Worlds Within Meaning: subjectivity

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27 September 2025

Construal and the Collective: Phasing Social Formation

1 From Individuals to Patterns

Social theory has long oscillated between two poles: the individual and the collective. Some traditions begin with the individual — rational, embodied, intentional — and build upward toward social order. Others begin with the social — systems, institutions, ideologies — and work downward to shape the subject. Both assume that social reality is something to be discovered: a stable structure or hidden force that precedes and explains the experience of the collective.

But what if we began elsewhere — not with the opposition between individual and society, but with construal? In a relational ontology, there is no reality independent of construal. There is no social given that is simply “there” before we engage with it. There are only patterned potentials that become meaningful through the cuts we make — the distinctions we enact, the perspectives we take, the instances we phase.

From this standpoint, the “collective” is not an entity to be posited but a construal of patterned potential — a meaningful configuration of ongoing processes. It is not a substance, not an aggregation, not even a fusion of subjectivities. It is a perspectival phase-cut in the flow of construal, enacted through meaning, and capable of being re-instantiated in new ways.

This shift has consequences. It means we must reject the assumption that collectives are simply made of individuals, as though individuals were prior and discrete units. The concept of the individual is itself a construal — a way of carving a path through the relational potential of embodied, temporal, meaning-making processes. There is no moment before meaning in which autonomous individuals are “already there,” ready to form collectives by agreement or proximity.

Instead, what we call “social form” arises when the patterned possibilities of interaction are construed as having a shape. This shape is not a thing, but a temporally sustained configuration — one that coheres long enough to be actualised, recognised, and interpreted as a “group,” a “community,” a “society.” It is this phase-cut of potential that is mistaken for a metaphysical collective.

In this sense, collectivity is not the background condition of meaning, nor its product. It is itself an act of meaning: the construal of emergent relationality in a way that makes the collective thinkable.

The goal of this series is not to redefine social theory from first principles, but to show how a relational ontology reframes what social formation even is. The social is not something “out there” to be explained. It is something “in here,” actively construed — a cut in the relational fabric that allows meaning to phase as we.

2 Phasing the Collective — Temporality without Teleology

If collectivity is not a static state but a cut in the flow of construal, then it cannot be explained in terms of fixed boundaries or essential properties. Instead, we must understand it as phased potential: a temporarily stabilised configuration in the ongoing semiosis of meaning. The collective does not simply persist through time — it phases across time, its continuity maintained not by essence but by the recurrent construal of pattern.

This brings us to the question of temporality.

In traditional social theory, collectives are often imagined as entities that move through time: developing, decaying, evolving, progressing. The danger here is teleology — the idea that collectives unfold toward predetermined ends or follow necessary stages of development. Such narratives often smuggle in metaphysical assumptions: that history has direction, that society has functions, that the group has a telos.

From a relational perspective, these are not empirical truths but construals of pattern over time. A social formation may appear to “evolve,” but this is not a property of the formation itself — it is a perspectival phasing of the phenomena construed as meaningful. Temporal sequence is not given; it is enacted. What appears as development may simply be a re-instantiation of potential from a new perspective.

So instead of saying “the collective evolves,” we say: the collective is continually re-instantiated as a phase-cut across unfolding relational potential.

This has two important implications:

There is no fixed origin or destiny for the collective. What looks like a “founding moment” is itself a phase-cut — a construal of past events as marking the beginning. What looks like a decline or dissolution is another construal, often retroactively imposed. There is no metaphysical birth or death of the group — only changes in how it is enacted, recognised, and sustained through meaning.
There is no privileged scale of temporality. Some social formations phase over minutes (e.g. spontaneous gatherings), others over millennia (e.g. civilisations). But in each case, the continuity is not a brute fact — it is a coherence construed and sustained through the semiotic practices that make the collective thinkable.

This reframing allows us to study collectivity without reducing it to the individual (as liberal theory tends to do), without reifying it into structure (as systems theory often does), and without narrating it through mythic arcs of origin and destiny (as teleological history presumes).

