The Becoming of Possibility: 12/12/25

Friday, 12 December 2025

The Cognitive Thread: 6 Intuition and Analysis as Divergent Readiness Modes

Psychology and cognitive science often divide cognition into “fast” vs. “slow,” “intuitive” vs. “deliberative,” or “System 1” vs. “System 2.”

These categories are mechanistic placeholders, smuggling interiority, representation, and serial processing into models of mind.

A relational ontology cuts deeper: intuition and analysis are not internal systems.

They are modes of horizon management, divergent strategies for navigating relational potential.

Mind does not switch modules; it adjusts the shape and scale of readiness.

1. Intuition: Wide Horizon, High Coupling

Intuition is the strategy of broad horizon engagement:

the horizon is wide, elastic, minimally constrained
inhibitory control is low, allowing multiple gradients to coexist
the system is attuned to subtle environmental patterns and emergent inclinations
metabolic cost is low per unit, but distributed across gradients
responses arise from rapid relational alignment, not sequential deliberation

Intuition is ecological attunement:

the organism tracks patterns without explicitly representing them
meaning is actualised through immediate alignment with gradient landscapes
readiness is diffuse but highly responsive, allowing fast, adaptive manoeuvres

Intuition is not guessing, not subconscious computation, and not the output of a hidden internal model.

It is relational sensitivity in action.

2. Analysis: Narrow Horizon, Sequential Actualisation

Analysis is the strategy of focused horizon contraction:

the horizon is narrowed, degrees of freedom are suppressed
inhibitory thresholds are high, preventing interference from competing potentials
the system sequentially explores actualisation pathways
metabolic cost is higher due to sustained narrow focus
coupling bandwidth is reduced, prioritising precision over breadth

Analysis is deliberate horizon shaping:

the system constrains possibilities to stabilise an actionable gradient
each step is a controlled cut through potential, not a computation of stored items
the trajectory is guided by the gradient landscape itself, not by abstract rules

Analysis is not reasoning over representations.

It is a metabolic–ecological strategy for achieving high-precision actualisations.

3. Divergent Readiness Strategies

Intuition and analysis are complementary, not antagonistic:

Mode	Horizon Width	Coupling	Metabolic Profile	Temporal Dynamics	Functional Goal
Intuition	Wide	High	Distributed, low	Rapid, parallel inclinations	Rapid alignment, pattern recognition
Analysis	Narrow	Low	Concentrated, high	Sequential, high-fidelity	Precise gradient actualisation, problem-solving

Switching between modes is not toggling systems.

It is modulating horizon width and coupling bandwidth to match the relational demands of the task.

The same system can operate intuitively in one gradient landscape and analytically in another, without invoking separate mechanisms.

4. The Ecological Payoff

Both strategies emerge from the relational requirements of living systems:

Intuition excels in high-uncertainty, complex environments where quick alignment is critical.
Analysis excels when gradients must be isolated, sequentially stabilised, or carefully manipulated.
Both depend on emotion to modulate metabolic readiness.
Both depend on memory/horizon-binding to stabilise potential.
Both culminate in construal, the actualisation cut.

The division is strategic, not structural.

Intuition and analysis are modes of readiness, not mental systems.

5. Beyond Kahneman: Relational Recut

Kahneman’s Systems 1 and 2 are internal, modular, and representational.

Relational ontology recasts them:

They are ecological strategies for managing relational potential
They are defined by horizon dynamics, not processing speed
They are enacted, not instantiated
They require no homunculus, module, or computational architecture

This resolves the longstanding paradoxes of intuition vs. analysis: apparent speed differences, error patterns, and resource limitations all emerge naturally from horizon and metabolic dynamics.

6. Why This Matters

Understanding intuition and analysis as divergent readiness modes:

integrates cognitive diversity without mechanistic modules
embeds decision-making directly in the organism–environment nexus
clarifies the ecological rationale for fast and slow modes of engagement
preserves relational integrity: all cognition arises from horizon shaping, coupling, and potential stabilisation
sets the stage for the final post, where mind itself is framed as multi-scale horizon negotiation

Intuition and analysis are not competing systems of the brain.

They are different ways a horizon can behave.

Next: Post 7 — Mind as Multi-Scale Horizon Negotiation

The Cognitive Thread: 5 Construal as the Actualisation Cut

If there is a single point where psychology collapses into our relational ontology and re-emerges transformed, it is here.

Construal.

Not interpretation.

