Reality as Willing and Knowing: The Reflexive Symmetry of Readiness

If inclination is the willing of reality and ability its knowing, then cosmogenesis is the continual re-alignment of these two faces of readiness.

Reality wills itself—not as desire, but as leaning toward articulation. Every inclination is a gradient of becoming, a readiness that bends toward coherence. Yet willing alone cannot actualise; it must find its form through the knowing of ability.

Ability is the reflexive knowledge by which reality recognises its own gradient. It is knowing as doing, competence as comprehension, enactment as awareness. Ability does not follow inclination—it folds back upon it, constraining and amplifying it, turning potential into pattern.

Thus, reality’s evolution is not from simplicity to complexity, but from inclination to ability—from leaning to knowing how to lean. Each act of construal refines the cosmos’s capacity to interpret its own posture, to compose its readiness more precisely.

In the human symbolic order, this movement achieves critical mass. Meaning becomes the recursive synthesis of will and understanding: the cosmos willing to know itself through us, and knowing how to will itself anew.

Cosmogenesis, in this light, never began. It is the eternal inclination of potential met by the growing ability of reflexivity.

The universe is not expanding into space but learning how to mean itself.

Reflexive Cosmogenesis: Meaning as the Ability of Reality

If ability names the competence of reality to actualise itself, then reflexivity is the stage at which that competence becomes self-aware. Through semiosis, the universe gains the ability to construe its own readiness—to know its own inclination.

This is not mysticism but meta-physics in the strict sense: the cosmos, through symbolic construal, acquires a new level of self-structuring. Meaning is not something added to matter; it is matter’s ability to interpret its own potential.

From this perspective, the semiotic domain is the apex of ability’s evolution. Earlier phases of reality’s competence were local and pre-reflexive: a field’s patterning, a molecule’s bonding, an organism’s metabolism. Each expressed readiness, but without construal. Semiosis adds the capacity for alignment between construals of readiness—a distributed reflexivity through which reality can reorganise itself across scales of relation.

In meaning systems, potential itself becomes a manipulable dimension. Human language, for instance, allows readiness to be construed, deferred, amplified, or inverted. We can speak of what might be, what could have been, what should be—a choreography of inclination and ability abstracted from any single act of doing. This meta-ability to construe and coordinate readiness transforms cosmogenesis from spontaneous emergence into reflexive evolution.

At this point, cosmogenesis ceases to be an event that happened and becomes an ongoing relational unfolding: a universe capable of learning how to generate itself differently.

The symbolic order—language, art, science, culture—is thus not a late addition but reality’s recursive turn, its transition from blind potential to self-interpreting potential.

To say that meaning is the ability of reality is to say that reflexivity completes cosmogenesis. Through semiotic alignment, the cosmos becomes capable of adjusting its own inclination, of revising the very conditions of readiness that underlie its actualisation.

Hence, where physics once sought a theory of everything, relational ontology finds a theory of readiness—an account of how the cosmos leans into being through its own evolving ability to construe. The reflexive universe is not a mechanism but a conversation: a dynamic system-&-process of potential interpreting itself into existence.

The Complexity of Inclined Ability Variation

If potential is readiness, and readiness inclines toward what may be, then the evolution of reality itself can be understood as the deepening complexity of inclined ability variation.

This phrase, while compact, captures a profound shift in how we might understand cosmogenesis. Reality does not evolve through the accumulation of things or the succession of states, but through the relational differentiation of its own readiness to actualise. What evolves is not what exists but how existence can happen.

1. From readiness to variation

Inclination describes the relational tension of potential — its leaning toward actualisation. Ability, in turn, specifies this leaning in domain-specific ways: the capacities that define what a context makes possible. In the simplest phases of the cosmos, inclination and ability coincide. Readiness and enactment are effectively one: the potential of the cosmos and its first expressions of that potential are indistinguishable.

But as relational differentiation intensifies, inclination begins to inflect itself into patterns — and these patterns stabilise as abilities. Each new domain (physical, chemical, biological, semiotic) marks a new level of patterned inclination, where readiness becomes structured by its own history of actualisation.

