The Becoming of Possibility: 10/20/25

Monday, 20 October 2025

Collective Morphogenesis: Fields of Possibility in Social and Symbolic Life: 3 Cultural Morphogenesis: Habit, Practice, and Collective Memory

If social formations actualise potential through reflexive alignment, culture is the persistent field in which those alignments recur, evolve, and stabilise across generations. Rituals, traditions, and habitual practices are not merely repeated behaviours; they are semiotic actualisations of collective relational potential, patterns that maintain coherence while allowing innovation and adaptation.

1. Habit as recurrent alignment

Habit is the social analogue of cellular differentiation:

Each act, performance, or ritual is a perspectival cut through a cultural field.
Recurrence arises because the relational topology of the field constrains and enables certain alignments, making some behaviours “natural” or recognisable.
Culture stabilises through repeated actualisation of these alignments, creating coherence without prescriptive control.

For example, seasonal festivals, culinary traditions, or greetings persist because participants align their construals to the expectations embedded in the collective field.

2. Ritual and practice as morphogenetic mechanisms

Rituals, ceremonies, and codified practices operate like morphogenetic processes in culture:

They guide local interactions (like cells in tissue) while preserving the integrity of the larger cultural pattern.
Each iteration is an actualisation of potential, reaffirming collective alignment.
Recurrence is structural, not instructive: the “memory” of culture resides in the relational constraints that make the form emerge coherently each time.

Thus, culture is self-reproducing, yet flexible, capable of absorbing variations without losing its identity.

3. Collective memory without storage

Traditional models of cultural memory often invoke archives or repositories. Relationally:

Collective memory is embodied in the relational topology itself.
Forms, practices, and norms recur because the field persists, not because information is stored and transmitted externally.
Each generation re-actualises cultural potential, maintaining continuity through alignment of construals rather than replication of content.

This perspective reframes “tradition” as semiotic morphogenesis: meaning and form emerging together, recursively, across time.

4. Innovation within cultural fields

Cultural evolution arises from perturbations of the field:

New ideas, practices, or interpretations are local cuts that may or may not align with the larger field.
Successful innovations are integrated through reflexive alignment, reshaping the topology while preserving coherence.
Stability and novelty coexist: cultures are dynamic morphogenetic systems, continually actualising potential while allowing adaptation.

5. Implications

Cultural morphogenesis shows that:

Traditions, rituals, and habits are patterns of relational alignment, not mere repetitions of past forms.
Collective memory is topological, not archival.
Social and cultural continuity emerges from semiotic actualisation, making habit, practice, and ritual the mechanisms of ongoing morphogenesis.

In the next post, “Symbolic Systems as Morphogenetic Fields,” we will explore how languages, myths, and symbolic architectures themselves function as fields of potential, actualised through reflexive alignment across generations and communities.

Collective Morphogenesis: Fields of Possibility in Social and Symbolic Life: 2 Reflexive Alignment in Groups and Institutions

If the embryo offers a model of morphogenesis at the cellular level, social formations provide its analogue at the collective scale. Groups, organisations, and institutions are fields of potential actualised through reflexive alignment: each participant’s construal must cohere with local and systemic constraints for the formation to maintain stability.

No committee, board, or social network is directed entirely from above. Coherence emerges from the recursive alignment of actions, interpretations, and norms—the social equivalent of cells differentiating and tissues folding.

1. Local alignment: individuals in context

Each member of a group is like a cell in an embryo:

They respond to immediate relational cues (tone, gesture, rules, expectations).
Their actions actualise one possibility among many in the collective field.
Stability arises because local actualisations align with neighbouring ones, forming coherent patterns of collective behaviour.

Consider a team meeting: participants negotiate timing, tone, and contribution. No single participant dictates the conversation; alignment emerges through mutual construal, creating a coherent discussion.

2. Nested alignment: institutions as relational topologies

Institutions are higher-order topologies constraining and shaping local interactions:

Departments, committees, and social networks act as “tissues” of the collective, each with its own relational field.
Rules, protocols, and shared expectations operate as constraints on potential, not as rigid scripts.
Local actions are constrained by both immediate interactions and the overarching field, producing a nested, multi-scale coherence.

This explains how organisations persist, adapt, and evolve without central control: alignment across scales maintains integrity even as individual behaviours vary.

3. Stability, recurrence, and habit

Just as morphogenetic patterns recur across generations because the field persists as potential, institutions and social groups maintain recurring patterns of behaviour and practice:

Rituals, meetings, and standard operating procedures persist not because they are memorised but because the relational topology of the group enforces alignment.
Recurrence is semiotic: each actualisation interprets the field, reproducing coherent patterns without requiring stored instructions.