Not representation.

Not inference or appraisal or belief.

Construal is the cut — the moment where a readiness field actualises as phenomenon.

The moment potential becomes experience.

The moment the relational horizon contracts, stabilises, and yields first-order meaning.

This is not an “inner event.”

It is not the mind generating a picture of the world.

Construal is the phenomenon.

It is meaning itself, enacted as an event in the relational field.

Everything psychology calls perception, thought, awareness, understanding, insight — all of it is downstream of the actualisation cut.

1. What Construal Is Not

It is important to clear the debris.

Construal is not:

an interpretation of sensory input
a representation of the world
a construction on top of raw data
an inner depiction
an appraisal of content
a computational transformation
a step in a cognitive pipeline

All of these presuppose a world “out there” and an inner space “in here” that must interpret it.

In a relational ontology, there is no such interiority and no such exteriority.

There is only structured potential and its actualisation.

Construal is not a reaction to a stimulus.

It is the event that creates the phenomenon by cutting potential into form.

2. The Actualisation Cut

A system exists as a horizon of readiness — structured, elastic, and metabolically tuned.

For any phenomenon to appear:

the horizon must narrow (attention)
the readiness field must be energetically primed (emotion)
a relational pocket must be stabilised (memory/horizon-binding)
an actionable gradient must crystallise

Then — and only then —

construal cuts: potential → phenomenon

This cut is not a process happening in the organism.

It is the moment the organism–environment relation yields a stable actualisation.

The phenomenon is not “in the head.”

It is the event of coupling itself.

Construal is the metaphenomenal boundary where meaning comes into being.

3. Construal Creates First-Order Meaning

Meaning is not added after perception.

Meaning is the phenomenon once construed.

A construed phenomenon is:

perspectival (cut from within a readiness field)
relational (actualised only in the system–ecology nexus)
metabolic (dependent on readiness and horizon shape)
non-representational (not about something; it is something)
horizon-specific (different horizon shapes yield different phenomena)

There is no such thing as an unconstrued phenomenon.

No raw sensation.

No pre-semiotic percept.

The cut is constitutive, not descriptive.

Construal is the system’s act of bringing a phenomenon into actualised being.

4. Construal is Not Interpretation — Interpretation is a Second-Order Cut

Once the first-order construal is actualised, the system may make further cuts:

interpreting the phenomenon
describing it
reflecting on it
analysing it
remembering it
abstracting it

But these are meta-phenomena — second-order construals that operate on the first.

The mistake of psychology is to treat interpretation as the essence of perception.

Your relational ontology restores the primacy of the first-order cut.

Meaning begins before thought.

Experience is meaning.

Construal is the event of meaning.

5. Construal is Not Constructivism

Constructivist psychology says:

the mind constructs the world.

Relational ontology says something far sharper:

the world as experienced is the actualised relational cut.

Nothing is constructed by an interior agent.

There is no inner builder.

No processing pipeline.

No stored models.

There is only readiness, horizon shape, and the event of actualisation.

Construal is not a construction.

It is a realignment of potential that yields a phenomenon.

6. The Crux: Construal as the Interface of Cognition and Semiosis

Up to this point in the Cognitive Thread:

attention set the horizon
emotion tuned its metabolism
memory stabilised pockets of potential
intuition/analysis regulate horizon strategies

But all of these prepare for the cut.

It is construal alone that turns readiness into meaning.

This is the hinge that will eventually open into your semiotic arc:

Construal is the first moment at which the system’s relational dynamics enter the symbolic domain.

Not yet symbols — that belongs to semiosis.

But meaning as phenomenon, without symbolisation, begins here.

Construal is the bridge between biology and meaning.

7. Why This Recut Matters

This redefinition of construal does what no psychological or philosophical model has managed:

dethrones representation
dissolves interiority
collapses the distinction between perception and meaning
integrates cognition with the organism–environment relation
grounds semiosis in relational dynamics rather than mental content
unifies the whole cognitive thread as a series of horizon operations culminating in the actualisation cut

In this model:

attention makes the cut possible
emotion modulates its viability
memory stabilises its precursor potential
and construal is the phenomenon that emerges

Meaning does not live in the mind.

Meaning is the act of construal itself.

Next: Post 6 — Intuition and Analysis as Divergent Readiness Modes

The Cognitive Thread: 4 Memory Without Storage — Horizon-Binding as Ecological Scaffolding

Memory is the most misleading word in cognitive science.

