To speak of experience as a sense of possibility is to displace consciousness from its traditional position as an interior observer of the world. Experience is not a private domain in which appearances are registered; it is a field of relation through which the potential of the world becomes perceptible. The sense of possibility, in this light, names the capacity of a relational system to orient within a horizon of potential — to differentiate, couple, and actualise across the shifting gradients of its own becoming.
From Interiority to Relational Field
Modern conceptions of mind often presuppose an epistemic divide: a subject perceiving an external world. Yet such a division cannot account for the precondition of experience — that perception and world must already stand in relation. Within a relational ontology, consciousness is not an observer but a medium of coupling. Experience emerges where potentials interact, stabilising neither as pure object nor pure subject but as a dynamic interface between them. The experiential field is thus the local expression of a more general relational becoming: the inflection of potential into perceptibility.
The Ecology of Sense-Making
If experience is relational, then cognition must be understood ecologically. A cognitive ecology is the system of reciprocal constraints through which an organism, a social formation, or a symbolic network differentiates the possible. Within this ecology, perception, affect, and action are not sequential steps but interwoven modulations of the same field. The sense of possibility arises where these modulations cohere — where the system’s attunement to its own affordances makes further affordance visible. In this sense, consciousness is not self-contained awareness but the continual recalibration of relevance within an environment of potential.
Experiential Mediation and Semiotic Coupling
The experiential field is also semiotic: it mediates between material, affective, and symbolic orders. Every act of sensing is simultaneously an act of construal, translating flux into form. Meaning, then, is not superimposed upon perception but co-emergent with it. The symbolic capacities of language and culture expand this semiotic field, allowing collectives to sustain and transform their horizons of potential. Through symbolic mediation, experience gains temporal and reflexive depth — it can remember, anticipate, and reconfigure its own relational conditions.
The Dynamics of Potential and Actualisation
Experience is not the record of what is but the ongoing differentiation of what may be. Each perceptual act resolves indeterminacy in one direction while leaving other potentials latent within the field. Attention, affect, and memory operate as modulatory forces, shaping the topology of relevance from which the next construal will emerge. In this way, the sense of possibility is both the generator and the residue of actualisation — the trace of potentials that remain unactualised but still condition what can follow.
Toward a Relational Phenomenology
To reconceive experience as a relational field is to move toward a phenomenology of becoming. The experiential field is neither static nor solipsistic; it is the medium through which potential differentiates into perception and perception feeds back into potential. Consciousness, in this view, is not a substance but a rhythm — the patterned self-modulation of a relational system. The sense of possibility is that rhythm’s reflexive moment: when the field becomes aware of its own openness, and the possible begins to sense itself as possible.
Modulatory voices:
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Merleau-Ponty: perception as the intertwining of body and world.
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Gibson: affordances as relational invitations.
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Varela: enactive cognition as co-emergence of agent and environment.
The next post, “Attention and the Aperture of Potential,” will trace how focus, selection, and attunement structure this relational field, shaping which potentials are foregrounded or left latent within experience.
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