The Cognitive Thread recasts mind entirely in relational terms.
It dissolves psychology’s inherited interiority, representation, and mechanism, replacing them with horizon dynamics, metabolic readiness, and actualisation cuts.
Here is the synthesis:
1. Mind as Horizon Ecology
Mind is not an organ, module, or computational system.
Mind is the living system’s strategy for navigating relational potential across nested scales:
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Micro-scale: immediate inclinations and local potentials
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Meso-scale: stabilised clusters of gradients (working memory, short-term coordination)
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Macro-scale: sedimented readiness patterns (long-term memory, learned inclinations)
Cognition is the modulation of horizons across these scales, coordinating attention, emotion, memory, construal, and readiness.
2. Core Functional Recasts
| Traditional Category | Relational Recut |
|---|---|
| Attention | Horizon contraction — controlled collapse of potential for actionable focus |
| Emotion | Metabolic readiness modulation — tuning energy, elasticity, and gradient sensitivity |
| Memory | Horizon-binding — ecological scaffolding of potential, not storage |
| Construal | The actualisation cut — first-order meaning emerging from stabilised potential |
| Intuition / Analysis | Divergent readiness strategies — wide vs narrow horizon management |
Each is not internal, not representational, and not mechanistic.
Each is a relational strategy enacted in the organism–environment nexus.
3. The Relational Mechanics of Cognition
Cognition unfolds as dynamic horizon negotiation:
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Attention narrows and stabilises potential fields.
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Emotion tunes the metabolic landscape, allowing horizons to contract or expand effectively.
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Memory scaffolds potentials across time, preserving actionable gradients.
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Intuition and analysis deploy divergent readiness strategies appropriate to environmental complexity.
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Construal actualises first-order meaning — the phenomenon itself — through the cut.
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Nested scales integrate these dynamics: micro (local action), meso (short-term stabilisation), macro (long-term sedimentation).
All cognition is relational field behaviour, not computation or representation.
4. Why This Matters
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Provides a non-psychologistic, non-representational model of cognition.
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Integrates attention, emotion, memory, construal, intuition, and analysis coherently.
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Situates mind within the ecology of system–environment interaction, consistent with deep-time biological evolution.
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Establishes a direct bridge to semiotic systems, where construal is the pre-symbolic foundation of meaning.
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Offers a scale-invariant framework, applicable to animals, groups, and even cultural structures.
5. The Cognitive Thread in One Sentence
Mind is the nested, multi-scale orchestration of relational potential, modulating horizons, tuning readiness, and actualising phenomena through construal.
This summary completes the Cognitive Thread series.
It presents a fully relational model of mind: attention, emotion, memory, construal, and readiness are ecological strategies, not mental contents or mechanisms.
Mind is not “inside” the organism.
Mind is the horizon itself in motion.
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