It smuggles in an ontology: something must be stored, kept inside, retrieved later, accessed by a system that contains items representing prior experience.

This picture is not merely wrong — it is impossible once relation is primary.

Nothing in the relational field is stored.

Nothing is retrieved.

Nothing is kept “in mind.”

A living system does not operate by inventory.

It operates by maintaining potentials long enough to stabilise a construal or action.

Memory — especially so-called working memory — is not a workspace, not a buffer, not a scratchpad.

Memory is horizon-binding: the temporary stabilisation of a subset of potential so it does not collapse under competing gradients.

Memory is ecological scaffolding.

1. The Ontological Error: Treating Possibility as Content

All storage metaphors depend on a representational ontology:

information must reside somewhere
cognitive items must persist
the mind must have an inner container
retrieval must access a stored trace

But in a relational ontology:

nothing is represented
phenomena are actualised, not encoded
potential is structured, not stored
readiness is metabolic, not symbolic
construal produces the phenomenon, not its copy

Thus memory cannot be the preservation of a past state.

It can only be the stabilisation of relational potential in the present.

“Remembering” is the system holding open a readiness pattern that would otherwise collapse.

2. What Working Memory Actually Is

Working memory — the so-called focus of the current cognitive task — is the clearest case of horizon-binding.

Instead of a workspace with items, it is:

the active maintenance of a local construal-ready horizon pocket.

This pocket:

sustains a small cluster of potential states
inhibits competing gradients
prevents horizon drift
aligns metabolic readiness toward a specific pattern
holds a relational configuration open long enough for sequential actualisation

The organism is not maintaining content.

It is maintaining possibility.

Working memory is the tensioned scaffolding around a narrow horizon groove.

When this scaffolding relaxes, the groove collapses, and “forgetting” occurs — not because information is lost, but because the readiness pattern is no longer sustained.

3. Forgetting Is the Default, Not a Failure

In mainstream psychology, forgetting is a deficit.

In a relational model, forgetting is simply the horizon returning to its natural elasticity.

A potential that is not actively bound dissolves back into the wider readiness field.

Nothing lost.

Nothing deleted.

Just released.

This means:

memory is effort
forgetting is relaxation
recall is re-binding
rumination is involuntary sustained binding
distraction is horizon re-expansion overpowering the binding scaffold

Memory and forgetting become dynamic properties of horizon shape, not the presence or absence of content.

4. Ecological Scaffolding: How the Environment Holds Potential for Us

Because memory is horizon-binding, not storage, the environment becomes part of the memory system — not metaphorically, but literally.

A notebook line, a gesture, a visual anchor, a rhythmic beat: these are not external aids.

They are gradient stabilisers that reduce the metabolic cost of holding potentials open.

Writing something “down so you don’t forget” is not outsourcing content.

It is using the environment to maintain a readiness pattern the organism cannot metabolically sustain alone.

This reframes extended cognition without importing representation:

The environment is not a repository.
It is part of the scaffolding that stabilises relational potential.

Memory is ecological.

5. Long-Term Memory Without Storage

If nothing is stored, what is long-term memory?

Long-term memory is stabilised patterning of readiness — the durable reorganisation of the relational field.

Learning is not the encoding of information but:

changes in baseline readiness
shifts in horizon elasticity
altered gradient sensitivity
new inclination patterns
reorganised coupling relations

A scar is not stored pain, yet it alters future gradients of sensitivity.

Likewise, long-term memory alters the system’s future horizon shape.

Long-term memory is the sedimentation of relational change.

6. Why This Recut Matters

This model resolves every longstanding puzzle without invoking mechanism:

the capacity limit of working memory → the metabolic cost of maintaining narrow horizon scaffolding
the fragility of memory under distraction → horizon re-expansion collapsing the bound pocket
the difficulty of multitasking → competing horizon bindings destabilise each other
the role of environment in cognition → gradient scaffolding, not information storage
the continuity of long-term memory → stable shifts in readiness, not preserved representations
the phenomenology of remembering → the re-actualisation of a readiness field, not retrieval of content

Memory is no longer a mysterious internal archive.

It is the behaviour of horizons in time.

7. Memory as a Condition for Construal

Memory provides the scaffolding that lets construal become stable:

working memory stabilises potentials
emotion modulates the cost and elasticity of the scaffold
attention narrows the horizon so the bound potentials can actualise
construal cuts the phenomenon itself

Memory is the ongoing holding-open that makes meaning possible.

