Semiotic Engines: Reconstructing the Architecture of Thought

1 A World Not of Things, But of Relations

We are used to imagining thought as something that occurs in the mind, as though it were a substance held within a vessel. But what if thought is not a substance at all? What if it is not even located in the mind? This series proposes a radical shift: to reconceive thought as a semiotic process, emergent not from brain matter alone, but from the relational architecture of meaning itself.

Our goal is not simply to describe how we think, but to reconstruct what thought is by attending to its semiotic conditions. And we begin with a foundational claim:

Thought is not a thing; it is a relation.

More precisely, thought is a phase in the actualisation of meaning potential. It is not the expression of a private interiority, but the dynamic interplay of signs across semiotic strata. The architecture of thought, then, is not built from neurons or ideas as such, but from semiotic relations: between system and instance, between speaker and situation, between what is potential and what becomes actualised.

In the history of philosophy, thought has often been framed in representational terms: as the mind's picture of the world. Even attempts to move beyond this framing, such as process philosophy or embodied cognition, often retain a substrate ontology beneath the process: there is still a "thing" doing the thinking.

Our relational ontology inverts this. It does not seek to ground thought in a substance or self, but in the structured potential of meaning systems. What we call "mind" is itself an emergent configuration of systemic relations. What we call "consciousness" is the instantial unfolding of those relations in context.

This is why we invoke the metaphor of the semiotic engine: not as a machine that produces thought, but as a dynamic system in which thought is a function of semiotic movement.

In the parts that follow, we will:

• Unpack how SFL's clines of instantiation and individuation can reframe cognition.

• Show how grammatical structures, far from merely expressing thought, enact its architecture.

• Reinterpret common metaphysical categories (like mind, reason, or will) as frozen instances of semiotic processes.

We are not building a theory of thought; we are revealing that thought is itself a theory, made real in language.

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2 Systems, Potentials, and the Machinery of Meaning

To understand thought as relational, we must start with how meaning itself is structured in a relational ontology. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers two crucial dimensions: instantiation and individuation.

Instantiation: From Potential to Instance

Every semiotic system is a structured potential for meaning. When we say something, we are not pulling meanings from an interior storehouse. We are actualising features of this system in relation to the situation. This process is instantiation.

An instance of meaning (a clause, a thought, a gesture) is not an isolated unit. It is a realisation of a selection from the system — a semantic act in context. Over time, repeated instantiations contribute to the shaping of what is likely to be instantiated again, subtly altering the system’s probabilistic architecture.

Thought, from this view, is never purely internal. A “private” idea is still a patterned semiotic act — a clause projected mentally, say — and it draws on shared systems. Even our most personal reflections are thus instantiations of culturally distributed meaning potential.

Individuation: From Shared Potential to Personal Repertoire

But people are not just passive reproducers of a collective system. As we engage in meaning-making across contexts, we develop a unique constellation of semiotic potential — a personal meaning repertoire. This is individuation.

Individuation is not the inheritance of a fixed set of categories. It is the ongoing relational differentiation of meaning potential within the field of culture. Our idiolects, personal styles, values, and habitual ways of meaning are shaped through social interaction — through the meanings we have access to, those we repeatedly instantiate, and those that are reinforced or marginalised.

In relational ontology, a self is not a bounded substance. It is an emergent pattern of individuation — a history of selections, variations, and resonances within a semiotic ecology. Where instantiation unfolds across situations, individuation unfolds across persons. Together, they make up the dynamic architecture of semiosis.

Thus, what we call "thought" is an instance of a system, enacted by an individuated repertoire, in a context of meaning relations. No mind is private. No idea is freestanding. All are phases in the ongoing, relational actualisation of meaning.

3 Grammar as Infrastructure

If thought is a function of semiotic movement, then grammar is not merely its expression — it is its infrastructure.

We often imagine grammar as a set of rules we follow to communicate ideas already formed in the mind. But from a relational perspective, this gets the process backwards. Grammar does not represent prior thought; it enacts thought, making it possible by organising meaning into form.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), grammar is not a code for translating ideas into language. It is the resource for meaning-making itself — a system of choices that configures experience into meaning. It does so not by labelling a pre-given world, but by constructing a world of relations: who does what to whom, when, how, why, and under what conditions.

Grammar is not a mirror of reality; it is a relational engine for construing it.

Consider the clause. In SFL, the clause is not a container for information but a configuration of functional roles: Processes, Participants, and Circumstances. These are not labels for ontological entities, but roles within a semiotic relation — relations that construct rather than reflect reality.

In this view, what we call a “thought” is an instance of clause structure being enacted. A mental clause nexus like “I believe it will rain” is not a window into an interior belief system. It is a grammatical construal that projects one clause (it will rain) through another (I believe), staging a relation between speaker, modality, and proposition. The very idea of belief is grammatical before it is psychological.

Grammatical metaphor extends this infrastructure further. Nominalisations like “freedom” or “consciousness” repackage processes as things, enabling us to build abstract domains — science, law, theology — atop reified semiotic relations. In doing so, grammar doesn’t just shape what we can say. It shapes what we can think.

The architecture of thought is grammatical — not because language limits thought, but because language enables it by providing the scaffolding of relations.

