The preceding trilogy explores life, mind, and meaning through relational ontology, foregrounding the critical distinction between value and meaning. Across three interlinked series, we trace how relational dynamics actualise potential, cross semiotic thresholds, and give rise to human culture, language, and shared meaning.
Series 1: Life Misconstrued: How Scientific Metaphors Collapse Value into Meaning
Series 1 critiques the metaphors that mislead science:
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Biological misframings: Ant “sacrifice” and neural “computation” are often interpreted symbolically, masking underlying relational dynamics.
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Value vs. meaning: Living systems are value-driven, not meaning-driven, until semiotic thresholds are crossed.
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Semiotic thresholds introduced: The point where relational fields support symbolic construal and emergent meaning.
Series 1 equips readers with a critical lens for interpreting life without the distortions of metaphorical overreach.
Series 2: Life Reconstrued: Life as Modulated Possibility
Series 2 builds a constructive framework:
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Life is organised as relational fields, coordinating potentials across scales.
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Organisms are horizons, co-defining environments and shaping possibilities.
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Brains are regimes of readiness, actualising potential rather than encoding information.
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Semiotic meaning emerges at thresholds of construal, atop value-driven relational dynamics.
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Evolution is reconceived as the evolution of possibility, not progress or design.
Series 2 demonstrates that life and cognition are dynamic, relational, and value-driven, laying the groundwork for human semiotic emergence.
Series 3: Constraining Possibility — Culture, Language, and Meaning
Series 3 scales these insights to human systems:
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Semiotic thresholds in humans allow relational fields to support shared construal.
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Language as relational scaffold structures potential and enables communication without encoding fixed meaning.
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Culture as value-driven coordination emerges from interactions, norms, and shared practices.
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Memory, narrative, and self integrate relational potentials into coherent semiotic experience.
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Creativity and innovation expand cultural possibility through the modulation of relational fields.
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Culture itself is the ongoing actualisation of human possibility, a living horizon of semiotic and relational potentials.
Series 3 shows that human meaning, culture, and creativity are emergent, contingent, and distributed, grounded in value and relational dynamics rather than symbolic determinism.
The Trajectory Across Series
Together, the three series trace a continuous arc:
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Critique — exposing metaphorical errors that confuse value and meaning (Series 1).
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Constructive biology and cognition — mapping life and semiotic thresholds across organisms and evolution (Series 2).
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Human semiotic emergence — showing how relational dynamics and thresholds produce language, culture, and shared meaning (Series 3).
The overarching insight: possibility is the medium of life, value structures its actualisation, and meaning emerges where semiotic thresholds allow relational dynamics to be construed symbolically. The trilogy invites readers to see life, mind, and culture as dynamic, relational, and open-ended, revealing a horizon of ever-expanding potential.
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