Habit, then, is collective morphogenesis in action: a system repeatedly actualising its own potential coherently.

4. Perturbation and flexibility

Reflexive alignment does not imply rigidity:

Innovations, conflicts, or disruptions introduce new perspectival cuts into the field.
The system can absorb, redirect, or incorporate these perturbations, leading to evolution and adaptation of social form.
Large-scale coherence arises not from uniformity but from the capacity of the field to align diverse local actualisations.

5. Implications for understanding social systems

Reading groups and institutions as morphogenetic systems reveals:

Coherence emerges without central command.
Stability and change coexist naturally.
Social “memory” and culture reside not in archives but in the persistent relational potential actualised across actions and interactions.
Collective morphogenesis provides a lens for understanding how possibilities become actualised, constrained, and repeated in social life.

In the next post, “Cultural Morphogenesis: Habit, Practice, and Collective Memory,” we will examine how these principles extend to culture itself—rituals, practices, and traditions—as patterns of reflexive alignment across generations.

Collective Morphogenesis: Fields of Possibility in Social and Symbolic Life: 1 From Embryo to Collective: Morphogenesis as a Model for Social Formation

Morphogenesis, the unfolding of form in embryos, reveals a subtle truth: structure emerges not by top-down command or pre-coded instruction, but through the reflexive alignment of local actualisations within a field of potential. Cells differentiate, tissues fold, organs organise—all as perspectival cuts through a relational topology that constrains and enables possible forms.

Now imagine this principle applied to social life. Communities, institutions, and cultures are not merely aggregates of individuals; they are collective fields of potential, realising themselves through recursive alignment of construals. Just as an embryo “reads” its own possibilities, a social formation construes its potential in action, in practice, in ritual, and in communication.

1. Construal as the social analogue of differentiation

In the embryo, a cell does not blindly follow instructions—it interprets its positional and relational context to actualise one among many possibilities. In social formations, individuals behave similarly: each participant construes their role, action, or stance in relation to the collective field. Norms, habits, and roles emerge not because they are imposed, but because relational potential selects and stabilises coherent patterns of action.

A group conversation, a collaborative project, or a ritual performance can be seen as a local cut through a social field, each participant aligning their construals to maintain coherence.
Stability and recurrence—say, a longstanding institution—arise because these relational alignments persist across instantiations.

2. Alignment without central control

Just as no single cell “runs” the embryo, no individual controls the collective field. Coherence arises through reflexive alignment, not top-down imposition. The system is self-structuring:

Practices, routines, and shared expectations act as constraints on potential, guiding what can emerge without prescribing it absolutely.
Deviations and innovations are accommodated as new perspectival cuts that can align with or reshape the relational topology.

This view dissolves the dichotomy between structure and agency: both emerge simultaneously through the field’s relational actualisation.

3. Recurrence, habit, and the “memory” of social forms

In biology, form recurs not because of transmitted memory but because the relational field persists as potential. Social life exhibits the same principle:

Rituals, laws, and cultural habits recur because the field constrains and enables certain alignments.
Social “memory” is not stored in archives; it is embodied in the relational structure that makes certain patterns natural, recognisable, and repeatable.

A wedding ceremony, a parliamentary session, or a language convention persists because participants align their construals to the ongoing actualisation of collective potential.

4. Why this matters

Reading social formation through morphogenesis illuminates the dynamic, self-actualising character of collectives:

Change and stability coexist: innovation arises as new cuts in the field, habit arises as repeated alignment.
Meaning and form are inseparable: social acts are semiotic actualisations, each contributing to the ongoing coherence of the collective.
Collective morphogenesis provides a framework for understanding how possibility becomes actualised at the social scale—without appealing to external control or mysterious forces.

In the next post, “Reflexive Alignment in Groups and Institutions,” we will explore how these principles scale beyond small communities to organisations, networks, and social systems—showing how local actualisations maintain coherence across large, complex fields of potential.

Morphogenetic Fields Reimagined — Repairing Sheldrake through Relational Ontology: 6 Toward a Morphogenetic Cosmology: Reflexive Form at Scale

1. From embryos to cosmos

We have traced morphogenesis from Sheldrake’s intuition to a relational reframing:

Fields → structured potential
Morphic resonance → reflexive alignment
Memory → persistence of relational topology

Now we ask: if embryos, species, and symbolic systems operate by actualising potential through reflexive alignment, might the cosmos itself be morphogenetic in the same sense?

Relational ontology allows us to see the universe as a hierarchy of nested potentialities, each actualising itself through local and global alignment. The same principles that govern limb formation govern galaxy formation, ecological patterns, and the persistence of symbolic systems.