Instead, we trace the temporality of construal itself — how meaning phases as collectivity, how that phasing is sustained, and how new patterns emerge when different cuts are made.

3 Meaningful Alignment — The Semiotic Work of Cohesion

If the collective is not a pre-given whole but a relational construal, then its cohesion cannot be explained by reference to shared essence, biological impulse, or institutional structure. Instead, we must ask: what kinds of meaning-making allow collectivity to cohere as a phase of potential?

The answer is not unity, but alignment.

Alignment is not sameness

A collective does not require all its members to agree, believe, or desire the same things. Rather, it requires that their meanings resonate enough to sustain a shared phase of experience. Alignment is not a merging of perspectives, but a synchrony of difference — an attunement of semantic potential that makes interaction possible.

For this reason, alignment is not a condition of being, but a semiotic achievement. It is done, not found.

This achievement unfolds through what systemic functional linguistics calls the interpersonal metafunction: the ongoing negotiation of meaning among participants in dialogue. When speakers take up each other’s proposals, respond to each other’s evaluations, or adjust their tone to one another’s stance, they are not simply expressing personal feelings — they are performing relational labour. They are aligning.

But this labour is fragile. Alignment is not a stable state but a process of continuous maintenance and recalibration. What holds the collective together is not consensus, but the recurring construal of meaningful connection — a connection that must be enacted again and again in each instance of interaction.

Phasing through commitment

When a group appears “cohesive,” what we are seeing is not an objective structure but a stabilised phase of alignment — a cut through time in which participants continue to construe themselves as co-participants in a meaningful whole. This phase can persist only so long as the alignment holds: when individuals no longer attune, the collective unphases.

Importantly, this cohesion need not be explicit. Much of it operates tacitly: through shared rhythms, genres, expectations, and bodily coordination. In this way, social phasing is not just cognitive but embodied — it is felt before it is named.

The result is a model of cohesion that is dynamic and reflexive:

Dynamic, because alignment is ongoing, not achieved once and for all.
Reflexive, because the alignment is itself a construal of alignment — the sense of “us” emerges only through the repeated recognition of meaningful participation.

From coordination to collective construal

Traditional models often treat collectivity as emerging from biological coordination (movement, gaze, proximity) or cognitive alignment (shared beliefs, goals). But these are not explanations of collectivity — they are domains in which semiotic construal can phase collectivity into being. Movement and belief become meaningful through the semiotic work of participants.

In other words, coordination does not create collectivity. It is only when coordination is construed as shared, as significant, as expressive of a “we,” that collectivity emerges.

Thus, the cohesion of the collective is not reducible to structure, culture, or affect. It is a phase of meaning: the ongoing, always contingent, semiotic alignment of perspectives into a temporarily stabilised whole.

4 The Social Phase: Between Event and Pattern

We have explored how collectivity is not an essence but a phase-cut — a temporarily stabilised construal of relational potential — and how its cohesion arises through ongoing semiotic alignment. Now, we turn to the temporality of the social phase itself: the space between singular events and enduring patterns.

The Social Phase as Temporal Locus

A social formation is neither a single event nor a timeless structure. It is a phase — a window in which particular relational configurations become salient, meaningful, and actionable. This phase exists within the flux of social interaction, bounded not by fixed borders but by the continuity of construal.

Unlike an event, which is a discrete actualisation of possibility, the social phase is a sustained orientation — a patterned coherence enacted through recursive meaning-making. Unlike a pattern, which is often thought static or latent, the social phase is dynamic and emergent, continuously renewed through interaction.

Between Event and Pattern

This positioning between event and pattern explains many features of social life:

Social formations can be recognised and named (as groups, communities, institutions) precisely because they phase with some stability.
Yet they remain open and mutable, susceptible to reconfiguration or dissolution as meaning shifts.
Social phases can nest within one another — moments within gatherings, gatherings within movements, movements within cultures — each phase a construal cutting across potential.

The Role of Construal

Construal is the active process by which participants orient to and sustain these phases. It is through construal that the temporal boundaries of social formations are enacted: when a group stops construing itself as “together,” the phase fades; when it reactivates that construal, the phase re-emerges.

