The Real in a Relational Cosmos

When the Fall and the Collapse are revealed as symbolic diagrams of the construal of reality, then what we mean by “the real” itself is pulled inside out.

Let’s walk into that reversal.

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🌌 1. The Real Is Not What Exists Independent of Us

In the classical view, reality is what’s “out there” regardless of whether anyone sees it. It is ontologically prior to observation, to meaning, to construal. We are latecomers, peeking into a finished world.

But both the Fall and the Collapse refuse this.

They say:

The world is not already fully real. It becomes real in relation to a meaner.

In this light, the real is not what precedes construal.

It is what emerges through construal.

It is the actualised shape of potential—made real through an act of meaning.

In quantum mechanics:

A particle has no definite position until it is measured—i.e., until a meaner actualises one of the possibilities latent in the wavefunction.

In myth:

The world is innocent and undivided until we eat the fruit—i.e., until we construe it as meaningful.

In both:

Meaning is not after reality.

Meaning is what makes the real real.

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🌱 2. Reality Is Always Situated and Partial

Once meaning enters, innocence ends. This is what the Fall remembers.

Every act of construal is:

• Situated (from a point of view)

• Selective (it picks from potential)

• Irreversible (you can’t un-construe)

• Binding (it changes what follows)

So the real is never all of what could be. It is always:

This construal. From here. Now.

The real is a local actualisation of a larger potential.

It is the field of meaning, temporarily collapsed into form.

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🌀 3. The Real Is Recursive

Because each construal feeds back into the system, reality is not a stable background. It’s a recursive unfolding.

This is where the SFL-informed ontology adds a vital insight:

Each act of instantiation (collapse/fall/construal) creates a new instance, which reshapes the meaning potential of the system.

• In quantum mechanics: each measurement changes the system’s future probabilities.

• In mythic life: each choice configures your self, your social world, your future meanings.

So reality is not a container. It is a dynamic process of meaning becoming actual, folding back into the field of potential, and reemerging anew.

Reality is instantiational.

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🧠 4. There Is No Reality Without a Meaner

This is the deepest shift: there is no real without relation.

• The wave function only collapses for a meaner.

• Eden only ends when a meaner construes meaning.

• A world only becomes real when it is seen, named, positioned.

There is no view from nowhere.

There is only the reality that emerges through construal.

This does not mean that reality is imaginary or solipsistic.

It means that the real is always relational—it only exists as the product of an encounter.

The cosmos does not mean until someone means it.

And once it is meant, it cannot mean the same again.

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🧭 5. So What Is the Real?

Here’s a provisional construal, rooted in our framework:

The real is the situated, instantiated shape of potential, as actualised by a meaner within a relational cosmos.

In this model, reality is:

• Semiotic: It only exists as meaning.

• Stratified: It is meaning instantiated at different symbolic levels.

• Dynamic: It changes as meaning changes.

• Recursive: Each instance reshapes what can be construed next.

• Participatory: We are not observing the real—we are making it.

This places myth and quantum physics not on opposite ends of a spectrum, but as co-articulations of what it means to mean.

One remembers it.

The other models it.

Both make it real.