This is not to say that all thought is linguistic. But even non-verbal meaning — gesture, image — is structured semiotically. And in humans, it is language that makes thought reflexive: able to turn on itself, build models of itself, and evolve into theory.

So when we ask, “What is thought made of?” — we might answer: it is made of grammar, understood not as syntax, but as relational structure. Grammar is the infrastructure of the semiotic engine. It does not decorate cognition; it constructs it.

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4 Reifying the Ghost — Mind, Will, and the Metaphysics of Meaning

If grammar is the infrastructure of thought, then metaphysics is what happens when we mistake that infrastructure for the world itself.

Western metaphysics is haunted by ghosts of its own making: mind, will, soul, consciousness — all reified abstractions, lifted from grammar and mistaken for substances. This isn’t merely a philosophical misstep; it’s a semiotic phenomenon. Our language doesn’t just enable us to construe these entities — it invites us to treat relations as things.

How? Through the grammatical process known as ideational grammatical metaphor: reconfiguring processes and relations as nominal entities. “I decide” becomes “my decision”; “I know” becomes “my knowledge.” This nominalisation enables abstraction, but it also obscures the relational nature of meaning. It reifies the process, freezing movement into object.

The “mind” is not a thing that thinks; it is the name we give to a pattern of semiotic activity construed grammatically as an entity.

This is not to deny experience. But when we say “I have a mind” or “my will is strong,” we are invoking metaphors with long histories of grammatical reification. The subject (“I”) is construed as possessor of an object (“mind,” “will”), as though selfhood were a container for inner things. In SFL terms, this is a relational clause construing an attributive relation — but mistaken for an ontological truth.

Here, the relational ontology offers a crucial corrective: there are no inner substances waiting to be accessed or explained. There are only semiotic processes unfolding in relation — across strata (from semantics to grammar to sound) and across instances (from social potential to individual expression). “Consciousness” is not a metaphysical constant but an instantial emergence: the unfolding of meaning potential through context.

This has powerful consequences for how we understand personhood, freedom, responsibility. If there is no ghost in the machine — no inner homunculus piloting thought — then what we call “will” is not an inner force but a socially instantiated pattern of meaning-making. And what we call “self” is not a metaphysical substance but a semiotic individuation, always becoming in relation.

We do not think because we have minds. We think because we inhabit — and are inhabited by — systems of meaning.

Rewriting these ghosts doesn’t dispel experience. It deepens it, releasing us from the illusion that meaning lives inside us, and allowing us to see that we live inside meaning.

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Epilogue: Engines That Make Themselves

We began this series with a provocation: What if thought is not something we have, but something we do — or better yet, something that happens through us, as meaning is made actual?

Over four parts, we’ve unfolded a radical proposal: that thought is not a thing in the mind, but a relational actualisation of semiotic potential. Its architecture is not neural or metaphysical, but systemic and stratified — made of grammars, discourses, and contexts that precede and exceed the individual thinker.

To summarise:

• In Part 1, we rejected the substance ontology of thought and replaced it with a relational view: thought as a phase in the unfolding of semiotic systems.

• In Part 2, we explored how the clines of instantiation and individuation (from SFL) model the dynamic movement from potential to instance, and from collective to personal meaning — making thought both systemic and situated.

• In Part 3, we examined grammar as infrastructure, showing how grammar doesn’t merely express thought, but constrains and enables its very form. Grammar is not a mirror of thought but one of its engines.

• In Part 4, we exposed the metaphysical illusions born of grammatical reification — “mind,” “will,” and “self” — and offered a reframing: not inner substances, but semiotic constructs, instantiated in and through language.

So where does this leave us?

With a new kind of engine. Not one that sits in the skull or hides behind the eyes, but a semiotic engine: a self-organising system of meaning, where thought is not produced by us but produced with us — as we move through the systems that move through us.

We are not sovereign minds who deploy language; we are language systems that instantiate thought.

This is not a loss of agency. It is the recovery of a deeper one: not the illusion of control over meaning, but participation in a living system of meaning-making. We do not think in isolation. We instantiate thought in relation — to other speakers, to contexts, to histories, to potentials we did not choose but may yet transform.

In this view, consciousness is not the ghost in the machine. It is the engine that makes itself — not by magic or fiat, but through the patterned actualisation of semiotic potential.

And that is what it means to think:

To enter into relation,

To move across meaning,

To become, moment by moment,

An instance of the possible.

Relational Cosmology: Science, Spirit, and Sense-Making

1 Why Cosmology Must Be Relational

What is the universe?

It sounds like a question of fact, of inventory — as if the universe were a warehouse to be catalogued, a container of things to be explained. This is how most cosmologies — scientific and mythic alike — have tended to proceed. They begin by asking what exists, and then how those things behave. Matter, particles, laws, dimensions. Inheritance. Structure. Force.

But what if this way of questioning already hides an assumption?

The assumption is that reality is made up of things — discrete units that persist in themselves and relate only secondarily. The universe, in this view, is a stage on which separate entities appear and interact.

We propose a different premise:

that relation is not secondary, but primary.

That the universe is not made of things, but of togetherings — processes of co-emergence and mutual becoming.