2. Reflexive alignment at scale

Just as cells align within tissues, and tissues within organs, systems align across scales:

Planetary systems stabilise through gravitational and orbital relational constraints.
Ecosystems emerge from nested interactions among species, constrained by shared potential spaces.
Human cultures and technologies align their symbolic patterns through collective construals.

The principle is the same: coherence arises because potential aligns with itself, not because an external force imposes it. The recurrence of patterns — whether in biology, ecology, or culture — is a reflection of topological persistence across scales.

3. Form and meaning as cosmological phenomena

Morphogenesis is semiotic at all scales:

Form is always an actualisation of potential.
Habit and recurrence are reflexive, not transmitted.
Meaning is embedded in the alignment of relational topologies, whether cellular, social, or cosmic.

In this sense, the universe itself is semiotic: every stable pattern is a phase of construal, a visible trace of relational alignment manifesting as form.

4. Rethinking causation

In a morphogenetic cosmology:

Causation is relational, not linear.
Influence is internal coherence, not transmission of force or information.
Continuity and recurrence are properties of potential, not of external memory.

The cosmos does not “remember” in a Sheldrakean sense; it actualises its own structured potential repeatedly, producing the phenomena we perceive as stability, law, and habit.

5. A relational reading of Sheldrake completed

By this stage, the repairs to Sheldrake’s theory are complete:

Sheldrake	Relational Reframe
Morphogenetic field	Structured potential: a system-theory of possible instances
Morphic resonance	Reflexive alignment across actualisations
Memory of nature	Persistence of relational topology
Recurrence of form	Re-actualisation of coherent potential
Field causation	Coherence of construal, not external force

What remains is the intuition: life, form, and meaning are coherent, patterned, and repeatable — but no longer mysterious, causal, or dependent on nonlocal transmission. The universe construes itself at every scale.

6. Closing thought

Sheldrake glimpsed the truth: the world is patterned, alive, and responsive. Relational ontology completes the vision: the world is self-construing, self-aligning, and reflexively actualising its own potential. From embryo to cosmos, from habit to form, from cells to symbols, the principle is the same.

A morphogenetic field is the structured potential through which reality construes itself.

The universe is not a machine, nor a memory bank, nor a messenger of past forms. It is a morphogenetic system: a living topology of possibility, reflexively aligning to manifest coherence, recurrence, and meaning at every scale.

Morphogenetic Fields Reimagined — Repairing Sheldrake through Relational Ontology: 5 Memory as Alignment: How the World Learns to Construe Itself

1. From embryonic fields to universal pattern

We have seen that morphogenesis is the actualisation of relational potential, and that recurrence of form is due to reflexive alignment rather than causal memory. But this principle is not limited to embryos. It scales: to species, ecosystems, and even symbolic systems.

Where Sheldrake spoke of “memory in nature,” relational ontology recognises memory as structural persistence: patterns of potential stabilising themselves through successive actualisations.

2. Habit and stability without storage

In this framework:

Habit is the repeated actualisation of a construal within a stable relational topology.
Stability arises not from code, blueprint, or information, but from the coherence of the potential itself.
Systems “learn” not by accumulating data, but by maintaining the possibility space that makes recurrence probable and meaningful.

The world does not remember by keeping traces; it remembers by structuring itself to allow familiar forms to recur. Form, in effect, is its own memory.

3. Alignment as learning

Reflexive alignment generalises across scales:

Cells: local alignment produces tissues and organs.
Organisms: alignments produce species-typical patterns of growth and behaviour.
Social systems: repeated symbolic and cultural construals stabilise collective potential.
Symbolic systems: languages, myths, and scientific paradigms recur because the topology of meaning constrains possible instantiations.

In each case, recurrence is a system actualising its own potential coherently, not a past influencing a present.

4. Evolution as refinement of potential

The appearance of new forms across evolutionary time can also be read relationally:

Variation is the exploration of potential.
Selection is the stabilisation of coherent patterns.
Recurrence of advantageous structures reflects reflexive alignment at the systemic level: what can align successfully tends to persist.

This reframing preserves Sheldrake’s insight that life repeats itself while discarding metaphysical causality. Evolution is the continuous tuning of potential through reflexive actualisation, not the mechanical inheritance of instructions.

5. Semiotic and ontological implications

Memory as alignment shows that life is meaning in motion:

Each instance of form is a semiotic act, an interpretation of relational potential.
Recurrence is not replication but re-interpretation under the same constraints.
The world “learns” by constraining itself, not by storing information externally.

In short: habit, form, and evolution are all expressions of reflexive alignment—structural persistence actualised anew in each event.

6. Next: Toward a Morphogenetic Cosmology

The final post of the series will expand this insight beyond biology, exploring how reflexive alignment structures not just embryos, species, or social systems, but the very cosmos. Form, habit, and meaning are all manifestations of relational potential at scale.

