If reflexive matter gives rise to observers through cuts in potential, then what we call emergence — the appearance of new forms, behaviours, or organisations — must also be rethought through the lens of relational ontology.
Emergence is often imagined hierarchically: as a bottom-up process in which simpler elements combine to generate more complex wholes. This view, however, still presupposes an ontological stratification: base level, emergent level, and some mysterious mechanism bridging the two.
But what if emergence is not a movement from less to more, or from simple to complex, but from one phase of potential to another? What if emergence is not a result of layering, but a reconfiguration of possibility within a reflexive system?
From Layers to Phases
In a relational ontology, a system is not built up from parts, but defined as a structured potential — a constellation of relations that can be cut in different ways to yield different instances.
Emergence, then, is not the appearance of something new in an absolute sense, but a reorganisation of how that potential is construed. It is a phase shift in the system’s own self-cutting capacity — not additive but configurational.
Think of how water becomes ice or steam. Nothing is added or subtracted — the same molecular potential is restructured into a new phase. Now transpose that logic into the semiotic and the physical: the emergence of life, mind, society, or symbolic meaning need not involve new substances or external causes. Rather, they mark a new cut through a system’s reflexive potential — a new way of making meaning real.
Reflexivity and Thresholds
Because the system is reflexive, these phase shifts are not imposed from outside, but arise through the system’s own internal dynamics of construal. Reflexivity allows for bootstrapping, for recursive resonance, for thresholds of coherence that, once crossed, yield qualitatively distinct regimes of organisation.
The emergence of language, for instance, was not the imposition of a symbolic system onto pre-symbolic beings. It was a reorganisation of construal: a shift in how potential was patterned, interpreted, and aligned. Meaning was always latent in the system — but a new phase made it actual.
Crucially, these thresholds are not hierarchical. The symbolic is not “above” the biological. The observer is not “above” matter. Instead, these are different patterns of phase coherence, different cuts in a multiply reflexive system.
The Power of Non-Hierarchical Emergence
Reframing emergence in this way releases us from the logic of transcendence — the belief that meaning, mind, or consciousness must somehow emerge from below or descend from above. Instead, everything meaningful is relationally co-actualised. It arises not from scale, but from structure; not from accumulation, but from alignment.
Emergence, in this view, is a sign that the system has shifted how it construes itself. A new phase has opened. A new resonance has become real.
In the next post, we’ll extend this logic of emergence into the realm of symbolic abstraction, asking: What is a symbol, if not a sign of meaning detached from matter? How can we reconstrue symbolisation within a reflexive, relational world?
No comments:
Post a Comment