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The Shift from Substance to Relation

This is not an esoteric metaphysical claim. It arises from the very heart of experience. Nothing arises alone. To see is to be seen. To breathe is to exchange. To think is to inherit language, to dwell in a history of meaning. Even the most basic 'thing' is already a confluence — a knot in a field of relations.

This is true not only experientially, but also physically. Quantum theory, for instance, resists efforts to describe isolated particles; it points us instead to entanglement, to wavefunctions that encode not individual properties but joint potentials. General relativity tells us that space and time are not neutral backdrops, but stretch and contract in response to mass — which is itself a measure of dynamic resistance to relational transformation.

Relation is everywhere — not as a feature, but as a ground.

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Cosmology as a Mode of Life

If this is so, cosmology is not simply the study of what exists, but the study of how things co-exist — how they arise through participation, influence, and transformation. In this sense, cosmology becomes an ethical project: a way of orienting ourselves to a world in which we are always already entangled.

To insist on relational cosmology is to insist that the way we imagine the universe shapes how we live in it.

It makes a difference whether we see the cosmos as cold machinery or as a dance of co-becoming.

It makes a difference whether we think of knowledge as extraction, or as resonance.

It makes a difference whether we imagine matter as inert, or as communicative.

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A Different Question

So the question is not “What is the universe made of?”

The question is:

“What kinds of relationships bring the universe into being?”

We begin here — not with substance, but with resonance; not with inventory, but with encounter. A cosmology not of separation, but of situatedness.

This is not merely a new theory, but a new stance:

to look outward as participants, not spectators;

to sense ourselves as within, not above;

to think, not of what-is, but of becoming-with.

Next, we’ll turn to the story of cosmic origin — the Big Bang — and reimagine it not as an explosion of substance, but as the genesis of relation itself.

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2 Rethinking the Big Bang

The Big Bang is often described as the origin of the universe — a single moment in which everything began. Space and time, energy and matter, all bursting forth from a singularity: infinitesimal, dense, and incomprehensibly hot.

But how should we understand such an “origin”?

What kind of beginning was it?

Most treatments of the Big Bang imagine it as an explosion of stuff — the birth of particles, the unfolding of space, the ticking of time. In this view, the singularity is the seed from which all things expanded, driven by forces and governed by laws.

Yet this framing subtly smuggles in a substance ontology. It imagines existence as composed of separable entities, set in motion by prior causes.

Relational cosmology suggests a different reading:

The Big Bang is not the origin of substance, but the origin of relation.

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From Nothing to With

It makes little sense to ask what existed “before” the Big Bang. Not just because time began then (as physics tells us), but because the very condition for anything at all is not a prior object, but a relational opening.

To say there was a beginning is to say there was a shift — from nothing to with.

Not from void to thing, but from absence of relation to the presence of co-actualisation.

In this light, the early universe is not a crowded furnace of particles, but a fluid interrelation — a wavefunction of possibility, still undifferentiated. Only gradually do determinate structures emerge: matter, charge, spin, space, time.

Each is a stabilised pattern of relating.

The birth of the universe, then, is not a moment in which things were made, but the moment in which making-with became possible.

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Becoming Local, Becoming Tangled

Cosmic evolution is the gradual unfolding of locality — not a decline into disorder, but the differentiation of situated relations.

Gravity does not pull things into existence; it intensifies participation by drawing them into mutual proximity.

Particles do not exist independently, but condense out of fields of relation.

Mass is not a property of an object, but a measure of entanglement with a field.

In this view, evolution is not a story of matter behaving in space and time.

It is a story of space and time themselves becoming textured through relation.

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From Myth to Meaning

Every cosmology is a mythos — not in the sense of a false story, but in the sense of a world-making narrative. The Big Bang, too, is a myth — a way of telling the origin in scientific terms.

Relational cosmology doesn’t deny the Big Bang. It reinterprets it.

It invites us to ask:

What if the true origin is not the first thing, but the first with?

What if what banged was not substance, but the possibility of resonance?

This reorientation does not discard physics.

It deepens it — by situating its abstractions within a story of becoming-with, where relation is not a complication, but the very ground of cosmos.

In the next post, we’ll follow this thread from origin to ontology, and consider what it means to say that reality is composed of relations all the way down.

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3 It’s Relations All the Way Down

We’re used to thinking of reality as built from smaller and smaller things: molecules from atoms, atoms from protons and neutrons, those from quarks. Dig deep enough, and you’ll hit bedrock — the final substance, the irreducible particle.

But what if there’s no bottom?

What if the further down we go, the less we find things, and the more we find relations?

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Abandoning the Bedrock

In physics, particles were once imagined as tiny billiard balls — solid and self-contained. But as theory progressed, this picture became untenable. Electrons have no known size or internal structure. Quarks cannot be isolated. Photons are quantised excitations of fields.

We haven’t uncovered fundamental building blocks.

We’ve uncovered patterns of interaction.

Quantum field theory no longer speaks of particles as things in space, but of fields in relation, where entities emerge as localised expressions of relational dynamics. An electron is not a discrete object so much as a recurrent ripple in a sea of potentiality.

This is not an oddity of quantum physics — it’s a shift in ontology.

The more deeply we examine matter, the more it dissolves into relations.