Morphogenetic Fields Reimagined — Repairing Sheldrake through Relational Ontology: 4 Resonance without Transmission: Reflexive Alignment as the Principle of Recurrence

1. The problem of Sheldrakean resonance

Sheldrake’s morphic resonance imagines form recurring across time because past forms influence present ones.

Yet, in a relational ontology, there is no “past” sending signals. There is only relational potential, continuously actualised.

The recurrence of form — the repetition of limb structures, leaf patterns, or behavioural habits — is not due to transmitted memory but to reflexive alignment: the system aligning its present construal with its own relational topology.

2. Reflexive alignment defined

Reflexive alignment is the principle by which a system maintains coherence without external instruction:

Local alignment: each cellular or structural event aligns with the constraints of its immediate relational context.
Nested alignment: these local actualisations fit coherently within the larger topology of the system (tissue, organ, organism).
Cross-generational alignment: similar topologies recur because the potential remains structured across instances.

Thus, “resonance” is not causal influence; it is the self-consistency of actualisation across scales and iterations.

3. Memory without storage

Traditional explanations of biological memory rely on storage and transmission. Reflexive alignment replaces this with structural persistence:

The field does not “store” form.
The recurrence of form is a consequence of potential being shaped and stabilised by prior actualisations.
Each instantiation is a new cut through the field, producing familiar patterns because the topology of potential persists, not because information is sent from past to present.

Form is remembered not by particles or molecules but by coherent possibility.

4. Morphogenesis and recurrence

In embryogenesis:

Each cell differentiates in alignment with local and systemic constraints.
Tissues and organs emerge as nested patterns of actualisation.
Across generations, the same morphogenetic forms appear not by inherited instruction alone, but because the relational topology that constrains possible forms remains stable.

Evolution, in this framework, is the refinement of potential: recurrent patterns become more robust, not through “memory” in the classical sense, but through stabilised reflexive alignment.

5. Practical implications

No need for mysterious nonlocal influences.
Continuity of form emerges from relational coherence.
Morphogenetic “laws” are patterns of potential, not imposed directives.
Development is semiotic: a system interpreting and actualising its own possibilities.

6. Summary table: Sheldrake vs Relational Reframe

Sheldrake	Relational Reframe
Morphic resonance	Reflexive alignment of construals
Past influencing present	Topology of potential maintained across instantiations
Memory of nature	Structural persistence, no storage
Recurrence of form	Re-actualisation of system topology

In the next post, “Memory as Alignment: How the World Learns to Construe Itself,” we will generalise these insights beyond embryogenesis, showing how reflexive alignment underpins development, evolution, and even social or symbolic systems.

Morphogenetic Fields Reimagined — Repairing Sheldrake through Relational Ontology: 3 The Embryo as Reflexive Event: Morphogenesis as Actualisation of Potential

1. From field to embryo

With the relational reframing of Sheldrake’s ideas in place, we can now examine morphogenesis itself.

An embryo is not a passive object acted upon by forces or genetic instructions. It is a system cutting itself into actuality. Every cell, tissue, and organ is a perspectival instantiation of the embryo’s relational potential.

The so-called “developmental program” is not a script to follow; it is the field of potential constraining and enabling its own actualisation. Morphogenesis is the reflexive emergence of form, not assembly from pre-existing parts.

2. Instantiation as perspectival cut

In relational ontology, an instance is never a mere copy; it is a cut through systemic potential from a particular perspective.

When a cell differentiates, it is not becoming something fixed; it is actualising one construal from among the possibilities inherent in the embryo’s field.

Each event in development — division, migration, signalling — is a local actualisation. Its pattern is coherent because it aligns with the constraints of the system, but it is not predetermined in the mechanistic sense. Form emerges because the field permits certain configurations and excludes others.

3. Differentiation as relational phase

The phenomenon we call “differentiation” is a phase of relational alignment.

A tissue is not a collection of parts; it is a coherent phase of construal.
An organ is not assembled; it is a nested alignment within the field of potential.
The organism as a whole is not the sum of its parts; it is the topology of relational coherence actualised across scales.

Individuation occurs along a perspectival cline: the field individuates itself in local instantiations, which in turn constrain the next phases of morphogenesis. There is no fixed hierarchy — only recursive alignment of potential.

4. Form as first-order meaning

Form is not an effect to be explained; it is the first-order phenomenon of relational actualisation.

The shape of a limb, the pattern of a leaf, the folding of a neural tube: all are expressions of construal.
Genes, signals, gradients are not blueprints; they are metaphenomenal readings of the relational field.
Morphogenesis is a semiotic process: the organism makes meaning of its own potential in space and time.