It is not storage.

It is the maintenance of relational potential.

Next: Post 5 — Construal as the Actualisation Cut

The Cognitive Thread: 3 Emotion as Metabolic Readiness Modulation

Emotion is typically treated as a qualitative interior state: a feeling, a valence, an affect.

Psychology toggles between two bad options:

emotion as internal content (a subjective colouration of experience)
emotion as a mechanism (a module triggering behavioural responses)

Both inherit the same metaphysical mistake:

they treat the organism as a container with inner states.

A relational ontology eliminates the container entirely.

There is no interior “emotion” to be felt, repressed, or expressed.

There is only the system’s dynamic modulation of readiness — the metabolic reconfiguration of the horizon.

Emotion is not something the organism has.

It is something the organism does to its relational potential.

Emotion is metabolic readiness modulation.

1. The Relational Premise: Readiness is Primary

Every living system maintains a structured horizon of potential:

gradients it can incline toward
gradients it must avoid
couplings it is sensitive to
actions it is prepared to enact
alternatives it must inhibit

This field of readiness is metabolic through and through.

The organism does not first “feel an emotion” and then adjust behaviour.

The shift in readiness is the phenomenon psychology labels as emotion.

Emotion is the system’s re-tuning of its inclination landscape.

2. The Metabolic Reconfiguration

A readiness field has two fundamental properties:

availability (How much energy can be mobilised?)
elasticity (How widely or narrowly can the horizon stretch?)

Emotions are ways of modulating these properties to reorganise how coupling takes place.

Here are the recuts, expressed relationally:

Fear

narrows the horizon abruptly
increases gradient sensitivity
prioritises fast actualisation pathways
suppresses alternative inclinations

Fear is not “negative affect.”

It is a metabolic constriction for survival-critical gradients.

Anger

amplifies readiness
decreases inhibitory thresholds
widens immediate-action gradients while suppressing reflective ones
increases environmental torque

Anger is not “arousal plus appraisal.”

It is metabolic overdrive for dominance or boundary enforcement.

Joy

widens the horizon
increases coupling bandwidth
lowers metabolic cost for exploration
enhances gradient diversity without collapse

Joy is not “positive emotion.”

It is metabolic surplus enabling ecological openness.

Sadness

decreases global readiness
collapses horizon elasticity
stabilises low-energy patterns
reduces gradient responsiveness

Sadness is not “low valence.”

It is metabolic conservation — forced horizon narrowing to prevent energetic overspend.

Each so-called “emotion” is a metabolic manoeuvre reshaping how the organism navigates gradients.

3. Emotion as Horizon Reshaping, Not Inner Colouration

Once we re-situate emotion as readiness modulation, several things follow immediately:

emotions are not internal feelings but relational states of coupling
they govern how the horizon expands or contracts
they tune the cost of shifting between inclinations
they structure what counts as actionable possibility
they prepare or prevent actualisation cuts

The point is not metaphorical.

Emotion literally configures the system’s way-of-being-in-relation.

Any feeling associated with emotion is a construal of this metabolic modulation, not the essence of emotion itself.

4. Why Emotion Makes Cognition Possible

Attention requires the horizon to be sufficiently elastic to contract and expand.

Working memory requires energy to hold potentials open.

Construal requires gradients to remain stable long enough to actualise.

Emotion governs all three.

Emotion is the metabolic infrastructure of cognition:

it determines how far the horizon can stretch
how fast it can collapse
how much energy is available to sustain contraction
how many potential states can be held open
how sensitive the system is to new gradients
how strong inclinations must be to actualise

Without emotional modulation, attention becomes rigid, memory collapses, and construal becomes erratic.

Emotion is the condition for cognition, not its by-product.

5. Against Psychologism: Emotion is Ecological, Not Mental

A hawk stooping is not “afraid.”

A wolf preparing to attack is not “angry.”

A child exploring a garden is not “joyful” in the psychological sense.

These are metabolic horizon reconfigurations enabling ecological strategies.

Emotion belongs to the relational dynamic of organism–environment coupling.

What humans call “feelings” are semiotic construals layered on top of these dynamics.

The mistake was ever to look inward.

Emotion is not interior affect.

Emotion is ecological readiness modulation.

