If meaning is not overlaid on reality, but is instead what reality becomes through symbolic construal, then the symbolic is not merely epistemic. It is ontogenic. It cuts into being—not to describe it, but to phase it.
In the previous series, we explored how construal is collective: how social formations phase through symbolic coordination, aligning value and meaning in patterned dynamics. But now we must follow this logic into deeper terrain: the symbolic not just as coordination within the social, but as a fold within the cosmos.
A fold is not a separation; it is a modulation of continuity. When meaning becomes reflexive—when a system construes its own construals symbolically—it folds. Not as a metaphor, but as an ontological operation. The cosmos becomes symbolically folded: a reality in which construal modifies potential, where symbolic abstraction enables new alignments of becoming.
This is not to spiritualise matter, nor to idealise mind. It is to displace both, in favour of a symbolic ontology in which neither is primary. What matters is not the existence of mental or material substances, but the capacity for systems to symbolically construe—and thereby phase their own development.
The symbolic fold is where potential becomes relationally structured through abstraction: where symbolic systems open up new axes of alignment, new scales of emergence, new horizons of construal. This is how collectives phase-shift into new historical formations—but also how cosmos evolves through symbolic inflection.
We must learn to see the symbolic not as a layer, but as a fold: a recursive dimension of ontological modulation, emerging wherever construal constrains and aligns itself.
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