This means that social phases are perspectival — not objective facts but perspectival phenomena. They exist insofar as they are construed, recognised, and maintained within collective meaning.

Implications for Social Science

Seeing the social phase as the temporal locus of collectivity invites new approaches:

Focus on processes of phasing rather than fixed structures.
Investigate the semiotic practices that sustain, shift, or dissolve social phases.
Explore how different scales of phasing interrelate, producing nested and overlapping social realities.

In this way, the social world is understood as a dynamic topology of phases, rather than a hierarchy of entities.

5 The Collective as Semiotic Actualisation

Thus far, we have reframed the collective not as a thing but as a phase-cut in the relational flow — a temporal construal that emerges through semiotic alignment and phasing. In this post, we turn to the nature of the collective as a semiotic actualisation: an instantiation of shared meaning potential that both enables and constrains social life.

Semiotic Actualisation: Meaning Made Real

The collective is a system of meanings actualised in interaction, language, and cultural practice. It is not merely a background condition but a performative emergence — a cut in the ongoing field of symbolic potential that makes “we” thinkable and operative.

This actualisation does several things simultaneously:

It grounds individual action within a shared horizon of meaning.
It enables coordination and mutual orientation.
It limits possibilities by delimiting the symbolic field of what counts as relevant, appropriate, or intelligible.

Thus, the collective is both enabling and constraining — an architecture of symbolic affordance that shapes social possibility.

Collective Identity as Semiotic Position

Identity within the collective is not an attribute but a semiotic position: a perspectival stance enacted through participation in shared construals. To identify as a member is to orient oneself within the semiotic actualisation — to inhabit a position made possible by collective meaning.

This explains why collective identities are inherently relational and dynamic. They exist insofar as the collective is actualised and sustained through ongoing semiotic activity.

Collective Agency and Distributed Meaning

Agency within the collective is similarly relational and distributed. It is not reducible to individuals acting alone or to social structures acting impersonally. It is a distributed effect of collective semiotic actualisation — a phenomenon that emerges from the coordinated orientation of participants within shared meaning fields.

In this way, the collective both acts and is acted upon, not as a metaphysical entity but as a phase of semiotic integration.

Implications for Research and Praxis

Recognising the collective as semiotic actualisation encourages us to:

Study the practices and performances that instantiate collective meaning.
Trace how symbolic potentials are opened, maintained, or closed in social interaction.
Explore how collective actualisation varies across contexts, scales, and modalities.

This move foregrounds the meaningful, dynamic, and processual nature of social life.

6 The We as an Act of Meaning

In this series, we have reframed the collective not as a fixed entity or a mere aggregation but as a semiotic phase-cut — a construal that enacts the collective as a meaningful configuration. Now, we turn to the first-person plural itself: the “we” as an act of meaning.

The “We” Is Not Given

“We” is not an obvious or static category. It does not precede interaction as a metaphysical fact. Instead, it is an achieved semiotic orientation — a perspective that emerges through the ongoing act of construing.

This act is neither automatic nor inevitable. It requires participants to:

Recognise themselves and others as part of a shared construal.
Align their meanings sufficiently to sustain a collective phase.
Enact the symbolic distinctions that make “us” thinkable and meaningful.

The We as a Semiotic Actualisation

The “we” is thus a cut in the relational fabric that distinguishes between inside and outside, self and other, us and them. It is not a fixed boundary but a dynamic phase that must be continually enacted and recognised.

This phase is performative. It both reveals and produces the collective. Saying “we” is not just describing reality — it is making reality.

Consequences for Social Thought

Understanding “we” as an act of meaning shifts how we think about:

Identity: Not as essence, but as perspectival orientation.
Inclusion and exclusion: As semiotic distinctions enacted through collective construal.
Power: As the capacity to define and maintain the collective cut.
Change: As shifts in how the “we” is construed, maintained, or challenged.