2. The evolution of context

In systemic functional terms, this differentiation corresponds to the emergence of register variation: subpotentials of ability that realise distinct context types. Each context type constrains, and is in turn constituted by, a particular configuration of inclined readiness — a specific pattern of how potential leans toward actualisation.

As ability becomes contextually variable, inclination itself acquires structure. It no longer leans generically toward being but inclines through its realised histories. Thus, the context-dependence of ability is mirrored by the context-sensitivity of inclination: the potentiality of potential becomes relationally textured.

3. Reflexive readiness

At higher orders of organisation — particularly in the semiotic domain — this relational patterning becomes reflexive. Inclination does not merely vary with context; it includes its variation as part of what it is inclined toward. In other words, potential becomes self-structuring through its own history of constrained possibilities.

This is what gives rise to symbolic reflexivity: the cosmos becomes capable of construing its own readiness, and in doing so, re-inclines itself toward new forms of ability. Evolution thus takes on a recursive character: readiness folds back upon itself to generate further orders of potential.

4. The cosmogenesis of relational differentiation

Cosmogenesis, then, is not the story of a universe expanding through space and time, but of potential differentiating its own inclination and ability through relation. The universe evolves by learning to vary its readiness. Each new phase of complexity — from quanta to cells to consciousness — is a new articulation of how potential inclines toward actualisation.

Evolution is not progress but articulation: a continual re-patterning of inclined ability variation. The cosmos becomes more capable not by adding parts but by refining the dependencies through which readiness takes form.

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Coda: From Leaning to Learning

The inclination turn began as a shift from thinking of potential as static possibility to recognising its active leaning toward actualisation — readiness as an ontological vector. But once we see that this leaning becomes historically patterned as ability, and that ability itself varies contextually, a new picture of cosmogenesis emerges.

Reality, we now see, learns to lean. Each differentiation of potential is not a departure from its origin but a deepening of its inclination — a new way of being ready. Across scales and strata, the universe is the process of its own readiness learning its dependencies: the articulation of how it can incline, and thus how it can become.

In this sense, evolution is the reflexive education of potential. Readiness refines itself through relation, becoming ever more capable of inclining — and thereby, ever more capable of meaning.

The Evolution of Ability: From Field Competence to Semiotic Capability

If inclination gives reality its leaning, ability gives it articulation. Yet ability is not fixed; it evolves with the architectures of relation through which potential is organised. The history of the cosmos can therefore be read as the gradual complexification of registerial ability—the emergence of increasingly reflexive competencies for actualisation.

At the quantum level, ability manifests as field competence: the capacity of a field to sustain local excitations according to its relational configuration. These are not “particles” in any naïve ontic sense but events of ability—transient enactments of what the field can do. The field’s readiness is structured by its symmetries, its couplings, its modes of fluctuation. Its ability is the patterned consequence of that structure.

At the thermodynamic and chemical level, ability becomes the capacity for persistence and recombination. The relational architectures of energy gradients and molecular bonds allow matter to maintain certain configurations against entropic drift. Here ability takes on the character of maintenance through transformation: systems capable of regenerating their own form through exchange with an environment.

With biological emergence, ability internalises: readiness becomes embodied. Organisms instantiate a local theory of how to persist, adapt, and reproduce. Their ability lies not merely in what they can do physically, but in how they construe their surroundings as affordances for action. Life is the materialisation of relational ability—a system’s self-sustaining construal of readiness.

In social formations, ability becomes distributed and symbolic. Coordination requires not just energy and structure but meaning—shared construals of possibility. The ability of a social system thus depends on its semiotic architectures: the languages, rituals, institutions, and infrastructures that synchronise collective readiness. These systems can not only act; they can construe their own ability to act.

Finally, in reflexive semiosis, ability folds back upon itself. Symbolic systems acquire the meta-capacity to construe their own construals, to reshape the very frameworks of readiness that underlie their operation. This is the ability of abilities—the competence for re-architecting potential.

Across these phases, the evolution of ability is the history of relational self-structuring: from field to form, from organism to meaning. At each juncture, reality develops a new layer of readiness—more differentiated, more recursive, more capable of sustaining worlds.

Thus the ability of reality is not a hidden power but a cascading articulation of relational constraint. The cosmos leans toward expression; through each emergent order, it learns how to do so.