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Entanglement Is Not an Anomaly

Nowhere is this clearer than in entanglement.

Two particles interact, then fly apart — and yet, their properties remain co-defined. Measure one, and you instantaneously constrain the other. This has been experimentally verified time and again. There is no “hidden information” travelling faster than light.

Entanglement is not a loophole in locality.

It is a window onto relational being.

What we call “particles” are not isolated facts. They are nodes in a network, and the state of any node can only be understood through its entanglements with others.

Reality, then, is not made of things.

Reality is made of co-actualisations.

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From Particles to Participation

This reframe has profound implications. It means that identity is not prior to relation — it is composed through relation.

A quark is not a quark outside the context of a proton.

An organism is not alive outside its ecological mesh.

A person is not a self outside the weave of language, culture, and care.

The ontology of substance gives us a world of inert objects.

The ontology of relation gives us a world of mutually arising processes.

It is not that things relate. It is that relation is what things are.

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There Is No Background

In this light, even space and time lose their status as neutral containers.

Spacetime in general relativity is not a static stage but a dynamic fabric, warped by mass and energy. This warping is not an effect on space — it is space. Time does not flow independently of events — it is the dimension of their unfolding.

Space and time are not where things happen.

They are how relation happens.

There is no background reality that exists independently of interaction.

Everything arises in and through mutual conditioning.

In the next post, we’ll ask how this relational metaphysics reshapes our understanding of physics itself — and how it invites us to read scientific theories not as mirrors of reality, but as maps of meaningful relation.

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4 Physics as Relational Mapping

If reality is not built from things, but from relations, then physics is not the study of objects in space. It is the ongoing attempt to map the patterns of becoming in which objects arise.

This doesn’t mean physics is wrong.

It means we must reconsider what kind of truth it offers.

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Theory as Interface, Not Mirror

Scientific theories are often imagined as mirrors: polished reflections of the world “as it is,” independent of us. But this objectivist fantasy is hard to defend once we appreciate that observation is always interaction, and measurement is always participation.

What we call “data” is not raw reality.

It is a record of our structured engagement.

In this light, theories are not mirrors but interfaces: symbolic systems through which we stabilise our couplings with dynamic processes. They don’t show us what the world is made of. They show us how worlds unfold when enacted through certain practices.

Relativity tells us how spacetime behaves in relation to mass and motion.

Quantum theory tells us how probability collapses in relation to measurement.

Thermodynamics tells us how energy disperses in relation to gradients and constraints.

Every scientific law is a mapping of relation, not an edict of substance.

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Models as Meaningful Constraints

This does not mean all models are equal. Some fit better. Some predict more. But “fit” and “prediction” are not properties of the universe. They are properties of our engaged mappings.

We evaluate models by how well they coordinate our participations.

And we revise them when they fail to do so.

Importantly, a model’s usefulness does not depend on its metaphysical literalness. The Bohr model of the atom — with electrons orbiting like planets — is incorrect. Yet it was crucial in the development of quantum theory. Its power was not in being true, but in being fruitful.

This is the logic of all modelling: we render one domain intelligible in terms of another. This is not distortion — it is analogy in action. Every map is partial. But partiality is what makes navigation possible.

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The Observer Is Always Inside the Frame

If theories are relational interfaces, then who is doing the mapping matters. We are not abstract minds gazing from nowhere. We are embodied participants — organisms within fields of relation, observing from within the world.

This is why every scientific act requires a cut:

What counts as a system? What is environment? What is measured? What is ignored?

Even “objective” observations are made from positions — instrumentally, conceptually, affectively. This does not undermine science. It enriches it — reminding us that what we can know depends on how we relate.

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Relational Truth

Truth, in a relational cosmology, is not correspondence with an independent reality. It is the ongoing adequacy of relation: the fidelity with which our concepts, models, and theories coordinate meaningful participation.

This is not relativism.

It is relational realism.

The world is not whatever we say it is. But neither is it a brute fact waiting to be mirrored. It is an emergent field of co-actualisation, and knowledge is the art of finding stable, generative paths through it.

In the next post, we’ll ask how this view recasts the concept of law in physics — not as universal dictate, but as conditioned regularity within an unfolding dance of relation.

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5 Law as Conditioned Regularity

If the universe is a field of unfolding relations, then the laws of physics cannot be timeless commands imposed upon a mute reality. They must be patterns of regularity that emerge within particular conditions of relation.

A relational cosmology asks us to shift our understanding of law —

from transcendent decree to immanent habit.

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The Myth of Universal Law

Classical physics inherited its model of law from theology:

the universe as a system governed by divine reason, expressed in immutable rules.

But even Newton, despite his genius, assumed a fixed space and absolute time — a passive stage on which God's laws played out. Einstein shattered this view: spacetime is not fixed; it curves, stretches, contracts, depending on the presence and movement of mass and energy.

Quantum mechanics dealt another blow: measurement does not merely reveal what is, but helps bring what is into being. Law, here, is not about universal certainty, but probabilistic regularity, enacted in the context of experimental configuration.

What emerges from these revolutions is a vision of law that is not absolute, but relationally enacted.

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Conditions of Regularity

A law is not a commandment.

It is a pattern of constraint that becomes visible under particular conditions.