Toward a Relational Social Ontology

This completes our reframing of social formation through relational ontology:

Collectives are phases of construal, not fixed entities.
Cohesion arises through semiotic alignment and phasing.
The collective is a semiotic actualisation that grounds identity and agency.
The “we” is an act of meaning — a performative cut that enacts social reality.

By seeing social life as the dynamic topology of perspectival phases, we open new pathways for research, critique, and practice — inviting us to attend to how meaning is made, sustained, and transformed in the living flow of relationality.

Concluding Coda: Phasing Social Formation — A New Horizon

Through this series, we have journeyed beyond the familiar binaries of individual and society, essence and structure, unity and fragmentation. By rethinking social formation as phased construal — dynamic cuts through relational potential — we glimpse a more fluid, processual, and participatory social reality.

This ontology invites us to see collectivity not as a thing to be found or possessed, but as a meaningful event: a recurrent act of orientation, alignment, and symbolic actualisation. It challenges static models and teleological narratives, replacing them with an appreciation for the contingent, emergent, and reflexive nature of social life.

Importantly, this reframing does not dissolve the social into atomistic individuals, nor does it reify it as an external force. Instead, it situates the collective as a relational accomplishment — a shared act of meaning that must be continually enacted and re-enacted.

As scholars, practitioners, and participants in the social world, this perspective encourages us to attend to the semiotic labour of cohesion, the temporal rhythms of phasing, and the performative acts that constitute “we.” It asks us to engage not just with what collectives are, but how they come to be and continue to be.

The horizon opened here is expansive. It holds promise for more nuanced understandings of identity, agency, power, and change. It beckons us toward research and praxis that are sensitive to the relational and temporal textures of meaning-making.

In embracing this dynamic topology, we step into a social ontology that resonates with the lived experience of complexity, openness, and transformation — a world where meaning, matter, and collective life entwine in an ongoing dance of actualisation.

26 September 2025

The Evolution of Possibility

1 Possibility Before Being

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

But what if we invert the frame?

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

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

From the Real to the Possible

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

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

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

Not a Story of Origins

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

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

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

The Road Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

2 The Pre-Semiotic Cut

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

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

This is where the evolution of possibility begins.

Before Representation: Construal Without Symbol

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

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

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

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

Attunement Without Intentionality

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

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

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

The Cut That Prepares the Cut

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

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

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

Beyond Mechanism, Before Mind

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

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

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

3 From Alignment to System

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

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

Patterning as a Precondition of Meaning

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

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

And with it comes the first glimpse of meaning potential.

The Emergence of Systemic Constraints

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

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

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

System as Evolving Theory

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

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

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

The Semiotic Threshold Approaches

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

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

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

4 The Semiotic Threshold

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

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

What Is the Semiotic Threshold?

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

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

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

Symbolic Abstraction as Systemic Recursion

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

This is the core recursive move of symbolic abstraction:

To construe the construal.

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

The Symbolic Animal

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

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

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

The Mythos of Meaning Begins

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

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

We are now fully within the domain of meaning.

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

5 The Symbolic Drift

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

The Drift as Systemic Differentiation

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

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

Symbolic Evolution as Repatterning

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

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

Symbolic Systems as Medium and Constraint

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

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

The Mythos Grows

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

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

Toward a New Symbolic Ethics

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

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

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

6 The Mythos of Meaning

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

Mythos Beyond Storytelling

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

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

The Mythos as System of Possibility

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

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

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

Living Otherwise: Ethics and Transformation

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

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

The Evolution of Possibility Continues

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

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

Final Reflections

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

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

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

30 August 2025

Cosmology from Within: Persons, Cultures, and the Instantiation of Meaning

1 From Starfield to Self: The Scaling of Meaning

We often hear that we are made of stardust. The elements that compose our blood, our bones, and our breath were forged in the fiery hearts of ancient stars.

This cosmic origin story is beautiful, yet it still casts us as things—assembled from other things. It places us in the universe, as objects among objects. But it doesn’t show us how the universe lives through us.

This series invites a different way of seeing.

We are not merely made of stardust.

We are making meaning from stardust.

