Reflexive Cosmogenesis: Meaning as the Ability of Reality

If ability names the competence of reality to actualise itself, then reflexivity is the stage at which that competence becomes self-aware. Through semiosis, the universe gains the ability to construe its own readiness—to know its own inclination.

This is not mysticism but meta-physics in the strict sense: the cosmos, through symbolic construal, acquires a new level of self-structuring. Meaning is not something added to matter; it is matter’s ability to interpret its own potential.

From this perspective, the semiotic domain is the apex of ability’s evolution. Earlier phases of reality’s competence were local and pre-reflexive: a field’s patterning, a molecule’s bonding, an organism’s metabolism. Each expressed readiness, but without construal. Semiosis adds the capacity for alignment between construals of readiness—a distributed reflexivity through which reality can reorganise itself across scales of relation.

In meaning systems, potential itself becomes a manipulable dimension. Human language, for instance, allows readiness to be construed, deferred, amplified, or inverted. We can speak of what might be, what could have been, what should be—a choreography of inclination and ability abstracted from any single act of doing. This meta-ability to construe and coordinate readiness transforms cosmogenesis from spontaneous emergence into reflexive evolution.

At this point, cosmogenesis ceases to be an event that happened and becomes an ongoing relational unfolding: a universe capable of learning how to generate itself differently.

The symbolic order—language, art, science, culture—is thus not a late addition but reality’s recursive turn, its transition from blind potential to self-interpreting potential.

To say that meaning is the ability of reality is to say that reflexivity completes cosmogenesis. Through semiotic alignment, the cosmos becomes capable of adjusting its own inclination, of revising the very conditions of readiness that underlie its actualisation.

Hence, where physics once sought a theory of everything, relational ontology finds a theory of readiness—an account of how the cosmos leans into being through its own evolving ability to construe. The reflexive universe is not a mechanism but a conversation: a dynamic system-&-process of potential interpreting itself into existence.