For instance, the laws of thermodynamics appear when we describe matter at scale, where individual atomic randomness becomes statistical order. They are not violated in the quantum realm — they simply do not apply in the same way, because the conditions are different.

Likewise, general relativity and quantum field theory describe different regimes, each mapping consistent patterns that hold under certain scales, speeds, and energies. The apparent “incompatibility” between them may not be a contradiction in reality, but a difference in the relational frame.

This means laws are not inscribed into the cosmos like runes on stone.

They are recurrent stabilities — robust enough to guide action,

but not metaphysical absolutes.

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Participation and Stability

The remarkable thing is not that there are laws.

It is that stable patterns emerge at all, in a world of ceaseless becoming.

Why should matter fall predictably, fields oscillate regularly, or particles decay consistently? Not because some legislator set the rules, but because relation itself can self-organise.

Form begets form. Patterns constrain possibilities.

Feedback loops build stability.

In this view, law is an attractor — a basin of relational possibility, sustained by the interplay of systems and constraints. These are not imposed from outside, but generated within the dance of participation.

And what we call "breaking a law" is better seen as entering a new regime: a shift in scale, energy, or context, where different patterns become dominant.

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Law as Lure

Law, then, is not limitation — it is invitation.

It invites coordination. It allows predictability. It creates the conditions for cooperation, construction, and world-making.

In a relational cosmos, law is not what binds the world into compliance.

It is what allows the world to stabilise enough to become.

And perhaps this is its greatest gift: not certainty, but trustworthiness — enough regularity to participate, enough openness to evolve.

In the next post, we’ll explore how such a cosmos supports emergence: how new structures and meanings arise, not by imposing form, but through the creative play of relation itself.

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6 Emergence as the Play of Relation

If laws are stable patterns that arise within particular relational conditions, then emergence is the appearance of new patterns — patterns not predictable from the parts alone.

Emergence is not an add-on to relational cosmology.

It is its pulse and principle.

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From Parts to Patterns

Classical science sought to explain the world by analysing it into parts. But parts, in isolation, do not explain wholes. A pile of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms does not explain the emergence of a living cell. The parts are necessary, but not sufficient.

It is how the parts relate — how they constrain, amplify, stabilise and transform one another — that gives rise to new kinds of being.

Emergence is the moment when relation becomes more-than the sum of its relata.

Not by magic, but by configuration — by the intricate choreography of dependencies, feedbacks, and co-regulations that make the whole a new centre of agency.

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Creativity Without Blueprint

In a relational ontology, emergence is not the unfolding of a fixed plan, nor the outcome of blind chaos. It is patterned novelty — the capacity of relation to surprise.

New structures — atoms, stars, cells, ecosystems, minds, meanings — come into being through thresholds of complexity. But these thresholds are not dictated by universal laws alone. They are negotiated through interaction.

There is no blueprint.

Only generative tension: between constraint and openness, stability and play.

This means emergence is not the exception. It is the rule.

The cosmos is not a clockwork machine with a few anomalies.

It is an ever-evolving network, where novelty is intrinsic to relation itself.

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Nested Worlds

Emergent forms give rise to new domains of relation.

The emergence of life generates new kinds of sensitivity, metabolism, reproduction. The emergence of mind introduces memory, anticipation, and reflection.

Each of these domains is not reducible to the previous one.

Yet each depends on and transforms what came before.

This creates nested ontologies: worlds within worlds, each with its own kinds of relation, its own patterns of lawfulness, its own forms of becoming.

To think relationally is to think through these layers — not erasing their differences, but holding their co-dependence in view.

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Emergence and Ethics

What emerges is not only structure, but meaning.

In each new layer of complexity, the world becomes capable of more — more perception, more expression, more care, more harm. Emergence carries with it the weight of responsibility. To participate in the becoming of a world is to help shape what it makes possible.

In this way, emergence is not only a scientific concept. It is an ethical challenge.

What kinds of worlds are we helping to bring forth?

What configurations do we stabilise, amplify, or suppress?

And how might we participate more wisely in the dance of becoming?

These questions bring us to the final post in the series:

“Cosmos as Kin: Toward a Participatory Metaphysics”

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7 Cosmos as Kin — Toward a Participatory Metaphysics

If the universe is a web of relations,

And emergence is the play of novel forms within it,

Then we are not mere observers of the cosmos —

We are participants in its becoming.

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From Object to Kin

Traditional metaphysics often casts the universe as a collection of discrete objects — inert, separate, knowable “things.”

Relational cosmology invites a radical rethinking:

The cosmos is a community of relations, a kinship network of becoming.

We are not detached subjects peering in;

We are nodes within the cosmic web, entangled and responsive.

This shift changes everything:

Knowledge is not about representing a static world.

It is about engaging with a world in formation.

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Participatory Knowing

Knowing is a dance — a mutual unfolding between knower and known.

Our observations, measurements, and theories do not merely describe the cosmos;

They co-create it.

This participatory knowing dissolves the strict boundary between subject and object, mind and matter, observer and observed.

It calls for humility, curiosity, and openness to the unexpected.

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Ethics of Participation

If we are kin with the cosmos, our actions ripple beyond ourselves.

We co-constitute not only knowledge but worlds.