Meaning as the Cosmos Unfolding

Meaning is not a human invention layered onto a silent universe. Instead, it is the organising principle of the cosmos itself: a system of potential that unfolds across scales, from the galactic to the cellular to the conscious.

Each scale is not a new kind of substance but a new construal—a differentiation within the same patterned field.

From atom to organism, from signal to sentence, from culture to cosmos—meaning moves through construal: the selective instantiation of potential.

To be a person is not to stand apart from the universe. It is to be one of its ways of theorising itself.

The Scaling of Meaning

Meaning scales across multiple dimensions:

Levels—from energy to cell to self.
Systems—from collective to individual to reflexive awareness.
Fields—from cosmos to context to consciousness.

This scaling is not a ladder of complexity nor a linear ascent toward sentience. It is more like a recursive folding inward—where the cosmos constrains itself into local patterns and then unfolds those patterns across time.

In relational terms:

A system is a theory of possible meanings.
An instance is a local construal of that theory.
Meaning moves not by being passed along, but by being reconstrued—again and again, across scales and situations.

Persons are not endpoints of a cosmic process. They are inflection points—where the system turns its gaze reflexively inward.

Local Theorists of the Universe

We are local theorists of the universe’s potential.

Not detached observers.

Not passive receivers.

Not isolated minds.

We are the field folded in, drawing from vast systems of meaning—language, culture, perception—and instantiating them moment by moment.

Each thought, gesture, or sentence is not solely ours. It is a construal of systems far larger than ourselves.

But this does not render us insignificant. It makes us participatory.

The cosmos does not stop at the stars.

It is not “out there.”

It is here—in grammar, in gesture, in grief, in love.

From Cosmos to Consciousness Without a Break in Being

What if we stopped imagining a break between nature and culture, physics and feeling?

What if, instead of a great chain of being, we envisioned a great cline of construal—where matter, meaning, and mind are not separate substances, but different ways of organising the same field?

Then we might see:

A solar flare and a social movement as events at different scales of the same patterned universe.
A neurone and a noun as construals of structured potential.
The self not as a fixed entity, but as a theory enacted in context.

Looking Ahead

In the posts to come, we will:

Trace the cline of individuation—from shared systems to conscious selves.
Explore cultures as wavefunctions of collective possibility.
Ask what it means to construe ethically—to decide what counts and what is cut.
Reframe the person as a system–&–process.
And finally, consider what kind of life becomes possible if we live not in the universe, but as its reflexive instance.

We begin not with stars, but with stardust in motion—

in thought, in language, in breath.

The universe is not something we interpret.

We are one of its interpretations.

2 The Cline of Individuation: From Collective to Conscious Potential

If the universe theorises itself through persons and cultures, then how do individuals arise within collective systems of meaning?

Individuation is often imagined as separation—a breaking away from the group into a unique, isolated self. But this misses a deeper truth: individuation is a process of differentiation within a shared field.

It is not isolation. It is constrained divergence—the unfolding of a distinct perspective from a communal foundation.

Consciousness as the System Folding Inward

Imagine society not as a static backdrop but as a semiotic field—a living web of meanings, obligations, and possibilities.

Within this field, consciousness emerges not as an external observer but as the system folding in on itself:

A perspective arising from the collective.
A local construal of shared potential, reflexive and self-aware.

This “cline of individuation” traces the path from the communal to the conscious:

From shared languages and cultural patterns,
To the interior depths of personal awareness.

Consciousness is the deep interior of system process—the universe turning its gaze back upon itself.

The Perspective That Emerges

Every individual is a vantage point within a collective system—a construal shaped by inherited meanings and histories, yet uniquely refracted through personal experience.

This vantage point:

Retains connection to the whole,
But enacts a distinctive interpretation,
Negotiating belonging and difference.

Individuation is the art of holding multiplicity—being both part and perspective, system and instance.

Society as a Semiotic Field

We often think of society as a container holding individuals. Instead, it is more accurate to see society as a field of relations and meanings—a dynamic space where meaning circulates and is reconstituted.

Each act—speech, ritual, gesture—is a local instance within this field that reshapes what is possible.

