Building on our updated understanding of system, instance, and non-meaning, we now explore how relational phasing scales from individual construals to cognitive networks and collective formations.
1. Language as distributed lantern
Language is not merely a code; it is a distributed system of lanterns:
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Each utterance is a localised instance of meaning, illuminating a portion of potential.
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Words and structures are vectors of affordance, shaping both the immediate construal and the latent horizon of potential meaning.
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Language enables alignment across perspectives, stabilising relational patterns that exceed the scale of any single mind.
In effect, language extends the lanterns of perception into the social field, creating shared light across multiple observers.
2. Cognition as relational phasing
Individual cognition operates through phased interaction with potential meaning:
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Memory acts as pre-lit lanterns, guiding which patterns are likely to stabilise.
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Attention is the local lowering of the lantern, actualising specific affordances.
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Expectation biases potential, shading non-meaning and shaping future illumination.
Thus, cognition is not passive computation but participatory emergence: the field of potential is co-shaped by perception, thought, and action.
3. Collective alignment
When multiple agents engage with overlapping fields of potential:
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Shared lanterns synchronise perception, generating phenomena experienced as “social reality.”
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Collective language, norms, and symbolic systems coordinate affordances, aligning potential and actualising distributed meaning.
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Non-meaning at the social level is the unactualised horizon of collective possibility, continuously modulated by interactions.
Each group, institution, or culture is a constellation of phased meanings — a living topology of relational affordances.
4. Implications for knowledge and social formation
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Experience is co-constitutive: Individual and collective meaning-making are inseparable.
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Potential is multi-scalar: Non-meaning exists both in personal cognition and in distributed social systems.
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Truth is relational: What stabilises as “true” is an effect of coordinated phasing across agents, mediated by language and culture.
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Innovation emerges in the shadows: Non-meaning, as latent affordance, is the source of novelty and transformation.
5. Summary
Relational phasing scales elegantly:
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Individual construal illuminates local patterns.
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Language and cognition expand lanterns into social and cultural fields.
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Collective alignment stabilises phenomena, while non-meaning remains generative.
Meaning, non-meaning, system, and instance are thus co-evolving layers in a relational cosmos: each act of illumination participates in the ontogenesis of both individual understanding and collective reality.
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