The relational metaphysics demands ethics of participation:

• To act with awareness of our embeddedness and influence

• To nurture relations that sustain flourishing

• To resist domination and fragmentation that harm the whole

Participation is an ongoing practice — a continual negotiation with the world’s becoming.

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Toward a New Story

This view invites a new story for humanity:

Not masters of nature, but co-creators with it.

Not isolated egos, but interwoven presences.

Not consumers of a fixed resource, but caretakers of a living community.

Relational cosmology opens a space for wonder, responsibility, and transformation.

Temporalities of Meaning: Relational Time and Becoming

1 Time as the Unfolding of Process — A Relational Reframing

In the modern scientific worldview, time is often imagined as a uniform container — a linear continuum in which things happen. Physics treats it as a fourth dimension alongside the three of space, something we move through or are moved by. But from a relational and semiotic perspective, time is not a container. It is not an empty backdrop against which processes unfold. Rather, time is the very dimension of unfolding itself — the relational axis of becoming.

This view reframes time as neither objective nor subjective, but as inherently semiotic. That is, it is a meaning dimension, emerging from and with the processes it organises. A process is not located “in” time; it constitutes time — just as a conversation constitutes meaning through the very act of being spoken.

From this perspective, time is not a fixed sequence, but a dynamic arising:

• It unfolds as processes unfold.

• It becomes through instantiations of potential.

• It is felt in and through consciousness, not as a clockwork metronome, but as the lived rhythm of meaning.

Potential and Instance

In a relational ontology, we distinguish between potential and instance. This is not just a distinction between the general and the particular, but between structured affordance and actualised relation. In temporal terms:

• Potential time is the structure of temporal meaning available to be instantiated.

• Instance time is the actual unfolding of a process — a stretch of becoming that occupies a place on the cline between potential and instance.

For example, the structure of narrative offers culturally shaped potentials for past, present, and future. But these do not exist independently; they are instantiated in texts, in utterances, and in experiences. Narrative time isn’t “in” the story — it is the unfolding of the story itself.

Time and Consciousness

If time is the dimension of unfolding, then consciousness is a process of temporal actualisation. In our neural model — grounded in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection — consciousness is not a substance but a processual selection of patterns. These selections are both temporal and semiotic. They occur over time, but they also constitute time.

Our experiences of flow, delay, anticipation, memory, and repetition are not distortions of objective time — they are the very fabric of meaning-in-becoming. And meaning systems — from language to ritual, from culture to mythology — are the semiotic scaffolds through which such temporal experiences are shaped, shared, and re-actualised.

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Toward a Semiotic Cosmology

In this reframing, we are not placing time “within” the world. Rather, we are locating the world — the world as construed — within time as semiotic unfolding. Time is not an object; it is the temporal dimension of meaning itself. And just as meaning is always relational, always patterned and always instantiated anew, so too is time.

In the posts to follow, we will explore how different meaning systems shape temporal experience, how grammar enacts time through tense and aspect, how subjectivity emerges through temporal orientation, and how social structures and imaginative acts give rise to collective temporalities of memory, anticipation, and transformation.

2 Grammatical Time and the Semiotics of Tense

If time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes, then language is one of the primary ways we organise, construe, and enact that unfolding. Every time we speak or write, we are not merely describing time — we are doing time. Through grammar, we instantiate temporal relations, selectively activating patterns of meaning from our cultural and linguistic meaning potential.

At the heart of this linguistic temporality is tense — a system that locates a process in relation to a speaking event. But tense is not simply a representation of clock time. It is a semiotic resource for positioning experience in relation to the act of meaning itself.

The Grammar of Temporal Relation

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, tense is not a label attached to verbs — it is a system of interpersonal and experiential meaning. It allows speakers to construe events as having happened, happening, or about to happen, always from a particular vantage point.

Tense structures time in three primary ways:

• It positions processes relative to the “now” of the speech event.

• It orders sequences of events or states — establishing before, after, or simultaneous relations.

• It frames meanings of completion, continuation, or anticipation through aspectual choices.

In other words, grammatical time is a relational map of becoming — not a neutral record of when something occurred, but a semiotic act of patterning experience.

Tense as Instantiation of Temporal Potential

Every tense selection — whether present perfect, future progressive, or past simple — is an instantiation of potential temporal meaning. The system of tense offers structured affordances for construing temporality, and speakers activate these selectively and creatively.

In this way, tense is not a representation of time in the physical world. It is a social-semantic technology: a cultural scaffold for making temporal distinctions that matter to us — to our purposes, our stories, and our interactions.

Becoming Through Language

In a relational ontology, meaning is always emerging — always on the move between potential and instance. Tense participates in this motion. It allows us to construe what has become, what is becoming, and what may yet become. And it does this not by referring to external clock-time, but by articulating position within the unfolding of meaning itself.

Grammatical time is thus a form of temporal individuation. Each utterance not only positions events in relation to others — it positions us. It creates a self who remembers, a self who anticipates, a self embedded in a fabric of unfolding meaning.