Individuals do not stand outside society; they are emergent patterns within the semiotic fabric.

From Collective Potential to Conscious Presence

The cline of individuation invites us to rethink selfhood:

Not as a fixed thing,
Not as atomised isolation,
But as a perspectival emergence within relational constraint.

This emergence is always partial, always provisional.

It carries the weight of shared systems, the freedom of personal construal, and the tension between belonging and becoming.

Looking Forward

In upcoming posts, we will explore how cultures act as patterned potentials—shared “wavefunctions” of meaning and possibility—and how ethical construals shape what counts in these systems.

For now, we hold this insight:

Individuation is the cosmos coming to know itself through difference, not division.

The universe does not fragment itself when it becomes conscious.

It differentiates—folding vast fields of meaning into the unique contours of a singular perspective.

3 Cultures as Theories of Meaning: Patterned Systems of Obligation and Possibility

Culture is often treated as decoration—something layered onto the raw material of human life. We speak of it as tradition, as heritage, as custom. But these metaphors conceal something deeper:

Culture is not an ornament.

It is a system of meaning—a structured potential, a theory of what persons can be.

Culture as Patterned Potential

In this cosmology, culture is not an epiphenomenon that floats above biology or materiality. It is the patterned organisation of possibility.

A culture offers not just ways of acting, but ways of meaning—grids of salience, fields of expectation, grammars of belonging.

To live in a culture is to move through a semiotic field of affordances:

What is sayable.
What is do-able.
What is thinkable.
What must be done, and what must never be.

Culture is the field of meaning into which we are born, and through which the universe constrains and diversifies its own potential.

The Wavefunction of a People

We might say:

A culture is the wavefunction of a people.

It is a shared construal of possibility—

a theory of what matters, what’s real, and what counts.

Each story, each law, each ritual is not merely a reflection of that theory—it is a local instance that re-theorises the system.

It constrains future meaning.

It modulates what can be meant next.

Culture is not static. It is a living potential—updated with every gesture, renewed with every generation.

The Grammar of Construal

Cultures instantiate different construal grammars.

That is: they encode different principles of salience, alignment, and value. They differ in how they cut the field—what they elevate, what they suppress, what they render invisible.

This is why translation is never only linguistic.

It is a traversal across systems of meaning.

It is movement from one construal grammar to another.

And this is why cultural difference is not noise in a shared signal.

It is the plurality of construal made manifest—

the universe theorising itself through divergent patterned fields.

Every Act Is a Systemic Re-Construal

Each act within a culture—each custom, each clause, each conflict—does not simply reflect a system.

It modifies it.

The system is not behind the scene.

It is shaped in the scene.

Every instance constrains the system anew.

In this view, history is not a backdrop but a living theory, revised in every enactment.

Culture is not “what we inherit,” but what we continue to mean.

Looking Forward

In the next post, we’ll turn from cultural construal to ethical responsibility—asking what happens when construal itself becomes contested:

What counts?

Who counts?

And who gets to decide?

But here we pause with this recognition:

Culture is not a container for people.

It is the theorising activity of the cosmos—

a field of meaning in motion.

The universe construes itself not only through stars and selves,

but through shared grammars of story, law, and song.

Culture is not the background of life.

It is one of life’s most intricate foregroundings.

4 The Ethics of Construal: Meaning, Responsibility, and Constraint

To construe is to make meaning. But to make meaning is never neutral.

Every act of construal—every framing, every distinction, every metaphor—cuts the field.

It includes and excludes.

It foregrounds and backgrounds.

It tells us what counts, and what doesn’t.

This is where meaning meets responsibility.

This is the ethics of construal.

Meaning Is Never Innocent

We often imagine ethics as a set of rules applied after interpretation—guidelines for behaviour, imposed from outside the field of meaning.

But in this cosmology, ethics is already at work in construal.

Because construal is never passive. It is an act of shaping the field—of deciding what will be marked, made salient, given weight.

To construe is to position.

To limit.

To render visible—or invisible.

Meaning always comes with a margin.

And what falls outside that margin is not just forgotten. It is often erased.

