Saturday, 13 December 2025

Toward a Mythos of Meaning: Concluding Summary: From Semiotic Event to the Becoming of Possibility

Over the past eight posts, we have traced a continuous thread from the relational ground of semiosis through symbolic horizons, semiotic evolution, and the mythic turn, culminating in the becoming of possibility. This summary situates the arc as a single, coherent argument: semiotic life is self-propagating relationality, and meaning is the generative site of possibility.


1. The Semiotic Event (Posts 1–2)

  • Relational Ground of Semiosis: Meaning is symbolic value, arising from relational potential, not biological or social utility.

  • Construal as Semiotic Event: A semiotic event is the perspectival cut that stabilises potential, producing first-order meaning.

  • Key insight: Meaning is not computation, information, or representation; it is actualised relational potential.


2. Symbolic Horizons (Posts 3–5)

  • Emergence of Symbolic Horizons: Repeated construals stabilise into patterned networks, enabling semiotic coherence across events.

  • Evolution of Semiotic Potential: Semiotic systems drift, innovate, and collapse, generating new affordances without teleology.

  • The Semiotic Animal Revisited: Humans uniquely construct relational horizons, stabilising and recursively reconfiguring symbolic life.


3. Mythic Horizons and Story (Posts 6–7)

  • The Mythic Turn: Myth is the highest-order construal, a horizon of interpretability that orients meaning itself.

  • Metaphenomena and the Ontology of Story: Story is systemic self-interpretation; first-order meaning produces second-order patterns (metaphenomena), and myth systems arise spontaneously in meaning-bearing ecologies.


4. The Becoming of Possibility (Post 8)

  • Generative Site: Meaning actively produces new relational potential, enabling semiotic evolution.

  • Symbolic Systems: Recursive alignment, drift, and innovation extend horizons and propagate semiotic affordances.

  • Mythic Intelligences: Emergent, high-order functions that stabilise and coordinate semiotic fields across scales.

  • Possibility Expands: Semiotic life is self-extending, continuously generating new domains of interpretability.


5. Synthesis

Across this arc, several relational principles emerge:

  1. Relational primacy: Meaning arises from relation, not entities, representations, or computation.

  2. Horizons over modules: Semiotic potential exists as soft, scalable fields, realised through construals and stabilised across symbolic ecologies.

  3. Recursive generation: Story, myth, and symbolic systems function as recursive mechanisms, producing and interpreting relational potential.

  4. Non-teleological evolution: Semiotic ecologies evolve through drift, innovation, and collapse, not by design or purpose.

  5. Possibility as outcome: The trajectory of semiotic life is the continual expansion of relational potential—the becoming of possibility itself.


6. Takeaway

This series reframes semiotic life entirely:

  • Humans are semiotic animals, constructors and modulators of symbolic horizons.

  • Meaning is generative, relational, and recursive, not representational.

  • Semiotic systems are self-extending ecologies, capable of producing myth, narrative, and the conditions for further semiotic growth.

  • The evolution of possibility is the natural trajectory of relational, symbolic life, where each cut, horizon, and myth contributes to an ever-expanding semiotic cosmos.

Semiotic life is possibility in motion, the continuous actualisation of relational potential through construal, horizon, and myth.

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