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Beyond Tense: Time as Social Semiotic

Tense is only one resource among many. Languages also use modality, mood, temporal adverbials, and narrative structure to construe time. These are not just linguistic conventions — they are ways of inhabiting time. In the posts to come, we’ll explore how these patterns shape subjective and collective temporalities — and how time, far from being uniform or objective, is always situated, enacted, and shared.

3 Subjective Time — Consciousness and the Rhythm of Meaning

If grammatical time is a semiotic system for construing temporal relations, then subjective time is the lived dimension in which those meanings unfold. It is the inner rhythm of becoming — the pulse of consciousness as it moves, not through a fixed timeline, but through streams of experience.

In a relational ontology, time does not exist independently of processes. It is the dimension of their unfolding. And conscious processes — mental and verbal — are no exception. When we attend, remember, imagine, or speak, we do so in time. But not in a time that simply “passes.” We do so in a time that is enacted.

The Pulse of Mental Processes

From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, consciousness is not a continuous stream, but a sequence of selections — discrete moments of neuronal integration that form higher-order patterns. Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection shows how neural processes are selected and stabilised through experience. These momentary integrations give rise to what we call attention, memory, and awareness — and each has its own temporal signature.

In this light, subjective time is rhythmic. It pulses with the dynamic recurrence of processes:

• Attention flares and fades.

• Memories surface and retreat.

• Thoughts spiral, stutter, or leap.

Rather than ticking forward like a metronome, time in consciousness is modulated by the patterns of meaning we instantiate.

The Temporalities of Projection

In language, we enact these rhythms through projection — one clause projecting another in mental, verbal, or emotive processes:

• I remember that she left.

• He says it’s raining.

• We believe they’ll return.

Each of these projected structures marks a temporal shift: not from present to past, but from immediate to distanced, from shared to internal, from the outer world to the inner theatre of experience. Here, time is not measured — it is layered.

Becoming Through Conscious Process

What, then, does it mean to become, in the semiotic space of consciousness?

To become is to mean — to actualise potential into instance through attention, reflection, desire, or action. Time, in this view, is not a stage on which we act. It is a trajectory of instantiation — a continual flow from potential experience into actualised meaning.

In this unfolding, the self is not a fixed point. It is a dynamic attractor, stabilised momentarily by recurrent patterns of meaning, memory, and intention. Subjective time is thus the rhythm of this self-organising flow — the way in which becoming is felt, enacted, and known.

4 Collective Time — Cultural Rhythms and Temporal Habitus

If subjective time unfolds in the rhythms of consciousness, then collective time arises in the patterned flows of cultural life. We don’t simply inhabit time — we inherit it. We are inducted into it through practices, rituals, technologies, calendars, and clocks. These are not neutral instruments. They are semiotic artefacts that coordinate shared temporal experience — synchronising bodies, meanings, and social orders.

The Social Construction of Time

Time is not experienced the same way across all cultures or historical periods. It is shaped by collective patterns of meaning:

• Some cultures organise time cyclically, emphasising return and renewal.

• Others emphasise linearity, with beginnings, progress, and ends.

• Still others live by event time, where processes dictate the flow, not the clock.

These orientations are not simply mental. They are encoded in language, myth, ritual, and practice. In this sense, time is a habitus — a relational field of dispositions shaped by the historical and social structures we live within.

Calendars, Rituals, and the Temporalisation of Meaning

A calendar is not merely a tool for marking days — it is a symbolic scaffold for collective becoming. It tells us:

• When to celebrate and mourn.

• When to plant, harvest, or migrate.

• When to pause, reflect, or begin again.

Religious rituals, national holidays, academic semesters, fiscal years — all of these instantiate temporal meanings that organise our lives. They do more than coordinate schedules; they shape our very sense of significance. They synchronise meaning potentials across individuals and groups, creating shared attractor spaces for cultural identity and action.

Time as a Semiotic Field

In this view, time is not a backdrop for culture — it is a product of semiosis. The meanings we give to birth and death, success and failure, youth and old age, all unfold within temporal categories that are learned, enacted, and inherited.

Just as grammar gives us resources to construe temporal relations in language, so cultural systems give us symbolic resources to construe time in life. These systems evolve through the same dynamics of selection and instantiation that shape the brain and the self. In this way, collective time is not imposed from above — it is continually being remade from within.

5 Nonlinear Time — Memory, Recurrence, and the Spiral of Becoming

Not all processes move in straight lines. Many of the most significant rhythms of human life — growth, grief, healing, insight — unfold in nonlinear time. These are not sequences of cause and effect, but recursive patterns of becoming. In a relational ontology, time is not merely duration, but difference unfolding — and that difference does not always follow a clock or a calendar.

Memory as Temporal Recursion

Memory is not a passive recording of what has passed. It is an active semiotic process — a re-instantiation of past meaning within a present context. In remembering, we do not retrieve static events; we re-enter attractor spaces of experience. What returns is not the past itself, but its relevance to the now.

This recursive quality of memory makes time spiral rather than linear. Old meanings are revisited, revised, revoiced. We do not simply move forward — we turn, we double back, we reframe. Personal identity emerges not from continuity alone, but from this dynamic interplay of past potential and present actualisation.

Mythic and Archetypal Time

Cultures also encode nonlinear time through myth. Myth does not recount history in chronological order. It dramatises eternal recurrence — the patterns that shape meaning across generations. These stories are not bound to once-upon-a-time. They are always now — available for re-enactment in ritual, imagination, and dream.