6. Why This Recut Matters

This model does what psychology cannot:

grounds emotion biologically without mechanism
integrates emotion into cognition without reducing it to appraisal
shows emotion as a metabolic strategy, not a mental state
positions emotion at the centre of horizon behaviour
eliminates the duality of “affect vs cognition” entirely
provides the conceptual foundation for intelligence as relational responsiveness

By replacing interior feelings with horizon reconfiguration, emotion becomes the system’s most fundamental lever for adjusting how actualisation becomes possible.

Emotion is not a colouration of experience.

It is the metabolic steering of potential.

Next: Post 4 — Memory Without Storage: Horizon-Binding as Ecological Scaffolding

The Cognitive Thread: 2 Attention as Horizon Contraction

Attention is one of psychology’s most overburdened metaphors.

Spotlight. Filter. Resource. Gate. Bottleneck. Priority system.

Every model tries to preserve the same assumption:

There is too much information “out there,” and the mind must select what enters “in here.”

Once relation is primary, this entire architecture dissolves.

There is no “out there” overflowing with inputs.

No “in here” equipped with capacity limits.

No mechanism sorting, filtering, or computing.

Instead, there is a horizon of potential — the structured readiness of a living system coupled to its ecological surround.

Attention is not a process within a container.

It is a dynamic operation on the horizon itself.

Attention is horizon contraction.

1. Removing the Myth of Attentional Resources

In mainstream cognitive theory, attention is costly because it consumes a limited resource.

But once we take relation seriously, cost is not a depletion of an internal store — it is:

the metabolic requirement to sustain a given horizon width
the effort involved in stabilising a narrowed field of inclination
the difficulty of preventing unused potentials from widening the horizon automatically

The “resource” metaphor is merely the residue of a mechanistic model with a fictional interior space.

In a relational ontology, attention does not use up a resource.

It reshapes the relational field.

2. Attention as a Controlled Collapse of Possibility

A living system exists in a state of structured potential: many gradients, many inclinations, many possible alignments.

A wide horizon means:

multiple simultaneous pathways of readiness
high coupling bandwidth
low specificity

Attention narrows this:

Attention is the deliberate reduction of degrees of freedom to stabilise an actionable gradient.

It collapses the wide readiness field into a constrained subset, making certain actualisations feasible while suppressing others.

This gives us precise relational definitions:

inattention → horizon too wide; gradients interfere
focus → horizon narrowed to an optimal basin
distraction → involuntary re-expansion of the horizon
hyperfocus → horizon over-contracted; alternative gradients suppressed
flow → horizon tuned perfectly to the task’s gradient landscape

Nothing here involves selection or filtering.

The system does not choose items; it reshapes its readiness topology.

3. Why Horizon Width Matters

Changing the width of the horizon modulates:

sensitivity to gradients (narrow → high precision; wide → high flexibility)
metabolic cost (narrow horizons require continuous inhibition; wide horizons cost more to maintain globally)
temporal scale of action (narrow → fast sequential cuts; wide → slower, distributed responsiveness)
ecological coupling (wide → high bandwidth; narrow → selective constraint)

Horizon width is the system’s primary cognitive lever.

Attention is simply the act of adjusting it.

This shift makes attention no longer a step in a pipeline, but a global reconfiguration of relational potential.

4. The Ecology of Attention

In relational terms, attention operates not in the head but in the system–environment nexus.

A bird narrowing its horizon to track a predator is not “selecting input”; it is collapsing its sensorimotor readiness around a specific gradient.

A child absorbed in drawing is not “filtering distractions”; the drawing dynamically contracts the horizon to a narrow attractor groove.

The environment is not “out there” to be processed.

It is a field of gradients whose salience depends on current horizon shape.

Thus:

attention is enacted in the coupling
the horizon is co-shaped by organism and ecology
narrowing is not an internal act but an ecological manoeuvre

Attention becomes a behaviour, not a mental mechanism.

5. Attention as a Pre-Condition for Construal

Only by narrowing the horizon can the system make an actualisation cut — the construal of a phenomenon.

With a wide horizon, gradients compete; none stabilise.

With a properly narrowed horizon, a gradient becomes actionable, and construal can occur without collapse or interference.

This produces a deep identity:

Attention is the preparation of the horizon that allows construal to actualise as a stable phenomenon.

It is not a precursor to meaning.

It is the shaping of relational potential that makes meaning possible.

Attention is the pre-semiotic modulation of the field.

6. Why This Recut Matters

A relational account of attention avoids every mechanistic assumption:

no spotlight
no filter
no capacity limits
no internal representations
no processing pipeline
no dual-system architecture

Instead:

Attention is the strategic narrowing of the system’s horizon of potential, enabling stable coupling and viable actualisation.

