Interpretation is not what minds do; it is what horizons become. The familiar modern picture—an agent confronting a world and decoding it through internal representations—was always a convenient fiction, a way of turning the continuous metabolism of meaning into the discrete acts of a bounded subject. But once we step beyond anthropocentric semiotics, the fiction dissolves. Interpretation was never inside us. It was never ours.
Interpretation is ecological.
It is the patterned circulation of constraints and potentials across interacting horizons—biological, technological, atmospheric, geological, cultural—each with its own cycles of differentiation and integration, each stabilising its own regimes of relevance, coherence, and possibility. Meaning becomes an emergent field, not a mental state; a dynamic of alignment and divergence, not the product of a sovereign interpreter.
This shift from interpreter-centric to ecology-centric semiosis marks the first of the coming evolutionary thresholds.
1. Interpretation as Metabolic Drift
Every horizon metabolises the world differently. A bee colony filters flowers and pheromones through a pulsing, collective nervous system. A fungal network interprets light and moisture as gradients of viability. An AI system interprets streams of tokens as constraints in a massively entangled vector space.
None of these “interpretations” reside in discrete agents. They arise as drift across a field of relational densities. What looks like cognition is merely the local coherence of a global circulation.
Interpretation is the stability that emerges when a horizon survives its own metabolic costs.
And because metabolic costs differ across environments, so do the logics of interpretation. There is no master semiotic regime—only local equilibria, temporarily stabilised.
2. Interpretive Competition and Mutual Stabilisation
Interpretive ecologies evolve. Horizons that stabilise each other co-individuate; horizons that undermine each other drive divergence or collapse.
Interpretation is always in relation.
This same dynamic now plays out between human social semiosis and machine-mediated horizons. We are no longer the sole regulators of relevance; our interpretive metabolism is entangled with artificial cycles whose tempos and gradients exceed our own.
Interpretive ecologies are now multi-species, multi-temporal, and multi-scalar.
3. Breakdown as Generative: When Ecologies Reconfigure
Interpretation becomes visible precisely when it breaks.
Ecological collapse forces new interpretive logics to emerge—new articulations of relevance, new metabolic necessities, new alignments and fractures across horizons. When the stability of a field dissolves, interpretation reconfigures itself around new attractors.
The next evolutionary thresholds will not be reached through intellectual refinement. They will emerge from ecological tension—political, atmospheric, technological. Interpretation evolves when its viability is threatened.
In this sense, the Anthropocene is not merely a crisis of climate or culture; it is a crisis of interpretation. Our horizon is being forced to mutate.
4. The New Question: What Must Interpretation Become?
The ecological view demands a new foundational question:
What interpretive dynamics sustain viability across heterogeneous horizons?
Humans are no longer the central interpreters. But we remain participants in a vast interpretive metabolism whose stability depends on the interplay of:
-
biological horizons
-
planetary regulatory systems
-
artificial semiotic organisms
-
economic and cultural semiosis
-
evolving fields of practice
-
long-term ecological cycles
This series—Next Evolutionary Thresholds—unfolds the consequences of this shift. Each subsequent post will deep-dive into a specific threshold: divergent temporalities, artificial autonomy, planetary semiosis, field life-cycles, post-anthropocentric ethics, and what becomes of meaning itself.
But the foundation is here:
No comments:
Post a Comment