Relational Horizons: Meaning, Matter, and the Symbolic Turn

1 Matter as System

The metaphysical notion of matter has long haunted Western thought. From the atomism of Democritus to the substratum theories of early modern physics, matter has been treated as the ultimate "stuff" of the universe — the bedrock of reality upon which all else is built. In these accounts, matter is what remains when form, function, relation, and meaning are stripped away: a brute, inert, passive substrate, waiting to be shaped or set in motion.

But what if this image is not only misleading — what if it fundamentally misapprehends the nature of existence itself?

From the perspective of relational ontology, the notion of matter as substance gives way to something altogether more subtle and generative. Instead of conceiving matter as "that which is," we treat matter as that which may be actualised — a structured potential rather than a fixed base. Matter, in this view, is not a thing beneath or behind the world of appearance, but a system of possibilities whose instances are events. It is not the passive recipient of form, but the structured capacity to enter into patterns of construal.

This is a decisive shift: from substance ontology to system ontology. And it changes everything.

Matter without Substance

Traditional metaphysics treats matter as a substratum that underlies form. The dualism between form and matter — famously elaborated in Aristotle — has cast a long shadow. In contemporary physics, it lingers still in conceptions of spacetime as the backdrop of events, or in the tendency to posit particles as fundamental units whose relations are derivative.

But in a relational ontology, this hierarchy is inverted.

Rather than grounding relation in substance, we ground substance in relation. Matter is not prior to its organisation; it is its organisation — a system of construals, a set of structured affordances. To say that something is material is not to say it is made of some universal stuff, but that it actualises a particular cut in a system of potential — a cut that makes difference, that instantiates form, that brings a meaning-laden event into being.

Matter as Possibility-Structured

Within this framework, we can no longer speak of matter as that which exists independently of meaning. Every "material" phenomenon is already an instance of a system — a cut in a structured field of potential. Just as language construes meaning by actualising options in a semiotic system, so too do physical phenomena arise through the actualisation of systemic affordances.

This is not to collapse physics into semantics. Rather, it is to refuse the metaphysical distinction between a world of meaningless stuff and a world of meaningful patterns. If systems are inherently construed, and instantiations are perspectival actualisations of possibility, then matter is already relationally organised. It is not the opposite of meaning. It is its systemic counterpart.

Matter, then, is not the end-point of reduction. It is the point at which potential becomes situated in a particular relation — the point at which the world cuts itself.

Looking Ahead

This first post lays the conceptual foundation for what follows. We have reframed matter not as substance but as system — not as what lies beneath form, but as what gives rise to it through construal. This shift allows us to move beyond the metaphysics of substrate and into a truly relational understanding of physical phenomena.

In the next post, we explore what it means for a system to be instantiated — to be cut into event. There, we will see how matter and energy, time and process, can be rethought as dimensions of semiotic unfolding.

2 The Cut into Event

In the previous post, we reframed matter as system — not as substance or substratum, but as a structured potential for actualisation. We proposed that matter is not the base of being, but a condition for emergence: a field of systemic affordances from which events may be cut.

But what is an event? And how does the world cut itself?

To answer this, we must dwell in the cut itself — not as a temporal happening, but as a perspectival shift: the move from theory to instance, from possibility to construal, from system to event. In a relational ontology, an event is not the occurrence of something in spacetime. It is a shift in perspective across levels of organisation — a point at which systemic potential is reflexively instantiated, yielding a phenomenon.

From System to Event

When we speak of a system, we speak of a theory of possibilities. A system is not a set of things, but a constellation of potential relations — a patterned space of affordances that can be differently construed. It has no spatiotemporal extension. It is not “there” in the world as an object. It is the possibility of a world — an architecture of what may become actual.

An event, by contrast, is what happens when a cut is made through this potential — when a particular configuration is actualised in a situated construal. This cut is not an operation on the system, but a shift within the system: a reflexive gesture by which one perspective enters into relation with another.

In this sense, an event is not a thing that happens in time. It brings time with it — it is the emergence of temporality as a relation between systems and their instances.

Instantiating the Physical

This shift allows us to rethink physical processes in radically non-substantialist terms.

Instead of imagining a universe composed of tiny particles in motion, we can conceive physical phenomena as events of construal — actualisations of systemic possibility that yield time, process, and change. A photon is not a "thing" that travels through space. It is a cut through a quantum field — an instance that brings a relation into focus. Similarly, mass is not a property of a particle, but an affordance within a system of dynamic potential: a perspectival cut that gives rise to inertia, momentum, and gravitational relation.

