Systemic Functional Neuroscience: A Manifesto
Towards a Semiotic Theory of Brain, Consciousness, and Meaning
Abstract
Systemic Functional Neuroscience (SFN) proposes a radical rethinking of the brain: not as a computational device or biological mechanism producing consciousness, but as a material substrate for the semiotic instantiation of meaning. Integrating Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) with Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), SFN reconceives perception, attention, memory, and consciousness as meaning-making processes. This manifesto outlines the foundational principles, theoretical commitments, and research agenda of SFN as a transdisciplinary, stratified theory of mind.
1. Introduction: Meaning Before Mechanism
Conventional neuroscience assumes that the brain processes inputs, stores representations, and produces outputs—cognition and consciousness among them. But this view leaves a gap: the qualitative, structured, purposive nature of meaning. SFN begins with a different premise: that meaning is not a product of the brain, but the very organising principle of its activity.
We argue that meaning must be theorised as systemic, functional, and stratified. The brain does not compute reality—it enacts meaning across strata: neurophysiological, phenomenological, and symbolic. Each moment of consciousness is not an output, but an instantiation of meaning potential drawn from a complex, evolving neural semiotic system.
2. Foundational Commitments
2.1. Meaning is Primary
The brain is not a container of meaning, but a system through which meaning is instantiated. Meaning is not epiphenomenal, but constitutive of experience.
2.2. System Before Structure
Structure is the outcome of system. Instantial configurations of neural activity realise selections from a network of options—neural meaning potential.
2.3. Stratal Organisation
Like language, consciousness is stratified:
Neurophysiological stratum: material substrate (neuronal groups, activation patterns)
Phenomenological stratum: experiential instantiations (percepts, affects, volitions)
Symbolic stratum: semiotic forms (language, gesture, culture)
These strata are not reducible but co-instantiating.
2.4. Metafunctional Organisation
All brain activity enacts meaning that serves:
Ideational metafunction: construing experience
Interpersonal metafunction: enacting relations
Textual metafunction: structuring flow
3. Reframing Core Concepts
3.1. Consciousness
Not a state, but a process: the semiotic actualisation of neural meaning potential. Each conscious moment is a structured, metafunctionally-organised neural text.
3.2. Perception
The construal of experience from potential. The thalamus and cortex do not filter data—they organise instances of meaning.
3.3. Attention
A textual resource, managing thematic prominence, cohesion, and flow. Not a spotlight but a principle of neural textuality.
3.4. Memory
Not storage, but resonance: inter-instantial activation of prior meaning-making. Memory is the intertextuality of the brain.
4. Methodological Implications
4.1. Mapping Instantial Systems
Research should focus on identifying patterns of neural meaning potential and their activation contexts.
4.2. Semiotic-Neural Modelling
Neural ensembles should be analysed for metafunctional organisation, not just activation dynamics.
4.3. Redesigning Experiments
Experimental tasks must elicit semiotic construal—not merely stimulus-response behaviour.
4.4. Triangulating Across Strata
Combine neural, phenomenological, and symbolic data—e.g., brain imaging, introspective reports, discourse analysis.
5. Toward a Transdisciplinary Science of Meaning
SFN unites neuroscience, linguistics, phenomenology, and systems theory in a common semiotic ecology. It treats the brain as a meaning-making organ, not in metaphor, but in method.
Just as the study of language required a move from grammar as rule to language as social semiotic, so too must the study of the brain move from neural computation to neuronal semiosis.
6. Conclusion: A Call to Instantiation
Systemic Functional Neuroscience is not just a theory of the brain—it is a theory of the enactment of meaning. It challenges the epistemology of reductionism, the metaphysics of emergence, and the methodological dualism of mind and body.
To understand the brain is not to decode it. It is to read it—as text, as system, as instantiation.
“Meaning is not what the brain makes. Meaning is what the brain is for.”
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