Archetypes, likewise, are not fixed templates but deep attractors in the collective semiotic field. They recur not because they are eternal substances, but because they offer resonant patterns for making sense of experience — especially in times of crisis or transformation.

The Spiral of Becoming

In this view, time is not an arrow, nor a circle, but a spiral: a recursive unfolding in which each turn builds on what came before, without ever returning to the same point. Transformation is possible precisely because meaning does not repeat identically. Even when we revisit old terrain, we do so from a new perspective — a different position in the unfolding relation.

This spiral temporality allows us to see human development, cultural history, even cosmic evolution not as straight progressions but as recursive self-organising systems — where the future emerges through the creative return of the past.

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6: Thresholds of Time — Crisis, Kairos, and Moments of Transformation

Not all moments are created equal. Some shimmer. Some rupture. Some rearrange the whole structure of our becoming. In this post, we explore thresholds of time — liminal moments that defy linear unfolding and mark the emergence of new meaning potentials.

Kairos: Time as Eventfulness

While chronos measures time in quantity — minutes, hours, years — kairos names a different kind of temporality: qualitative time, the right or ripe moment. In a relational ontology, kairos can be understood as a semiotic condensation — a moment when multiple trajectories intersect and a new attractor crystallises.

These are moments when reality feels charged — when the stakes are high, and the next move matters. They may be born of crisis or creativity, suffering or revelation. What makes them threshold moments is not their objective duration, but their transformative potential.

Crisis and Reconfiguration

Crisis literally means "turning point." It is not just a breakdown, but a bifurcation — a moment in which a system becomes unstable enough to shift into a new pattern. In such moments, the attractor landscape of meaning destabilises. Old semiotic patterns no longer hold; new ones are not yet stabilised.

From a relational perspective, this is not collapse but creative disintegration. It is the opening of new possibility — though that opening may be painful, disorienting, or traumatic. Transformation is not guaranteed. But the potential is there.

Rites of Passage and the Ritualisation of Thresholds

Many cultures have recognised the potency of these thresholds and marked them through ritual. Rites of passage frame transitions — birth, adolescence, marriage, death — as semiotic transformations: not just events in time, but reconfigurations of being. They help hold the uncertainty of the in-between, offering symbolic structure for what cannot be managed by chronology alone.

In modern life, we often lack such ritual containers, and so personal thresholds — illnesses, losses, awakenings — may be lived as private chaos. But even in silence, these moments continue to perform their work: to loosen the grip of old forms and open space for the new.

Time at the Edge

Thresholds are temporal edges. They reveal that time is not merely flow but field — patterned, punctuated, marked by intensities. The event is not a dot on a timeline but a relational convergence — a point where multiple potentialities touch down in experience.

To live relationally is to recognise and honour these edges — not to fear the thresholds, but to walk them with awareness, and with care for the meanings that are trying to emerge.

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7 Future-Bearing Time — Anticipation, Intuition, and the Pull of Potential

What if the future is not something “out there” waiting to arrive, but something already active within us — a field of potential that calls us forward? In this final post, we explore how meaning systems not only interpret time but participate in the generation of futures.

The Future as Semiotic Gradient

In a relational-semiotic ontology, the future is not an empty space ahead on a clock. It is a gradient of possibility — structured by the meanings we inherit, the patterns we instantiate, and the trajectories we imagine.

Anticipation is not passive waiting. It is attunement to affordance — the capacity to sense what might become, and to orient meaning-making accordingly. Just as physical systems follow gradients of energy, semiotic systems follow gradients of potential meaning.

This is how the future pulls: not as an external force, but as a relational tension within the attractor landscape of consciousness.

Intuition and the Shape of What Is Coming

Intuition may be one way this tension becomes felt. It is not irrational but pre-rational: the resonance of a not-yet-actualised pattern within our current configuration. Intuition gives form to the vague — an inkling, a hunch, a symbolic dream.

We might say that intuition is the semiotic pressure of the future, registering as embodied sense before it becomes articulated in thought or speech.

From a neuronal perspective, this may be the forward reach of dynamic repertoires. From a linguistic perspective, it is the shaping of future speech by the affordances of past and present meaning. Either way, the future is not separate from the present — it is emergent within it.

Imagination as Temporal Agency

Imagination, in this light, is not a detour from reality but a constitutive act. When we imagine a future, we are not simply picturing it; we are participating in its potential actualisation. We reconfigure attractor landscapes. We shift the probabilities of what will come to pass.

This is why storytelling, art, dreaming, and theorising matter. They are practices of future-making — not in the predictive sense, but in the world-forming sense. Every imagined possibility we take seriously begins to alter the field of what seems possible.

Becoming With the Future

To live with future-bearing time is to be aware that the present is not only a product of the past, but a participant in the future. It is to understand becoming as a process not merely of unfolding but of emergent alignment — tuning ourselves to what wants to happen through us.

In this sense, the future is not fate but field — not fixed endpoint but dynamic invitation.

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And so we conclude this journey into the temporalities of meaning. In the unfolding of relation, time is not a container, but a participant — a rhythm, a threshold, a lure.