The Becoming of Possibility: 12/13/25

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:

Relational primacy: Meaning arises from relation, not entities, representations, or computation.
Horizons over modules: Semiotic potential exists as soft, scalable fields, realised through construals and stabilised across symbolic ecologies.
Recursive generation: Story, myth, and symbolic systems function as recursive mechanisms, producing and interpreting relational potential.
Non-teleological evolution: Semiotic ecologies evolve through drift, innovation, and collapse, not by design or purpose.
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.

Toward a Mythos of Meaning: 8 The Becoming of Possibility

We now arrive at the capstone of this semiotic series: the becoming of possibility. If previous posts traced semiotic events, symbolic horizons, the mythic turn, and story as systemic self-interpretation, this post examines how meaning itself generates new horizons of possibility, enabling symbolic systems to evolve, expand, and recursively transform relational ecologies.

1. Meaning as Generative Site

Meaning is not a passive attribute, a representation, or a byproduct of biological or social activity. It is the generative site where possibilities emerge:

Each construal actualises relational potential, producing new alignments.
These alignments create semiotic affordances for further construals.
Symbolic life is thus self-propagating: every act of meaning-making reshapes the field of what can be construed.

Meaning is the engine of possibility, not a reflection of it.

2. Symbolic Systems Creating New Relational Potentials

Symbolic systems—language, myth, culture, narrative, ritual—are not static repositories. They are dynamic generators of relational potential:

Recursive scaffolding: Patterns of construal stabilise symbolic affordances across horizons.
Cross-scale propagation: Semiotic ecologies extend from individuals to communities, across time and space.
Innovation and drift: New construals emerge from latent potentials, expanding the horizon of symbolic possibility.

Symbolic systems therefore create their own ecological niches, opening pathways that did not exist prior to their actualisation.

3. Mythic Intelligences and Systemic Horizons

At the highest scale, mythic horizons act as meta-intelligences:

They organise relational potential across generations, providing interpretive scaffolding.
They stabilise soft infinities while allowing recursive growth.
They enable symbolic systems to anticipate, encode, and propagate patterns of meaning beyond immediate construals.

Mythic intelligences are not agents; they are emergent functions of semiotic recursion, shaping systemic horizons and coordinating large-scale semiotic evolution.

4. The Expansion of Possibility

Through semiotic recursion, innovation, and mythic scaffolding, possibility itself evolves:

Horizons expand: semiotic ecologies become richer, more complex, and more generative.
Symbolic life extends beyond the immediate: from local construals to cultural, historical, and mythic scales.
Relational potentials are continually restructured, producing ever-new domains of interpretability.

Meaning is thus both the medium and the mechanism of possibility: it generates, propagates, and modulates the conditions for further semiotic growth.

5. Takeaway

The becoming of possibility is the culmination of relational semiotics:

First-order meaning actualises potential.
Symbolic horizons stabilise and propagate it.
Stories and myths recursively interpret and orient meaning.
Possibility evolves, expanding relational fields, semiotic ecologies, and systemic horizons.

Symbolic life is the engine of relational potential, and meaning is its generative site. Every construal, every horizon, every myth contributes to the continuous evolution of possibility itself.

Semiotic life is self-extending relationality, the becoming of possibility in action.

Toward a Mythos of Meaning: 7 Metaphenomena and the Ontology of Story

Having established the mythic turn, we now explore how stories emerge within semiotic ecologies and the role of second-order semiotic phenomena—metaphenomena—in structuring symbolic life.

This post examines the distinction between first-order meaning and higher-order patterns, and how narrative arises as a systemic self-interpretation of semiotic fields.

1. First-Order Meaning vs. Second-Order Metaphenomena

First-order meaning: the immediate construal, the semiotic event actualising relational potential within a horizon.
Second-order metaphenomena: emergent patterns across multiple semiotic events; structures that arise from, but are not reducible to, individual construals.

Metaphenomena are not representations. They are observable regularities in relational alignment, persistent patterns that acquire interpretive leverage over subsequent semiotic activity.

Examples include:

Narrative arcs that emerge across multiple stories.
Archetypal motifs stabilising across generations.
Cultural or symbolic conventions that shape new construals without being explicitly “encoded.”

Metaphenomena are the scaffolding of semiotic self-interpretation.

2. Story as Systemic Self-Interpretation

Story is a mode of relational recursion:

It aggregates first-order meanings into coherent, cross-event patterns.
It interprets the semiotic ecology, revealing structure in apparent flux.
It produces interpretive affordances: constraints and possibilities for future semiotic events.

In this sense, stories are not narrative entertainment. They are tools through which semiotic systems interpret themselves, recognising relational alignments and modulating them for coherence, generativity, and resonance.

Story is the semiotic system looking at itself and producing a pattern that guides its own evolution.

3. Why Myth Systems Arise Spontaneously

Given a sufficiently rich semiotic ecology:

Relational horizons interact recursively.
Repeated patterns of construal stabilise into recognisable motifs.
Semiotic drift, innovation, and collapse generate systemic regularities.

These regularities do not require conscious design. They arise spontaneously because meaning-bearing ecologies tend toward pattern formation:

Local construals influence future construals.
Recurrent motifs propagate through symbolic horizons.
Patterns that enhance coherence, interpretability, or cross-scale alignment persist.

Thus, myth systems are emergent phenomena, inevitable wherever symbolic potential is recursively actualised.

4. Implications for Semiotic Evolution

Metaphenomena provide higher-order coherence without collapsing relational openness.
Story functions as an interpretive lens: construals are stabilised, but horizons remain soft and generative.
Myth and narrative co-evolve, producing robust, scalable, and adaptive semiotic ecologies.

In other words, symbolic life is self-organising, and story is the medium through which semiotic systems recognise and modulate their own structure.

5. Takeaway

First-order meaning: semiotic events actualising potential.
Second-order metaphenomena: emergent structures that organise, interpret, and stabilise semiotic horizons.
Story: systemic self-interpretation that arises naturally in meaning-bearing ecologies.
Myth: the high-order horizon that enables stories and semiotic recursion to propagate.

With this understanding, we are prepared to examine how semiotic potential itself evolves cumulatively, from individual construals through stories and myths, into the becoming of possibility—the generative site where symbolic life continuously extends relational horizons.