The Weighting Of Construals Of Experience With Evolutionarily Selected Values Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 118):

The advantage provided by the ability to construct a scene is that events that may have had significance to an animal's past learning can be related to new events, however causally unconnected those events are in the outside world. Even more importantly, this relationship can be established in terms of the demands of the value systems of the individual animal. By these means, the salience of an event is determined not only by its position and energy in the physical world but also by the relative value it has been accorded in the past history of the individual animal as a result of learning. It is the evolutionary development of the ability to create a scene that led to the emergence of primary consciousness.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the ongoing pairing of construals of experience with evolutionarily selected values entails that the ontogenesis of systems of perceptual potential is differentially weighted according to the values of different species, and according to the different experiences of individuals within species.