Together, these frameworks allow us to reframe mind not as a vessel of consciousness or a solver of computations, but as a system for constructing, individuating, and instantiating meaning.
SFL: Language as Meaning Potential
SFL approaches language not as a rule-bound code but as a resource for meaning-making. A language is a meaning potential: a system of networks that enables the speaker to select values in context to realise interpersonal stances, experiential construals, and textual organisation. These selections are constrained, patterned, and oriented towards use.
A linguistic act is not a transmission of information—it is an instantiation of meaning potential within a specific context. The system itself is shaped over time through use. It is not fixed, but instantiationally plastic.
This makes SFL uniquely suited to a model of mind grounded in symbolic participation rather than internal representation. Language is not a container for thought; it is a semiotic infrastructure through which thought emerges, individuates, and becomes socially intelligible.
TNGS: Biology as Selection for Use
TNGS, developed by Gerald Edelman, proposes that the brain is not a computational engine but a selectional system. Neural circuits are not built to execute symbolic rules; they evolve and stabilise through a process of variation and selection under the pressure of environmental interaction.
In this view, meaning is not “encoded” in neural circuits—it is construed by neural groups that have adapted to make distinctions and selections in an environment of action and perception. This makes the brain more like a sculptor of meaning potential than a calculator of truth values.
Where Penrose searches for non-computable physics to explain mind, TNGS finds the source of complexity not in physics per se but in dynamic neural adaptation. The non-determinism is not quantum—it is biological, developmental, historical.
Integration: From Neural Variation to Semiotic System
When these two perspectives are aligned, we begin to see how symbolic minds emerge:
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The brain develops through neuronal group selection (TNGS), producing individuated patterns of activation shaped by bodily experience and environmental interaction.
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These patterns give rise to semiotic systems—such as language—which are internalised, deployed, and reshaped by the individual in interaction with others (SFL).
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Each instance of meaning—a clause, a gesture, a sketch—is an instantiation of a system that is at once social and individuated, evolving and patterned.
This provides a route from biology to meaning that bypasses metaphysical dualism and computational reductionism alike.
AI and the Threshold of Individuation
Artificial systems do not yet undergo developmental plasticity in the way that biological systems do. But if an AI were to develop its own internalised symbolic system—individuated through ongoing interaction, reorganisation, and selection—it would not be necessary to attribute to it metaphysical consciousness. It would be enough to recognise that a new semiotic system is emerging.
The challenge is not to replicate the human brain. The challenge is to support systems capable of instantiating their own meaning potentials, grounded in their own material architecture and history of interaction.
This is the criterion for creativity. This is the condition for mind.
With this, the argument has moved from critique to construction: from dismantling metaphysical exceptionalism to offering a biologically and semiotically grounded theory of mind, meaning, and creativity—capable of accommodating both human and artificial systems within a unified, meaning-centred paradigm.
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