Let’s imagine Systemic Functional Neuroscience (SFN) as a radically integrative paradigm: one that aligns Halliday’s semiotic theory of meaning with Edelman’s neural theory of value, and refuses to treat consciousness as separable from semiosis.
We’ll start by sketching some principles, then move to how SFN would reconceive key concepts—like consciousness, perception, attention, memory—and finish by imagining its methods and potential research programme.
🌐 1. Foundational Principles of Systemic Functional Neuroscience (SFN)
1.1. Meaning as Primary
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The brain doesn’t contain meaning. It is a material substrate for the semiotic enactment of meaning.
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SFN treats semiosis as the primary organising principle of brain function—not behaviour, cognition, or input-output mappings.
1.2. System before Structure
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Borrowing from SFL: a system is a network of options. Meaning is not in forms (e.g. neural activation patterns), but in the relations among potential alternatives.
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Neural groups form instantial systems, not static circuits: each instantiation draws from, and reshapes, the meaning potential of the brain.
1.3. Instantiation across Strata
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Meaning unfolds simultaneously across multiple levels (strata): neural (material), phenomenological (experiential), and symbolic (semiotic).
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Each act of consciousness is a stratal instantiation: a single instance realising patterns across all three strata.
1.4. Meaning is Metafunctionally Organised
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Neural activity enacts meaning that serves metafunctions:
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Ideational: construing experience (e.g. sensation, memory, prediction)
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Interpersonal: enacting relations (e.g. affect, motivation, valence)
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Textual: structuring flow (e.g. attention, coherence, salience)
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These aren’t categories we impose on meaning—they are organising principles of meaning-making itself, realised neurally, socially, and phenomenologically.
🧠 2. Reconceiving Core Concepts through SFN
2.1. Consciousness
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Not a thing or property, but a process of instantiation from neural meaning potential.
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It is semiotic actualisation: the moment when potential meaning becomes enacted meaning—a coherent instance.
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Each act of consciousness is a neural text: structured, cohesive, thematically organised, metafunctionally balanced.
2.2. Perception
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Perception is not passive intake. It is the construal of experience, drawing from available semiotic systems.
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The thalamus may serve not as a filter, but as a textual organiser: structuring neural potential into a coherent perceptual clause (Theme-Rheme; Given-New).
2.3. Attention
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Attention is not spotlighting. It’s a textual resource—a neurosemiotic way of managing cohesion, prominence, and flow.
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It controls how instantiations unfold in time, functioning like thematic progression in language.
2.4. Memory
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Memory is not storage, but activation of meaning potential from prior instantiations.
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It involves resonance across instantial systems—the neural equivalent of intertextuality.
🧪 3. Methods and Research Programme
3.1. Mapping Instantial Systems
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Instead of treating neural structures as static processors, SFN would map how systems of meaning potential are organised and how they vary by context.
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Techniques like multi-site dynamic neural recording (e.g. thalamus, cortex, limbic system) would be reinterpreted not as causal traces but as semiotic ensembles.
3.2. Semiotic Modelling of Neural Dynamics
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Use SFL-inspired tools to model brain states:
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Field: What experience is being construed?
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Tenor: What affective stance or relation is being enacted?
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Mode: How is the experience organised in time?
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Each brain state becomes a meaning clause, not a data point.
3.3. Reconfiguring Experiment Design
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Experiments would treat participants not as observers of stimuli, but as enactors of meaning.
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Tasks would be designed to elicit semiotic instantiations—e.g., by having participants construct meanings (language, gesture, choice), not just respond to stimuli.
3.4. Integrating Metasemiotic Reflection
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Incorporate self-report not as subjective noise but as metasemiotic data—participant construals of their own meaning-making.
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This creates a bridge between phenomenology and neurophysiology, allowing triangulation across strata.
🧬 4. SFN as an Integrative Theoretical Ecology
SFN could function as a metatheory that:
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Bridges phenomenology (Varela), neuroscience (Edelman, Damasio), and linguistics (Halliday).
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Rejects the idea that consciousness emerges from matter, in favour of the idea that consciousness instantiates potential across material and symbolic strata.
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Treats the brain not as a processor, but as a semiotic system, embedded in a meaning-making ecology.
In SFN, the brain is not the source of consciousness, but its semiotic substrate—meaning is not stored, but made; not decoded, but enacted.
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