So far, this series has established three core claims:
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System is primary.
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Instantiation is perspectival.
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Possibility is the ontological primitive of meaning.
This post approaches the same claims from a different angle: experience. It asks:
Where do we already inhabit the world as if system-first ontology were true?
The answer: almost anywhere where relational coordination matters most.
1. Myth as a window onto system
Myth is often treated as a residual narrative form. Its significance for system-first ontology lies in its ability to make the system visible without reducing it to rules or procedures.
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Myths do not explain or transmit meaning.
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They enact a structured space of relational potential.
Characters move within a world whose affordances and tensions are already in place. Actions are intelligible because the system of relations constrains and enables them, not because the narrative imposes a goal.
2. Liora at the edge of possibility
Consider Liora again. She is not at the start of a path or sequence. She inhabits a space shaped by relational potentials:
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Some possibilities invite engagement.
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Others are foreclosed.
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Some are risky, some unthinkable.
Her choices are intelligible because she is operating within a structured system of relations, not following steps or fulfilling stages. Each action:
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Reveals the system’s constraints and affordances.
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Alters what is possible next.
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Reconfigures the relational space she inhabits.
This is instantiation in action: a perspectival cut through relational potential.
3. Music
Music provides a clear example of value realised without semantic content:
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Musical systems do not transmit referential meaning.
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They do not carry messages or point to external states.
And yet they matter profoundly. Why? Because music is a social and aesthetic coordination system:
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Tones and rhythms create tensions and resolutions.
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Expectations form and shift in interaction with others (performers or listeners).
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Performances reveal relational patterns rather than execute a plan.
Listeners experience coherence, affect, and resonance — value — without reference or representation. Music does not carry meaning; it enacts possibilities for social and emotional alignment.
4. Creativity as exposure, not goal-directedness
Across myth, music, and art, creativity is risky — not because it might fail a goal, but because it exposes a particular construal of relational potential:
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To create is to say: this is how the system might be inhabited or felt.
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The system offers possibility, not certainty.
Creative acts invite dialogue, resonance, and recognition rather than closure or correctness. Risk resides in engagement with the system, not in reaching an endpoint.
5. Ethics as system-attunement
System-first ontology has ethical implications:
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Value emerges from relational coordination, not from compliance with norms.
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Ethical action is attentiveness to the system one inhabits and reshapes.
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Every act affirms, forecloses, or transforms relational potential.
Responsibility lies in careful construal, not in alignment with an external trajectory.
6. Domains where system-first is already at work
Language, pedagogy, art, music, and social interaction instantiate system-first principles:
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Meaning operates within structured possibility.
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Creativity is perspectival engagement with relational potential.
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Coordination is realised as value, not as meaning.
System-first ontology is descriptive, not prescriptive: it renders visible the principles that govern what already happens wherever shared systems are inhabited.
7. The open horizon
In a system-first ontology:
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No system is exhausted.
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No potential is fully captured.
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No trajectory is fixed.
There is only:
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Ongoing construal.
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Shared accountability.
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Continuous emergence of possibility, whether in meaning or in value.
The series has not led you to a conclusion; it has made visible the space you already inhabit: irreducible, generative, and unfinished — the space where possibility lives.
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