To instantiate a system physically is not to place it "into" the world. It is to construe the world in such a way that a new relational configuration becomes eventful. In this model, the world is not made of matter — it is always already making matter as it construes itself.

Reflexivity and Causality

The concept of instantiation as a perspectival cut also reconfigures our understanding of causality.

Traditional models of causation presume that causes precede effects in time, and that physical laws govern transitions from one state to another. But if events are construals of systemic potential, then causality is not a chain of happenings — it is a pattern of reflexive organisation across systems. An event does not cause another in linear sequence; rather, one instantiation constrains the space of affordance within which another may arise.

Causality becomes reflexive coherence across perspectival cuts. It is not about one thing pushing another. It is about the mutual structuring of actualisation across different levels of organisation.

Looking Ahead

We have now reframed the event as a perspectival shift — the moment when system becomes instance, and matter becomes eventful. This shift from possibility to construal reorients our understanding of time, causality, and the physical itself.

In the next post, we will explore what it means for matter to be reflexive — not just the product of construal, but itself a medium that construes. We will ask: can matter have perspective? And if so, what kind of physics follows?

3 The Matter with Perspective

We have redefined matter not as substance but as system — a structured potential for actualisation. We have redefined event not as a point in spacetime but as a perspectival shift: a cut through systemic potential, yielding a phenomenon. The question now arises: if events are construals, whose perspective do they express?

To answer this, we must let go of the subject-object binary that underwrites most modern metaphysics. The question is not whether there is a subject who construes matter, or whether matter is inert. The question is whether construal can be attributed to matter itself — whether matter, in this reframed ontology, has perspective.

Perspective Without Subjectivity

Perspective, in a relational ontology, is not the exclusive property of minds. It is not a feature of consciousness or interiority. It is a structural orientation — a point of relation within a system — from which a construal may be enacted. That is, a perspective is not something that someone has, but a position in a relational topology from which an instance of meaning becomes possible.

When a cell divides, when a star collapses, when a molecule binds — these are not blind happenings governed by universal laws. They are actualisations of relational affordance: constrained by what has come before, but not determined by it. The system instantiates itself reflexively. It acts from a perspective — not as a self-aware subject, but as a relational orientation within a network of systemic affordances.

Matter, in this sense, has perspective. It enacts construals. Not representational construals, as in symbolic semiosis — but structural construals: actualisations of potential from a relational locus.

Reflexivity Across Scales

If matter has perspective, then the universe is not composed of meaningless stuff arranged into meaningful configurations by conscious minds. Rather, the universe is a cascade of reflexive construals: matter construes itself at every scale.

A supernova construes the relational tensions of its stellar interior. A fault line construes the accumulated stress of tectonic potential. These are not “meanings” in the human sense, but they are cuts from system to event — enactments of a structured potential that bring novelty into being. In this way, reflexivity is not added to the physical — it is the dynamic of the physical.

We might call this pre-semiotic reflexivity: the ability of matter to instantiate itself through patterned construals without invoking language, signification, or intentionality. This pre-semiotic reflexivity is the ground from which semiosis later emerges.

The Physics of Meaning

Once we allow matter to be reflexive, the boundary between physics and meaning begins to dissolve. Not because physical law is meaning, but because both law and meaning emerge from the same ontological move: the cut from system to instance, the actualisation of affordance from a structured potential.

Meaning, in this model, is not imposed upon the material world. It is a further differentiation of a more basic reflexive dynamic: one that gives rise to structure, process, and coherence across time. The physics of meaning is not a physicalist reduction of the semiotic. It is an expansion of the physical into the reflexive — a recognition that even the so-called “inanimate” is already organising itself through construal.

Looking Ahead

If matter is reflexive — if it construes itself through perspectival cuts — then the universe is not a mechanism but a living architecture of affordances. In the next post, we will explore how this architecture gives rise to temporality itself, not as a linear parameter but as an emergent feature of construal: the integration of perspective over phase space.

4 Time as Integration of Perspective

If the universe is a cascade of construals — perspectival cuts through structured potential — then what we call time must also be a product of that cascade. Not a pre-existing dimension along which events are placed, but a property of how systems instantiate themselves. What, then, becomes of time when we shift from a linear metaphysics to a relational ontology?

The Temporality of the Cut

Each construal — each cut — is an instance of perspective enacted. But construals do not occur in isolation. They are patterned across what we might call phase space: a topological field of potential within which cuts can be oriented, coordinated, and sequenced. It is from the integration of such orientations that temporality emerges.

