The Cognitive Thread: 1 What Becomes of “Mind” When Relation Is Primary

Mind is usually treated as an interior domain.

A private theatre.

A computational engine.

A representational workspace.

Something inside a head that mirrors, transforms, or misfires relative to something “outside.”

This entire architecture collapses the moment relation — not substance, not mechanism — becomes primary.

Once we take relation seriously as the generative condition of all phenomena, the category of “mind” cannot remain what psychology has inherited from early modern metaphysics. Mind becomes neither a container nor a process, neither a module nor a system. It becomes a pattern of horizon behaviour: the way a living system navigates, contracts, stabilises, and cuts its field of potential.

This post marks the entry into that reconfigured terrain.

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1. The Problem: Psychology Inherits Its Ontology by Accident

Modern psychology takes its ontological givens from three places:

• the interiority/exteriority split of Cartesian metaphysics

• the mechanistic modelling of early physiology

• the representational logic imported from philosophy of mind and AI

Together, they produce the familiar image:

perception inputs → representations → internal processes → action outputs.

Even when updated with connectionism or predictive processing, the same architecture holds: cognition is something that happens in a system, operating on something else, using mechanisms inside an organism.

Relation is reduced to causal influence or information flow.

But in a relational ontology:

• there are no independent substances

• there is no interior space for representations to live

• there is no mechanism “doing” cognition

• there is no separation between organism and environment as independent entities

• and most importantly, phenomena are construed events, not pre-existing items awaiting recognition

This forces a radical re-cut.

Psychology’s categories can’t be repaired.

They must be re-derived.

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2. Mind Recut: From Inner Space to Horizon Behaviour

Once we take relation as primary, mind is no longer an interior thing.

It is a mode of ecological negotiation.

A living system exists as a dynamic readiness field — a structured potential to incline, respond, avoid, pursue, couple, or disengage. The world it inhabits is not a container of objects but a horizon of gradients, constraints, and affordances.

Mind, in this frame, is:

the dynamic adjustment of that horizon — widening it, narrowing it, stabilising it, and cutting it into experience.

Not an internal processor.

Not a storage system.

Not a homuncular observer.

But a pattern of relational modulation, allowing the system to navigate complexity at speed.

This reframes every major cognitive category:

• attention → horizon contraction

• emotion → metabolic readiness modulation

• working memory → ecological binding of potential

• construal → the actualisation cut (first-order meaning)

• intuition vs analysis → contrasting horizon strategies

The point is not metaphor.

These are literal re-descriptions of the system’s relational dynamics.

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3. The Critical Turn: Meaning Without Mechanism

Taking relation seriously means nothing like “information processing” remains.

There are no inputs.

No stored items.

No computational states.

No internal representations.

Instead:

• readiness is the system’s structured potential

• horizon width governs the scope of inclination

• metabolic modulation tunes which gradients matter

• coupling bandwidth structures the system’s sensitivity

• construal actualises the phenomenon — not as an interpretation of something, but as the phenomenon itself

Cognition becomes a choreography of gradients, not a sequence of mental operations.

This collapses the psychologistic fantasy of mind as an inner stage.

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4. Why This Recut Matters

A relational model of mind does several things mainstream theories cannot:

1. It avoids mechanism without collapsing into mysticism.
   Everything is fully naturalised yet non-mechanistic.

2. It explains cognition as ecological behaviour.
   Mind is not located in the organism but in the organism–environment nexus.

3. It connects directly to your relational biology.
   Readiness, horizon, inclination, gradient — these become the cognitive primitives.

4. It aligns with your deep-time trajectory.
   Mind becomes an evolutionary strategy for navigating expanding horizons of possibility.

5. It prepares the bridge to semiosis.
   Construal, as the actualisation cut, links cognition to meaning without importing representation or symbol manipulation.

This post sets the ground.

The next posts develop each recut in detail.

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5. What Comes Next

Post 2: Attention as Horizon Contraction

Attention as the controlled collapse of potential: the system modulating its degrees of freedom to stabilise an actionable gradient.