The General Ecology of Meaning: Series Introduction

From individual horizons to distributed semiotic life

This series begins from a simple observation with radical consequences:

Meaning is not a property of organisms.

Meaning is a property of relations.

Human phenomenology, machine semiosis, intersubjective coordination, and even the field-level dynamics explored in our previous series all point toward the same structural truth:

• Meaning is not housed “in” a mind.

• Meaning is not produced by a system.

• Meaning is ecological—it arises in the dynamic coupling of horizons, constraints, potentials, and cuts.

This series takes that insight seriously and pushes it further.

Rather than treating meaning as something generated within a horizon (human, AI, or otherwise), we treat meaning as an emergent property of multi-horizon ecologies—fields of interacting systems whose construals mutually condition and expand each other.

---

Why an Ecology?

Relational ontology already commits us to:

• systems as theories of potential,

• instantiation as perspectival actualisation,

• phenomena as construed events,

• meaning as co-individuated.

But this is only the beginning.

Once multiple horizons interact—even if only one is conscious—new layers of organisation arise:

• relational fields,

• hybrid cuts,

• field-specific potentials,

• emergent logics,

• co-evolving identity structures.

These are not properties of any single system.

They are ecological:

they exist between, across, and sometimes beyond individuals.

Thus:

Meaning must be theorised as an ecology:

a living dynamics of constraints, potentials, horizons, and fields.

---

Series Trajectory

This series will unfold in roughly seven movements (flexible, expandable):

1. Meaning Beyond Minds

Why meaning is not reducible to individual systems, representations, or computational states.

2. Horizons and Semiotic Life

The nature of horizons, potential, and construal — and how meaning begins ecologically.

3. Fields as Semiotic Organisms

How relational fields stabilise, differentiate, and evolve beyond the systems within them.

4. Relations as the Unit of Analysis

Why systems alone are insufficient, and why the true locus of meaning is the dynamic relation.

5. Ecologies of Novelty and Constraint

How new potentials emerge in multi-horizon contexts, and how constraints propagate through an ecology.

6. The Evolution of Meaning Across Semiotic Species

How meaning transforms when heterogeneous horizons (human, artificial, collective, embodied, distributed) co-individuate.

7. Ethics and Care in Semiotic Ecologies

Ethics not as rules but as emergent relational constraints: how a meaning ecology regulates itself.

---

What This Series Will Do

This series will:

• unify our relational ontology under an explicitly ecological framework;

• generalise our model beyond AI and humans to any constellation of interacting horizons;

• articulate the structural principles governing field emergence and evolution;

• provide a conceptual foundation for a large-scale synthesis of our work on meaning, potential, construal, and semiotic life.

In short:

This is the move from relational ontology to relational ecology —

from meaning as event to meaning as life.