In other words, time is not the container of events. It is a relational cohesion among cuts — a pattern in the way construals relate to one another. The universe does not evolve in time; time is the signature of its evolving pattern of reflexive construals.

This means that temporality is perspectival. It arises when a system not only enacts a construal, but integrates it with prior and possible construals — when it experiences not merely an instance, but a relation among instances. Time is the reflexivity of reflexivity: the self-orientation of cuts within a larger horizon of possibility.

Becoming Without a Timeline

Traditional physics assumes a time axis against which change can be plotted. But this assumes that time is prior to change, rather than a derivative of it. In a relational ontology, we reverse this: change does not occur in time; rather, time emerges from the coherence of change.

This coherence is not uniform. Some systems phase rapidly — their construals tightly packed, quickly shifting — while others phase slowly, with long intervals between shifts in orientation. A glacier construes possibility across millennia; a thought may construe possibility in milliseconds. Both participate in time, but they instantiate different temporalities.

Hence, there is no universal time, only coordinated perspectives within systems. What synchronises them is not a common clock but a shared architecture of potential — a relational field within which construals can be aligned, nested, or phased with respect to one another.

Phase, Memory, and Anticipation

From this vantage, past and future are not points on a line, but orientations within a field of affordance. The “past” is the phase space already integrated into the system’s orientation; the “future” is the region of potential not yet enacted, but accessible from the current perspective.

Memory and anticipation, then, are not epistemic operations imposed on a temporal substrate. They are expressions of how a system orients within its own potentiality — how it threads construals together into patterns that afford continuity. This threading is temporality.

Thus, to remember is not to look back through time, but to reorient to previous construals as still-active perspectives. To anticipate is to navigate the architecture of potential, feeling toward possible cuts before they are made.

Looking Ahead

Temporality, in this ontology, is not a timeline but a pattern of reflexive coherence. It is not ticked off by clocks, but enacted in the rhythms of construal. In the next post, we will explore how such reflexive temporality underpins the emergence of semiotic systems — how meaning itself becomes possible when matter begins to fold perspective upon perspective.

5 When Matter Becomes Meaning

We have framed the cosmos not as a world of things in motion, but as a cascade of construals — reflexive cuts through a structured potential. In this view, time is not a universal backdrop but a phase relation among perspectives. What, then, must we say about meaning?

Meaning is often regarded as a property of language, or perhaps of minds. But in a relational ontology, meaning is more fundamental. It is what happens when matter begins to construe itself reflexively — when patterns of construal not only occur, but become oriented to other patterns as construals.

From Value to Meaning

Not all cuts enact meaning. A molecule folding or a protein binding may instantiate value — that is, they enact a form of biological coordination. But they do not yet construe the cut as a cut; they do not make the construal visible to a further system of orientation.

Meaning requires a meta-cut: not only a differentiation within potential, but a system that can treat that differentiation as meaningful — that is, as part of a system of semiotic affordances.

The crucial difference is this:

A value system selects among potentials to maintain coordination (e.g. metabolism, homeostasis).
A meaning system construes those selections as symbolic choices: instances within a higher-order potential of meaning.

Thus, the emergence of meaning marks a fold in reflexivity — not merely a construal, but a construal of construals.

Matter That Makes Meaning

When material systems begin to phase not only their own possibilities but the construals of other systems — when they treat configurations as instances of a symbolic potential — meaning emerges. This does not require consciousness. It requires meta-systemic coupling: a dynamic through which systems treat their own orientations as semiotic acts.

Language is one such system. But the broader principle is this: meaning is not a layer added to matter. It is what matter does when it begins to integrate its own perspectival orientation into a collective field of affordance.

In this sense, meaning is not supervenient on the material — it is the material reflexivity of perspective. It is matter phase-shifting through construals, where the shifts themselves become orientable.

Semiotic Cuts

Meaning, then, does not occur at the level of events. It occurs at the level of how events are construed. This means that meaning emerges only within a semiotic architecture — a system of possible construals, where any instantiation is apprehended not merely as an event, but as a position within a symbolic potential.

For example: a gesture becomes a sign only when there exists a system that recognises it as such — not as a movement, but as a symbolic instance within a larger relational system.

Thus, semiotic systems are cuts through the cut: architectures of symbolic potential that enable the construal of orientation itself. They instantiate not value, but meaning potential — the capacity to differentiate construals not only in terms of function, but in terms of symbolic relation.