This redefinition allows the rest of cognition to be re-derived.

Emotion modulates the cost and elasticity of horizon shifts.

Working memory stabilises local pockets of potential to prevent collapse during sustained narrowings.

Intuition and analysis become contrasting strategies for managing horizon width.

Attention is the hinge on which the entire cognitive thread pivots.

Next: Post 3 — Emotion as Metabolic Readiness Modulation

The Cognitive Thread: 1 What Becomes of “Mind” When Relation Is Primary

Mind is usually treated as an interior domain.

A private theatre.

A computational engine.

A representational workspace.

Something inside a head that mirrors, transforms, or misfires relative to something “outside.”

This entire architecture collapses the moment relation — not substance, not mechanism — becomes primary.

Once we take relation seriously as the generative condition of all phenomena, the category of “mind” cannot remain what psychology has inherited from early modern metaphysics. Mind becomes neither a container nor a process, neither a module nor a system. It becomes a pattern of horizon behaviour: the way a living system navigates, contracts, stabilises, and cuts its field of potential.

This post marks the entry into that reconfigured terrain.

1. The Problem: Psychology Inherits Its Ontology by Accident

Modern psychology takes its ontological givens from three places:

the interiority/exteriority split of Cartesian metaphysics
the mechanistic modelling of early physiology
the representational logic imported from philosophy of mind and AI

Together, they produce the familiar image:

perception inputs → representations → internal processes → action outputs.

Even when updated with connectionism or predictive processing, the same architecture holds: cognition is something that happens in a system, operating on something else, using mechanisms inside an organism.

Relation is reduced to causal influence or information flow.

But in a relational ontology:

there are no independent substances
there is no interior space for representations to live
there is no mechanism “doing” cognition
there is no separation between organism and environment as independent entities
and most importantly, phenomena are construed events, not pre-existing items awaiting recognition

This forces a radical re-cut.

Psychology’s categories can’t be repaired.

They must be re-derived.

2. Mind Recut: From Inner Space to Horizon Behaviour

Once we take relation as primary, mind is no longer an interior thing.

It is a mode of ecological negotiation.

A living system exists as a dynamic readiness field — a structured potential to incline, respond, avoid, pursue, couple, or disengage. The world it inhabits is not a container of objects but a horizon of gradients, constraints, and affordances.

Mind, in this frame, is:

the dynamic adjustment of that horizon — widening it, narrowing it, stabilising it, and cutting it into experience.

Not an internal processor.

Not a storage system.

Not a homuncular observer.

But a pattern of relational modulation, allowing the system to navigate complexity at speed.

This reframes every major cognitive category:

attention → horizon contraction
emotion → metabolic readiness modulation
working memory → ecological binding of potential
construal → the actualisation cut (first-order meaning)
intuition vs analysis → contrasting horizon strategies

The point is not metaphor.

These are literal re-descriptions of the system’s relational dynamics.

3. The Critical Turn: Meaning Without Mechanism

Taking relation seriously means nothing like “information processing” remains.

There are no inputs.

No stored items.

No computational states.

No internal representations.

Instead:

readiness is the system’s structured potential
horizon width governs the scope of inclination
metabolic modulation tunes which gradients matter
coupling bandwidth structures the system’s sensitivity
construal actualises the phenomenon — not as an interpretation of something, but as the phenomenon itself

Cognition becomes a choreography of gradients, not a sequence of mental operations.

This collapses the psychologistic fantasy of mind as an inner stage.

4. Why This Recut Matters

A relational model of mind does several things mainstream theories cannot:

It avoids mechanism without collapsing into mysticism.
Everything is fully naturalised yet non-mechanistic.
It explains cognition as ecological behaviour.
Mind is not located in the organism but in the organism–environment nexus.
It connects directly to your relational biology.
Readiness, horizon, inclination, gradient — these become the cognitive primitives.
It aligns with your deep-time trajectory.
Mind becomes an evolutionary strategy for navigating expanding horizons of possibility.
It prepares the bridge to semiosis.
Construal, as the actualisation cut, links cognition to meaning without importing representation or symbol manipulation.

This post sets the ground.

The next posts develop each recut in detail.

5. What Comes Next

Post 2: Attention as Horizon Contraction

Attention as the controlled collapse of potential: the system modulating its degrees of freedom to stabilise an actionable gradient.