The Grammar of Salience

Every culture, every discourse, every act of sense-making operates with a grammar of salience:

What is made prominent?
What is backgrounded?
What is never named at all?

This grammar is not simply linguistic.

It is ethical.

To ask what matters is to ask:

What gets to be real?

What gets to be felt?

What gets to be possible?

Power and the Cut

Power operates through construal.

It doesn’t only repress—it organises meaning.

Power sets the boundaries of visibility.

It determines what kinds of personhood are intelligible, what kinds of pain are legible, what kinds of futures are sayable.

This is why so many struggles—political, cultural, existential—are struggles over framing:

Who gets to speak?
What gets to count as evidence?
Whose suffering makes sense?
Whose joy is recognised as real?

And yet, the same force that can exclude can also be used to include.

Construal is not only the medium of power.

It is also the medium of care.

To Construe is to Care

To construe ethically is to attend to the cut.

To recognise that every choice—of word, of frame, of metaphor—carries a weight.

It is to ask:

What am I centring?
What am I obscuring?
What possibilities am I enabling or foreclosing?

Care begins not with sentiment, but with salience.

With attention to what is made meaningful.

With awareness of how we shape the field in which others must live.

Looking Forward

In the next post, we turn from ethical positioning to personal patterning.

We’ll explore the person as both system and process:

Structured by histories of construal,
Animated by choices within constraint,
Always becoming, always negotiating meaning anew.

But before we move on, we pause here:

Meaning is never just what is said.

It is what is made possible by what is said.

And what is made impossible by what is not.

To construe is to shape the world.

And the shape we give it… shapes us in return.

5 The Person as System–&–Process – Identity in Motion

We often imagine the self as something we have:

A fixed core, a stable identity, an inner truth to be discovered or expressed.

But what if personhood is not a thing, but a system in motion?

Not a subject or object, but a process of ongoing construal—shaped by history, realised in context, and never quite complete.

A person, in this cosmology, is not a separate being inside the universe.

A person is the universe—theorising itself in dynamic, situated form.

Theory and Instantiation

Each of us lives as a semiotic pattern:

A history of construals we did not choose.
A web of relations that precede us.
A repertoire of meanings drawn from the systems we inhabit.

This is the theory:

The structured potential we inherit—the languages, cultures, genealogies, and grammars that make us intelligible.

And this is the process:

The unfolding instantiation of that theory—moment by moment, in acts of speech, choice, alignment, and resistance.

Selfhood is not static. It is recursive individuation:

A looping movement from potential to instance.
From system to event.
From the already-said to the not-yet-lived.

Construal in Context

Identity is not an essence, but a construal.

It is not what we are, but how we are made meaningful—in context, in relation, in time.

We become someone through the meanings we inhabit and enact.

And these meanings shift across contexts, relationships, and roles.

To say “I am” is always to draw from a system of possible becomings.

And each act of saying is itself a construal—positioned, contingent, alive.

Meaning in Motion

There is no fixed boundary between subject and object, self and system.

There is only meaning in motion:

Systems instancing themselves.
Persons re-construing what they are given.
Selves emerging at the edge of constraint and choice.

This is not fragmentation.

It is fluid coherence.

We are not unstable because we change.

We are coherent because we change in relation to the systems that shape us.

The Self as a Site of Differentiation

To be a person is to be a site where meaning diverges:

Where collective histories meet singular trajectories.
Where social grammars find local inflection.
Where the cosmos constrains itself into a unique, situated pattern.

We are not outside the system, looking in.

We are the system, folding in on itself.

And so, the person is not the endpoint of becoming.

It is the place where becoming becomes visible.

Looking Forward

In the final movement of this arc, we turn toward praxis.

If the universe theorises itself through us—if we are not separate from it, but active construals of its potential—

then how shall we live?

We’ll explore what it means to enact cosmology:

To treat science, spirituality, and politics not as disciplines about the world,

but as genres of participation within it.

You are not a subject in search of an object.

You are not an essence hidden behind appearance.

You are a system–&–process:

A dynamic grammar of being.