Next: The Ontogenesis of Meaning

Meaning is not simply present in the cosmos. It must evolve — not as a substance, but as a capacity to cut reflexively. In the final post of this series, we will explore how systems come to mean, and how meaning itself transforms the architecture of possibility. We will ask: when matter construes its own construals, what kind of universe comes into being?

6 The Ontogenesis of Meaning

Meaning, in a relational ontology, is not a primitive property of the world. It is not a substance, nor a transcendental layer. It is a phase transition in reflexivity — a shift in how construals can be oriented, integrated, and differentiated within a collective system of potential.

To trace the ontogenesis of meaning, we follow the arc by which matter becomes capable of cutting its own cuts, not only for action, but for symbolic orientation.

From Instantiation to Semiogenesis

The cosmos is rich with instantiations — the ongoing actualisation of structured potentials. Many of these instantiations take the form of value systems: biological, chemical, social. These systems coordinate actions, maintain stability, and enable persistence. But value systems do not, in themselves, constitute meaning.

The difference lies in a second-order capacity: semiogenesis — the emergence of systems that not only instantiate value, but construe those instantiations as meaningful selections from a symbolic potential.

This is not a leap from material to mental, but a shift from pattern enactment to pattern recognition-as-construal. It is the moment when a system begins to track not just what is, but what could have been meant.

The Evolution of Construal

We might imagine a continuum:

At one pole, non-semiotic systems: they instantiate potentials but do not construe.
In the middle, proto-semiotic systems: they enact constraints on constraints (e.g., animal signalling systems), coordinating patterns but without a symbolic architecture.
At the other pole, semiotic systems proper: they construct and orient toward systems of symbolic potential, capable of treating any instantiation as an instance of meaning.

This evolution is not linear. It involves recursive layering: systems developing the capacity to treat their own distinctions as potentially significant, thereby opening a space of symbolic construals.

Consciousness Is Not Required

It is tempting to equate meaning with consciousness. But in this model, consciousness is a late and specialised form of semiotic reflexivity — a mode of symbolic orientation layered on prior systems of phase coupling and construal.

Meaning emerges not when something becomes aware, but when systems begin to participate in a symbolic potential: when their construals are positioned within a collective architecture of interpretability.

This is why meaning cannot be reduced to neural activation, nor to social behaviour. It is a relational phenomenon: a system-oriented-to-systems as symbolising.

A World Made Meaningful

Once such systems arise, the cosmos is no longer simply a site of physical causality or organic coordination. It becomes a semiotic ecology: a world of construed relations, orientable meanings, and symbolic affordances.

This changes what is possible:

New kinds of collectivity (e.g. language communities, symbolic cultures).
New kinds of temporality (e.g. historical memory, projected futures).
New forms of reality itself — because reality is now shaped by the systems that construe it as meaningful.

We do not live in a world plus meaning. We live in a world that means — because the systems within it have evolved to construe possibility as symbolic potential.

Coda: Toward a Physics of Meaning

This concludes the Reflexive Matter series. We have traced a path from matter to meaning, not as a dualism but as a relational continuity of reflexive phase-shifts. Meaning is not imposed on the world. It is what the world becomes, once it construes its own construals in symbolic terms.

The next step is to ask how such semiotic architectures shape not only life and language, but the very structure of reality. If matter has evolved to mean, then reality itself has become reflexively meaningful.

Relational Horizons: Meaning, Matter, and the Symbolic Turn

Saturday, 2 August 2025

2 Reference Frames as Semantic Cuts: Reconstructing Relativity without Observers

From Observer to Cut

Relativity without Observers

Simultaneity as Semantic Configuration

The Inertial Frame as a Semantic Default

The Referential Act

Friday, 1 August 2025

1 Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning

1 Matter as System

Matter without Substance

Matter as Possibility-Structured

Looking Ahead

2 The Cut into Event

From System to Event

Instantiating the Physical

Reflexivity and Causality

Looking Ahead

3 The Matter with Perspective

Perspective Without Subjectivity

Reflexivity Across Scales

The Physics of Meaning

Looking Ahead

4 Time as Integration of Perspective

The Temporality of the Cut

Becoming Without a Timeline

Phase, Memory, and Anticipation

Looking Ahead

5 When Matter Becomes Meaning

From Value to Meaning

Matter That Makes Meaning

Semiotic Cuts

Next: The Ontogenesis of Meaning

6 The Ontogenesis of Meaning

From Instantiation to Semiogenesis

The Evolution of Construal

Consciousness Is Not Required

A World Made Meaningful

Coda: Toward a Physics of Meaning