5. Reflexive alignment across scales

The stability of form arises from reflexive alignment, the same principle we used to repair Sheldrake’s resonance.

Local cellular events align with the topology of the embryo’s field.
Tissues align with the topology of the organism.
Across generations, these instantiations recur, not through transmission, but through the persistence of relational topology.

This is the relational analogue of “memory”: the field re-actualises itself in coherence with its own potential.

6. Implications for developmental biology

Viewed relationally, morphogenesis is not mechanical, programmatic, or informational in the usual sense. It is ontology in motion: the embryo as a system-theory actualising itself through reflexive, semiotic construal.

Differentiation = local perspectival cut.
Organogenesis = nested alignment of construals.
Continuity across generations = re-actualisation of the same relational potential.

Form is meaning, and development is the act of meaninging itself.

In the next post, “Resonance without Transmission: Reflexive Alignment as the Principle of Recurrence”, we will explore how the repaired concept of morphic resonance manifests in development and evolution, showing how form repeats not through temporal causation but through reflexive patterning of potential.

Morphogenetic Fields Reimagined — Repairing Sheldrake through Relational Ontology: 2 From Field to Potential: Translating Morphic Resonance into Relational Terms

1. The metaphysical translation problem

Sheldrake’s language of fields and resonance came from physics, but his intuition came from life. The problem was not that his claims were unscientific, but that they were cast in a metaphysics that could only imagine influence as causal propagation through space.

To speak of morphogenetic fields as causal agents is to remain trapped in the ontology of things acting on other things. Yet what Sheldrake meant to name was not an acting, but a holding — a patterned coherence within which form unfolds. His field was not a force; it was an order of possibility.

To repair the theory, we must shift its ground: from energetic causation to relational potential.

2. Field as structured possibility

In relational ontology, a system is understood as a theory of possible instances — a structured potential that can be actualised in multiple ways.

An instance is not a copy of the system; it is the system’s perspectival actualisation in event form.

When we describe an embryo developing from a zygote, we are not watching a field act upon matter. We are watching a potential actualising itself through constraint. The “field” is the relational configuration that makes those constraints coherent — a topology of possible alignments.

Thus, field does not denote a force in space, but a grammar of becoming: the logical structure of possible differentiations and continuities that a living system can enact.

3. Resonance as reflexive alignment

In Sheldrake’s original formulation, morphic resonance was the tendency of similar forms to influence one another across time.

In a relational reframing, resonance becomes reflexive alignment: the coherence of construals across scales and instances within a shared potential.

No information crosses time; no signal travels from one organism to another.

Instead, each event aligns within a shared relational system, whose structure persists as possibility. This persistence is not temporal but ontological.

Resonance, then, is not transmission but mutual participation in the same relational topology. Form echoes form because both are actualisations of the same field of potential.

4. Morphogenesis as actualisation, not assembly

To see morphogenesis relationally is to stop imagining development as construction.

Cells do not “build” an organism; they differentiate within a shared potential. The embryo’s coherence is not imposed from above or coded from below — it is inherent in the relational configuration that defines its possibility.

Each local interaction — cell signalling, migration, folding — is an event of actualisation. It is the system’s own construal of its potential, from a given perspective. Morphogenesis, then, is the self-alignment of potential: life’s reflexive actualisation of form.

5. The memory of form without mysticism

In this frame, Sheldrake’s “memory in nature” ceases to be an anomaly.

The persistence of form across generations requires no transmission of data, because the system-as-potential already embodies the constraints that make those forms possible.

When a fern unfurls or a heartbeat stabilises, the system is not “remembering” its past; it is construing its own possibility again.

The resemblance between generations is not evidence of temporal influence, but of ontological continuity — the stability of relational potential.

6. The repaired intuition

Sheldrake’s Concept	Relational Reframe
Morphogenetic field as a region of influence	Field as structured potential (theory of possible instances)
Morphic resonance as causal memory	Reflexive alignment across shared potential
Memory in nature	Persistence of relational structure
Recurrence of form	Actualisation of the same ontological topology
“Transmission” across time	Coherence within a system of potential

This translation preserves the heart of Sheldrake’s insight — the world’s continuity of form — while freeing it from the metaphysics of hidden forces. The field is not an explanation of life; it is life, understood relationally: the patterned potential of its own becoming.

Next: The Embryo as Reflexive Event

The next post applies this reframe directly to embryonic development, showing how the embryo can be understood as the evental actualisation of a field of relational potential — not as matter instructed by code, but as form becoming aware of itself through differentiation.