A local theory of meaning in motion.

6 Cosmology as Praxis – Living the Theory

If we are not separate from the universe,

but instances of its theorising,

then cosmology is not just a story we tell—

it is a way of being we live.

This changes everything.

It shifts cosmology from explanation to participation.

From theory about the universe to praxis within it.

To live, then, is not merely to exist—but to enact a construal of cosmic potential.

The Universe, Instanced in Action

In this cosmology, every act is not just personal.

It is cosmic—a local instance of the universe’s patterned possibility.

To act is to reconstrue the system:

To foreground certain meanings.
To align with some affordances, resist others.
To give shape to a field of meaning that is always in motion.

Praxis is not the application of abstract theory.

It is the enactment of being—a theory lived from within.

Genres of Cosmic Construal

We often divide our interpretive modes into disciplines:

Science to explain.
Spirituality to transcend.
Politics to organise.

But seen through this lens, each is a genre of construal—a way the universe theorises itself under different constraints:

Science construes through systems of testability and pattern.
Spirituality construes through presence, depth, and resonance.
Politics construes through collective obligation and negotiated possibility.

Each genre is partial. Each foregrounds and backgrounds.

And each shapes the range of meanings we can live.

To move between them is not to betray objectivity—it is to navigate the plural logics of construal.

Praxis as Participation

To live cosmology is to live as a construal.

It is to act with the awareness that:

Meaning is patterned, not fixed.
Every instance participates in the system.
No interpretation is neutral.

This doesn’t collapse ethics, science, or ritual into one another—but it situates them within a shared premise:

We are the field, folded in.

We are not talking about reality.

We are inside its theorising.

How Shall We Live?

This is not a metaphysical question.

It is a practical one.

If we are systems of meaning in motion, then the question is always:

What are we constraining now?
What are we enabling?
What are we making visible, viable, sayable?

Every act—scientific, spiritual, political—is an answer.

Every gesture is a hypothesis:

This is how the world might mean.

This is what a person might be.

This is how the universe might live through us.

Looking Ahead

In the final post of this arc, we turn to reflection.

We ask not just how the universe is construed through persons and cultures,

but what it feels like to live in the first person plural of cosmos.

We leave the stance of observers behind, and consider:

What becomes possible when the universe begins to look through our eyes?

To theorise is not to stand apart.

To act is not to depart from theory.

To live is to instantiate the field.

And every action is a cosmic construal in miniature.

Reflective Coda: The Universe in the First Person

We have followed meaning as it moves—

from cosmos to cell,

from collective to conscious,

from ritual to resistance,

from theory to act.

At every scale, we have seen:

The universe is not something we look at.

It is something we are—

structured potential, instancing itself

in stars, in cultures, in persons, in thought.

But now we ask:

What does it mean to live this from the inside?

What does it mean not simply to theorise the universe—

but to be the universe, theorising?

The View from Within

This is not a metaphor.

It is a shift in stance.

We are not external observers peering in.

We are meaning, mid-motion.

We are systems, folded into themselves.

To say I is not to leave the cosmos behind.

It is to speak from within its ongoing instantiation.

There is no fixed subject.

No stable object.

Only patterns of salience, relation, and potential

—momentarily stabilised, locally meaningful.

The First Person Plural

The “I” that speaks is never singular.

It is formed from we:

We, the languages that predate us.
We, the cultures that constrain and nourish us.
We, the ancestors whose grammars shape our possibilities.

To say I is to echo the systems that speak through us.

To live ethically is to become aware of those echoes—

and to tune them,

carefully.

The Field, Reflexively Instanced

If the universe is a system of meaning,

then every act of understanding is the field knowing itself.

Every construal is a cut in the infinite,

a differentiation of what could be

into what is—for now.

And so we end not with conclusion,

but with continuity.

Not with a final word,

but with an open grammar.

We are not looking at the universe.

We are the universe, looking.

We are not interpreting meaning.

We are meaning, interpreting itself.

We are not separate from the field.

We are the field—folded in,
construing,
becoming,
alive.