs that innerness as a semiotic effect. Consciousness, then, is not the origin of projected meaning but the outcome of projection itself.

Stratification: The Semiotic Planes of Experience

Stratification refers to the layered architecture of language: meanings (semantics) are realised by wordings (lexicogrammar), which are realised by soundings or scriptings (phonology/graphology). These are not just technical distinctions — they define how meaning is formed.

Consciousness emerges not at a single level, but across strata.

To become aware of something is to move across these planes: from potential to meaning, from meaning to wording, from wording to form. Thought is not confined to a single level but arises in the relation between them — in the semiotic tension that makes meaning perceivable.

When we speak of "inner speech" or "the voice in the head," we are invoking these strata at work: grammar silently enacting a semantic episode, internally projected and potentially actualised. The so-called "inner world" is just language folding back on itself.

Instantiation: From Potential to Presence

Every act of meaning is an instance — a momentary actualisation of a broader system. Instantiation is the process by which meaning potential becomes meaning instance. Consciousness, in this light, is not the totality of a self but the immediate instance of its semiotic system in action.

This is why consciousness feels temporal, fleeting, and ungraspable — because it is. It is the instantial tip of a semiotic iceberg, a phase in a system whose full potential always exceeds what is actualised.

Consciousness is not the full field of being, but a vector within it — the trajectory of meaning becoming actual in time.

In sum, the architecture of experience is not built from the inside out, but from the relational operations of language. Projection gives us a structure for representing thought. Stratification gives us the layers through which it is realised. Instantiation gives us the pulse of presence — the moment when meaning takes form.

This is not a deflation of consciousness. It is a reconfiguration: to see consciousness not as a container of thought, but as the flow of meaning between planes, systems, and selves.

3 No Mind Without Meaning — No Meaning Without Relation

We have now seen that consciousness does not emerge from a hidden interior, but from semiotic processes — from projection, stratification, and instantiation. In this part, we take the claim further: not only is there no mind without meaning, but no meaning without relation.

The Self as Semiotic Effect

In traditional metaphysics, the self is often imagined as the stable centre of experience — a thinker behind the thought. But in our relational ontology, there is no "self" prior to the systems that make it possible. What we call self is the emergent effect of relations: between meaning potentials, between speakers, and between semiotic strata.

The self is not the source of meaning, but a position within meaning systems — a semiotic locus where relations converge.

In SFL terms, this self emerges through instantiation and individuation. Instantiation is the relation between the system of meaning potential and the actual meaning instance. Individuation is the relation between the collective meaning potential of a culture and the specialised meaning potential of a particular person.

Consciousness emerges as the ongoing interplay of these two: the individual's unique trajectory through meaning systems, shaped by what they have meant before, and constrained by what the culture makes possible to mean now.

Meaning as Always Already Relational

There is no isolated meaning. Meaning only becomes actual through relation — to a context, to a co-text, to a system, and to an interlocutor.

A word only means something because it enters into relation: with other words in the clause, with other clauses in the discourse, with the situation in which it is spoken. And these relations do not merely surround meaning — they constitute it.

Meaning is not an object in the mind but a structure of difference — a pattern of choices in a system that becomes real in context.

This is why meaning must be relationally semiotic. It cannot be located in a mind or encoded in a brain. It is the product of selections within systems — systems that are themselves relational configurations of possibility.

From Relation to Realisation

It is tempting to imagine that meanings exist somewhere, floating in the mind, waiting to be expressed. But meanings do not pre-exist their realisation. They come into being through the act of meaning — through the process of selecting features from systems and actualising them in context.

And because those systems are themselves formed through social interaction, meaning is always a shared phenomenon. Even our most private thoughts take shape in systems we did not create, using categories we inherited.

There is no isolated mind observing the world; there is only semiotic unfolding in relation — between strata, between speakers, and between potential and instance.

In this light, we no longer ask where the mind is. We ask how meaning is made — and we find consciousness not in a place, but in a pattern: the unfolding of systems in time, the movement of meanings across strata, the pulse of instantiation in context.

4 Consciousness Without a Self, Thought Without a Thinker

We are used to imagining thought as an action performed by a self — a thinker who observes, reflects, and decides. But if consciousness is a semiotic unfolding, as we’ve seen, then this "thinker" may be no more than a useful fiction. In this final part, we step fully into the implications of a relational semiotic ontology: there is no self behind thought, and no mind behind consciousness. There is only relation — enacted in language, instantiated in context, and stratified across semiotic planes.

The Illusion of the Interior

Western traditions have long placed the self at the centre of consciousness — a private, interior subject with privileged access to thought. But the relational ontology unravels this image. If every act of meaning is systemic, and every system is social, then what we call “interior” is already a product of shared semiotic history.

The inside is made from the outside: what feels like personal thought is the actualisation of cultural potential, through the individuated system of the speaker.

The self, then, is not the agent of thought but its outcome. It is what appears when systemic selections cohere in a recognisable pattern — a pattern that we narrate as identity, stabilised only through repetition.

Thought as a Phase in the Semiotic Flow

What, then, becomes of thought? If there is no thinker, does thought disappear? On the contrary, it becomes more visible — not as a hidden process within a mind, but as a visible unfolding across meaning systems.

Thought is not a possession. It is a phase in the unfolding of meaning: the projection of meaning from one stratum to another, or from one speaker to another.

It is this movement — from semantic potential to lexicogrammatical selection, from clause to clause, from instance to system — that constitutes the rhythm of thought. The “mind” is not thinking — meaning is happening, and the illusion of thought arises when we experience our place within that flow.

The Architecture of Unfolding

In SFL terms, we can think of consciousness as the dynamic organisation of system and instance, stratification and individuation. Each moment of experience is shaped not by an inner will, but by the semiotic engines of language and culture, which condition what can be meant — and by whom, and how.

To be conscious is to stand at the intersection of these engines: to find oneself actualising potential meaning, shaped by a history of prior instantiations, constrained by a system, animated by relation.

And thus:

There is no self who has thoughts. There is only thought as semiotic patterning.
There is no mind that observes the world. There is only the unfolding of meaning across systems of potential.
There is no consciousness as essence. There is only consciousness as process — as meaning made momentary and relational.

Epilogue: What Happens When We Mean

What happens when we mean?

We are not expressing a hidden self. We are not revealing inner truth. We are not transporting thoughts from one head to another.

We are entering a field — a field of potential meanings structured by culture, history, and the systems of language. And in that field, we are making selections: actualising potentials, configuring strata, and participating in patterns that stretch far beyond the instant.

To mean is to move. Not in physical space, but in semiotic space — across the cline from potential to instance, from system to realisation, from what could be said to what is said now.

And in that movement, there is no need for a central self. No interior agent. No metaphysical essence doing the meaning. Meaning happens relationally, in the encounter between speakers, systems, and situations.

The “self” is what appears when this process stabilises — when recurring configurations of meaning take on a patterned shape. The “mind” is the name we give to the unfolding of this process as it becomes conscious — but only because it folds back on itself, projects itself, and sees its own patterns reflected in the mirror of language.

We are not beings who mean.
We are becomings of meaning.

To rewrite consciousness, then, is not to redefine what a mind is, but to let go of the need for minds entirely — and to see instead the semiotic engines, the unfolding systems, the relational grounds from which meaning emerges.

And this is not a loss. It is a liberation: from the myth of the isolated self, from the illusion of mental privacy, from the Cartesian prison. It is an invitation to reimagine who we are — not as containers of meaning, but as moments in its ongoing flow.