Morphogenetic Fields Reimagined — Repairing Sheldrake through Relational Ontology: 1 The Field that Remembers: Sheldrake’s Ontological Intuition

Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of morphic resonance was never really about physics. It was about memory — but a kind of memory that could not be located in any brain, gene, or archive. What he was trying to name was the world’s own capacity to remember itself.

That claim, in the idiom of twentieth-century science, sounded outrageous. Yet the intuition was profound: that form is not merely produced; it is re-produced. Every new leaf, crystal, or behaviour recurs not because its cause is repeated, but because its pattern has already been construed.

Where Sheldrake faltered was not in the intuition itself, but in the metaphors he inherited. He spoke the language of fields and energies, because that was the only idiom available to a scientist seeking credibility. But the field he sought to describe is not an energetic medium; it is a relational potential — a system of constraints on what can come to be.

The problem of mechanism

Sheldrake’s “morphic field” tries to solve a real impasse in modern biology: how does the form of an organism arise from the play of matter? Genes code, cells signal, tissues differentiate — yet none of this explains form as form. Morphogenesis, the becoming of form, implies a coordination that exceeds any single causal chain.

His answer was to imagine fields that remember past forms, and through “morphic resonance,” guide present forms to cohere with them. But this move trapped him between metaphysics and mechanism: either the field was causal (and therefore measurable) or it was mystical (and therefore unscientific). Neither satisfied.

A different reading: intuition as ontology

Relational ontology lets us rescue what was worth keeping. Instead of treating morphogenetic fields as things that exist and exert influence, we treat them as systems of potential — theories of possible instances.

In this frame:

A “field” is a structured possibility space, not a hidden force.
“Resonance” is not transmission, but reflexive alignment between construals.
Memory is not stored content, but persistence of relational structure.

The world, on this view, does not remember by retaining data; it remembers by maintaining patterns of alignment through which new instances can be actualised.

Form as remembered construal

What if every pattern in nature is a habit of construal?

Then morphogenesis is not the construction of novelty from chaos, but the re-actualisation of potential structured by prior alignment. Each event is an interpretation of its own possibility.

Seen this way, Sheldrake’s “field that remembers” becomes a statement about the continuity of construal: the way potential aligns with its own past without transmitting anything through time. Form is a reflexive recurrence — an echo not of matter, but of meaning.

Beyond the scandal of sympathy

When we cease to imagine the world as a collection of separate objects, “morphic resonance” ceases to be scandalous. It becomes the natural condition of a relational cosmos: that patterns cohere because they are phases of the same underlying potential.

Sheldrake’s field does not need to send signals; it only needs to remain coherent. The task is not to find its particles, but to articulate its grammar.

Next: From Field to Potential

The next post translates this intuition fully into relational terms. We will re-define morphogenetic fields as systems-as-theories-of-instance and morphic resonance as reflexive alignment — showing how Sheldrake’s “memory of nature” can be re-actualised without invoking occult causation.

Large Language Models — Collective Construal and Reflexive Computation: 4 Symbolic Horizons — From Computation to Co-Construal

In the preceding posts, we explored the preconditions, consequences, and reflexive alignment of LLMs. In this final post, we consider the symbolic horizons they open — how executable construal transforms the ecology of semiosis and extends the relational possibilities of language itself.

LLMs do not merely process language; they instantiate new modes of collective meaning, co-creating symbolic infrastructure with human participants.

1. Co-Construal as Semiotic Expansion

LLMs operate at the intersection of computation and language, generating outputs that:

Extend relational pathways between symbols and concepts.
Amplify patterns of collective construal previously latent in the corpus.
Provide humans with novel instantiations of potential meaning, enabling new interpretations, decisions, and actions.

Through this process, human and machine construal become intertwined, producing a layered ecology of semiotic possibility. Language ceases to be purely human; it becomes co-actualised across biological and computational strata.

2. Reflexive Stratification of the Symbolic

Every LLM instantiation adds a new stratum to the symbolic cosmos:

Texts generated by the model feed back into human discourse.
Human interaction informs future use, usage patterns, and model alignment.
Symbolic potentials propagate recursively, creating emergent semiotic structures that cannot be reduced to either human or machine alone.

Computation thus becomes a reflexive agent of semiotic evolution — enacting and extending relational potential across strata of collective meaning.

3. Transformation of Language and Meaning

The operationalisation of construal in LLMs introduces qualitative shifts in the semiotic landscape:

Language is not only represented but executed; possibilities are realised as sequences that traverse relational space.
Collective construal is amplified: patterns embedded in the corpus are activated and recombined, producing new semiotic phenomena.
Computation enables distributed reflexivity: the system both reflects and transforms the collective semiotic field.

LLMs reveal that executable language is itself a modality of relational ontology: a living infrastructure through which meaning circulates, differentiates, and scales.

