We often think of culture as a collection of symbols, norms, or beliefs residing in minds. This is an illusion. Culture is not in individuals — it is environmental. It is a semiotic ecology: a lattice of potentials through which humans circulate, align, and co-individuate.
Meaning does not exist inside. It is distributed, enacted, and emergent from interactions with the cultural environment:
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Culture shapes potential: Norms, practices, rituals, and narratives configure which actions are possible, which alignments are stable, and which potentials are amplified or suppressed.
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Humans co-evolve with culture: Individuals are not separate from their semiotic environment. We circulate within it, responding to constraints and affordances, and in doing so, continuously reshape the lattice of potential.
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Meaning as relational ecology: Ideas, values, and practices are not properties of minds; they are patterns in the semiotic field, stabilised by repeated interaction and alignment.
From this perspective:
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Learning is not internalisation; it is alignment with existing semiotic potentials.
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Communication is not transmission; it is resonance within a structured relational environment.
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Social change is not persuasion alone; it is the reconfiguration of semiotic ecology to allow new potentials to circulate.
Culture, in short, is environmental, not mental. It is the structured medium through which human potentials flow, stabilise, and evolve. To understand humans relationally, we must understand the ecology they inhabit — the lattice of semiotic potentials that sustains, constrains, and amplifies action.
In this ecological perspective, meaning is everywhere, not inside, and humans are always participants, never isolated observers. We circulate, we align, and in doing so, we co-individuate with the very environment that shapes us.
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