2 Life Reconstrued: 6 Thresholds of Meaning: When Value Gives Way to Semiotic Actualisation

Having reconceived the brain as a field of potentialities structured into regimes of readiness, we are now in a position to address a fundamental question: how does semiotic meaning emerge from value-driven relational dynamics?

The answer lies in what we call the semiotic threshold: the point at which relational fields — such as those in complex nervous systems — become sufficiently differentiated and interactively coupled to support symbolic construal.

Below this threshold:

• Neurons, astrocytes, and networks modulate potentials, actualising patterns that maintain viability.

• Actions, perceptions, and responses are value-driven but non-semiotic.

• Meaning is absent; there are no interpretations, codes, or representations.

Above this threshold:

• Relational dynamics are embedded within semiotic systems capable of construal.

• Patterns of neuronal activity, bodily interaction, and environmental coupling become interpretable as signs, symbols, or structured distinctions.

• Semiotic meaning emerges, but it does so at the level of construal, not within the neurons themselves.

This perspective clarifies why human cognition is exceptional: it does not arise from computational processes in neurons, nor from “information encoding.” It emerges from relational fields crossing the semiotic threshold, where the modulation of value can be interpreted, symbolically mapped, and incorporated into higher-order semiotic practice.

The semiotic threshold is not static. It depends on:

• Complexity: Sufficient differentiation and interaction among relational potentials.

• Coupling: Integration of internal and environmental relational fields.

• Constraining structures: Semiotic frameworks — language, cultural practice, memory — that allow actualisation to become interpretable.

By understanding thresholds of meaning, we preserve the distinction central to relational ontology: value is the domain of living regulation; meaning is the domain of semiotic construal. Life is rich in value long before it is capable of generating meaning, and only by respecting this distinction can we describe the emergence of cognition and symbolic systems rigorously.

In the next and final post of this series, we will expand this perspective to evolution, showing how life unfolds not as “progress” or “design” but as the continuous actualisation of relational potential: evolution as the evolution of possibility.