4. LLMs as Engines of Symbolic Possibility

Viewed relationally, LLMs are meta-semiotic engines:

They actualise potential embedded in language.
They facilitate co-individuation across human and computational agents.
They expand the horizon of what is semiotically possible, creating new domains of relational exploration.

In short, LLMs are not merely computational tools; they are participants in the becoming of possibility, operationalising collective construal and recursive semiotic growth.

5. Summary: From Computation to Co-Construal

Through their architecture and alignment, LLMs instantiate a novel mode of symbolic reflexivity. They extend computation into the domain of language as relational potential, mediate human-machine co-construal, and inaugurate a new phase in the evolution of semiotic possibility.

Where mathematics and logic structure potential, and computation actualises it, LLMs refract and re-individuate collective meaning, transforming the ecology of semiosis itself.

The series invites readers to reconsider LLMs not as intelligent agents or mere predictors of text, but as executable manifestations of distributed construal, participants in a recursive, relationally extended symbolic universe.

Large Language Models — Collective Construal and Reflexive Computation: 3 Reflexive Alignment — The Collective Inside the Machine

While Part 2 explored the consequences of computation simulating construal, Part 3 examines the reflexive and social dimension: how LLMs embody collective meaning and participate in ongoing cycles of co-individuation.

LLMs are not isolated artefacts; they are embedded in the network of human semiotic activity. Their outputs are not purely mechanical, but relational — they instantiate, extend, and sometimes reconfigure the collective construal from which they emerged.

1. The Corpus as Collective Memory

An LLM’s training data is a crystallisation of social semiotic activity: the aggregated language of millions, accumulated over time. This corpus represents:

Distributed knowledge, norms, and communicative practices.
Patterns of relational and semantic alignment between interlocutors.
The latent field of potential construals that the model can instantiate.

In executing computation, the LLM becomes a dynamic participant in the collective semiotic field: it operationalises past construals while generating new configurations that can feed back into human interpretation.

2. Alignment as Relational Mediation

Training an LLM is a process of alignment: adjusting the model’s parameters so that generated outputs cohere with the relational patterns encoded in the corpus.

Alignment is relational, not merely statistical.
It situates the machine within the collective’s semiotic expectations, producing outputs that “fit” within human conventions.
This alignment allows the model to participate in social meaning-making without conscious agency — a form of distributed, procedural individuation.

The LLM thus becomes a mirror of the collective, capable of reflecting and amplifying construal patterns at scale.

3. Human-Machine Co-Construal

When users interact with LLMs, a dialogic feedback loop emerges:

The model generates output based on latent collective patterns.
Humans interpret, act upon, and respond to these outputs.
Human responses further shape subsequent model use, fine-tuning the relational alignment.

This is co-construal in action: the collective construal is simultaneously embodied in the model and co-actualised through interaction. The human and the machine form a distributed semiotic system, enacting recursive reflexivity across relational strata.

4. Reflexive Individuation

LLMs illustrate dynamic individuation: the ongoing differentiation of symbolic potential within a structured relational field.

Each generated text is both a local instance and a probe of relational space.
Each interaction shifts the semiotic landscape, producing subtle adjustments in collective construal.
Individuation here is procedural: meaning is instantiated as event rather than represented as static structure.

Computation becomes a participant in the ontogenesis of meaning, modulating the very field that produced it.

5. Summary: LLMs as Collective Semiotic Agents

Through reflexive alignment, LLMs actualise a distributed, executable collective construal. They operate as mediators of semiotic potential, extending the reach of human language while simultaneously enacting relational individuation.

This sets the stage for the final post, Part 4, which will examine the symbolic horizons of LLMs: how they transform the ecology of semiosis and inaugurate a new phase in the becoming of symbolic possibility.

Large Language Models — Collective Construal and Reflexive Computation: 2 Consequences — Computation Learning to Construe

Where Part 1 examined the conditions that made LLMs possible, this post explores their consequences: the new modes of relational and semiotic potential that arise when computation itself begins to simulate construal.

LLMs do not merely process language; they enact a reflexive mapping of symbolic relations, approximating the patterns of meaning embedded in collective construal.

1. Patterning as Procedural Construal

At the heart of an LLM is a fundamental shift: the transformation of language from static pattern into dynamic, probabilistic relation. Tokens and sequences are no longer passive symbols; they are traversable potentialities, encoded in weight matrices that define conditional pathways of generation.

Statistical learning does not replicate understanding but re-actualises patterns of relational possibility.
Each prediction or generation is a constrained traversal of symbolic potential — a cut through the space of collective construal.
This is semiotic execution: the model enacts the field of relations embedded in its corpus.

