If meaning is not everywhere, then coordination must be taken seriously without it.
This episode develops a deliberately non-semiotic account of coordination—one that treats value systems as complete, powerful, and sufficient in their own domain. The goal is not to diminish meaning, but to prevent it from being prematurely invoked where it does no explanatory work.
Before there is interpretation, before there is construal, before phenomena appear as anything, there is coordination.
What Coordination Is (and Is Not)
Coordination is the stabilisation of action under constraint.
A coordination system:
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Regulates behaviour relative to conditions of viability
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Couples actions across agents or components
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Maintains patterns over time
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Responds to perturbation through feedback
What it does not do is interpret.
There is no perspective here. No phenomenon is apprehended. No distinction is drawn between appearance and reality, sign and referent, meaning and noise. Coordination systems operate directly on relations between states and actions.
They answer the question: What must happen next for this system to continue?
They do not answer: What is happening?
Value Without Aboutness
Value systems are often misdescribed as being “about” something: about survival, about goals, about optimisation. This is metaphorical shorthand, not ontology.
A value system does not represent survival. It does not know a goal. It does not construe a norm. It simply constrains transitions between states such that some trajectories persist and others are eliminated.
Value, in this sense, is not meaning-laden. It is selective pressure internal to the system.
This is why value systems can be:
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Blind
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Myopic
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Brutally effective
They coordinate successfully precisely because they are not burdened by interpretation.
Why Gradualist Accounts Fail
But complexity alone does not produce construal.
No amount of:
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Reinforcement
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Signal coupling
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Pattern sensitivity
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Adaptive optimisation
will, by itself, yield a phenomenon appearing as something. These accounts mistake functional differentiation for perspectival actualisation.
Meaning is not coordination with decorations. It is a different kind of operation altogether.
The Missing Operation: Construal
What coordination lacks is not sophistication, but a specific operation: construal.
Construal is not:
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A better signal
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A richer internal state
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A more efficient mapping
It is the actualisation of a phenomenon through a perspectival cut.
Where coordination stabilises transitions, construal brings a phenomenon into being as a phenomenon. This is not a temporal upgrade but an ontological shift. A system does not slowly “approach” meaning; it either performs construal or it does not.
This is why meaning cannot be said to emerge from value in the usual sense. Emergence here is not accumulation but reorganisation of what counts as an event.
Coordination Is Not Incomplete
It is tempting to treat coordination systems as somehow lacking—proto-semiotic, half-formed, waiting for meaning to arrive.
This is a mistake.
Coordination systems are not unfinished semiotic systems. They are complete systems that solve a different problem. They answer to viability, not intelligibility.
Only once this is fully acknowledged can we ask a genuinely interesting question:
How can a system that does not construe ever come to do so?
Something else must intervene.
Looking Ahead
The next episode introduces that intervention.
That conditional—precise, fragile, and non-gradual—is where the real work begins.
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