1 Life Misconstrued: 6 The Semiotic Threshold: Where Value Gives Way to Meaning

So far in this series, we have explored ants, astrocytes, and neurons, tracing the recurrent error of imposing semiotic metaphors on systems that only regulate value. We have clarified the distinction: value is the modulation of relational potential to sustain viability; meaning is the construal that arises in semiotic systems.

But what about the transition? How does a world of pure value, full of coordinated, self-regulating dynamics, give rise to semiotic meaning? This is what we call the semiotic threshold: the point at which relational dynamics are sufficiently complex, differentiated, and interactively coupled to support the emergence of symbolic construal.

The semiotic threshold is not a property of individual cells, nodes, or molecules. It is an emergent property of the system, arising when relational potentials are arranged such that a perspective capable of symbolic differentiation can actualise meaning. A simple bacterial colony, an ant nest, or a brain operating in isolation does not cross this threshold — it regulates value without generating semiotic distinctions.

When a system crosses this threshold, a new mode of actualisation becomes possible:

• Differentiation: Elements of the system can be distinguished in ways that are meaningful to a construal-capable agent.

• Construal: Relations among elements are interpreted, rather than merely realised.

• Symbolic potential: Patterns are not merely stabilised; they are mapped onto a semiotic framework that supports abstraction, generalisation, and projection.

Consider the human brain as it participates in language. Neurons, astrocytes, and synapses remain value-modulating entities. They do not encode meaning. But when their dynamics are coupled to semiotic structures — speech, writing, cultural practice — they become the substrate through which meaning is actualised, not the origin of meaning itself.

The semiotic threshold reframes what neuroscience often misdescribes as “representation” or “information processing.” Meaning does not descend from the firing of neurons or the modulation of astrocytes; it emerges at the interface between complex relational fields and a semiotic agent capable of construal. Below this threshold, there is only value: coordination, modulation, regulation. Above it, meaning becomes possible.

Recognising the semiotic threshold allows us to preserve the distinction between life as relational potential and life as semiotic construal. It allows us to read ants without attributing altruism, astrocytes without ascribing computation, and neurons without inventing codes. It also clarifies where meaning actually resides: not in the material substrate, but in the systems capable of symbolic differentiation.

In the final post of this series, we will reflect on why science journalism and research so often misfires, exploring the broader consequences of collapsing value into meaning, and proposing a disciplined approach to describing life as it truly is — a field of relational potentials, orchestrating possibility, awaiting the semiotic cut.