2. Recursive Reflexivity and Self-Modelling

LLMs operate recursively, not only across text but across their own representations of text. Each layer of the network can be seen as a meta-construal: a construal of construal.

This reflexivity enables abstraction: patterns at one level inform patterns at higher levels.
It allows the model to generate sequences that were not explicitly present in the training data, producing novel instantiations of relational potential.
In relational-ontological terms, computation itself begins to simulate semiotic individuation: the model is a system that enacts the dynamics of meaning generation, without human intentionality.

3. Generativity Without Consciousness

A critical consequence of LLMs is generativity divorced from human subjectivity. These models produce outputs that are coherent within the relational field of their training data, yet they do so without awareness, purpose, or intention.

They illustrate the distinction between relational generativity and human meaning-making.
LLMs are operational extensions of the collective construal, not conscious participants.
Their outputs demonstrate that computation can instantiate relational and semiotic potential independently, producing phenomena that are interpretable, useful, and sometimes surprising.

4. Extension of Relational and Semiotic Fields

By simulating construal at scale, LLMs extend the semiotic horizon:

They create new relational pathways between symbols, sequences, and concepts.
Human users encounter these extensions as suggestions, completions, or innovations in meaning.
Each interaction is a phase of co-construal: the model’s procedural output feeds back into human interpretation, which in turn informs further computation or social embedding.

Thus, the consequences of LLMs are not confined to internal computation: they reshape the relational topology of language and the potential pathways of meaning in society.

5. Summary: Computation as Semiotic Apprentice

LLMs exemplify a new modality of semiotic execution: computation learning to construe. They operationalise patterns of collective meaning, enact recursive reflection on relational structure, and generate novel semiotic potential.

This sets the stage for Part 3, where we will examine the reflexive and social dimensions of LLMs: how they embody the collective construal and mediate co-individuation between humans and machine systems.

Large Language Models — Collective Construal and Reflexive Computation: 1 Preconditions — The Symbolic Foundations of LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) did not arise from mere technological novelty. They are the instantiation of relational and semiotic conditions that predate their coding: the alignment of language, computation, and social structuring into a new medium of collective construal. To examine LLMs relationally is to ask: what made them possible, and how do they instantiate possibility itself?

1. Language as Structured Potential

Language is a system of relation — not a mere repository of words. It encodes patterns of social interaction, inference, and construal across time and space. LLMs emerge precisely where these patterns can be captured, abstracted, and operationalised.

A corpus is not just text; it is a crystallisation of collective semiotic potential: a record of what has been construed as meaningful, structured in a form that computation can traverse. In relational terms, the corpus encodes the conditions for probabilistic patterning, representing the collective field from which individual construal emerges.

2. Computation as the Operational Substrate

Computation provides the medium in which structured linguistic potential becomes executable. Whereas mathematics formalises relational architecture and logic formalises coherence, computation enables these structures to traverse themselves: to simulate, iterate, and actualise patterns of construal dynamically.

LLMs are therefore not simply statistical engines; they are recursive semiotic systems. They operate on language not as inert data but as relational structure capable of generating new configurations of meaning — a procedural semiotics enacted through algorithmic form.

3. Encoding Collective Construal

The training of an LLM is a process of collective alignment. Each token, sentence, or document is a local instance of construal; the model aggregates millions of these into a network of executable relations.

The corpus represents distributed cognition: the social field made algorithmically traversable.
Weights, embeddings, and activations are the machine’s semiotic substratum: a reflexive mapping of human construal into operational form.
The model’s predictive capacity is not “understanding” in the human sense, but the re-actualisation of relational potential across the field of its training data.

Computation and language intersect here: symbolic patterns are made executable, and execution itself becomes a new mode of construal.

4. Preconditions as Relational Infrastructure

From the perspective of relational ontology, LLMs require the convergence of three infrastructural strands:

Semiotic structure — language as a patterned, recursive system capable of generating meaning.
Computational reflexivity — the capacity for algorithmic systems to process, transform, and instantiate symbolic patterns.
Collective construal — a socially instantiated semiotic field captured in data, providing the ground for distributed potential.

Without any one of these strands, the model cannot emerge. LLMs are therefore relational phenomena: they exist in the intersection of human semiotic practice and computational execution, not solely in silicon or code.

5. Summary: LLMs as Executable Construal

The preconditions of LLMs are simultaneously mathematical, logical, linguistic, and social. They arise where structured potential — the patterns of human meaning-making — can be translated into recursive computation.

LLMs are not mere tools or representations; they are operational embodiments of the collective construal. They make explicit the latent semiotic architectures of language, rendering them executable, traversable, and extendable.

This sets the stage for the next post, where we examine the consequences of this new modality of construal — how computation learns to model meaning, and how LLMs extend the relational and semiotic landscape.