1 Life Misconstrued: 5 Value Without Meaning: How Living Systems Orient Without Interpreting

We have followed ants, astrocytes, and neurons through a series of metaphorical traps: chemical perturbations cast as “communication,” glial modulation recast as “computation,” firing patterns mistaken for “information.” What unites these errors is the same ontological slippage: the conflation of value and meaning.

Relational ontology demands a corrective. Biological systems regulate value; they do not construe meaning. The distinction is subtle but profound:

• Value is what living systems do to maintain themselves, preserve systemic viability, and navigate the space of potentialities. It is relational, dynamic, and non-symbolic.

• Meaning is the semiotic process of construal: the selection, differentiation, and symbolic mapping that only occurs in systems capable of semiotic activity.

Consider the ant pupae again. Their chemical perturbation does not “signal altruism.” It is a shift in the local relational field that reorganises the colony’s behavioural potentials. Workers act, not because they interpret a message, but because the system’s value-dynamics have altered the landscape of possibility.

Or consider astrocytes. Their modulation of synaptic conditions is often described as “shaping computation.” In reality, it is the dynamic adjustment of thresholds and potentials: value-regulation without symbolic content. Neurons firing in response to these modulations are actualising patterns of potential, not transmitting encoded information.

What looks like intention, signalling, computation, or representation is simply the emergent coordination of value across a distributed system. By imposing semiotic metaphors onto these dynamics, we misread what is happening and risk constructing an entire field of pseudo-explanation.

Recognising value without meaning has several consequences:

1. Clarity in explanation – We describe what living systems actually do, rather than what our metaphors want them to do.

2. Correct scale of analysis – Individuals are perspectival instantiations of system potentials, not autonomous meaning-makers.

3. Discipline of metaphor – Metaphors become conscious analytic tools, not ontological assumptions.

4. Preservation of meaning – Semiotic systems retain their distinctiveness; meaning is rare, emergent, and not conflated with regulation.

The lesson is simple: stop reading messages where there are only modulations; stop seeing computation where there is only coordination. Life is not a communication network, a computer, or a moral agent. It is a field of relational potentials continuously modulating itself, a living lattice of value that, when coupled with semiotic organisms, makes meaning possible.

In the next post, we will examine the semiotic threshold: the point at which value gives way to actual meaning, where relational dynamics are sufficiently complex to support construal, and how this threshold clarifies the rare emergence of symbolic systems amid the vast field of life’s value-regulated activity.