The Construction Of An 'Imaginative Domain' Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 151-2):

For now, we can only speculate on such matters. But we do know that higher-order consciousness leads to the construction of an imaginative domain, one of feeling, emotion, thought, fantasy, self, and will. It constructs artificial objects that are mental. In culture, these acts lead to studies of stable relations among things (science), of stable relations among stable mental objects (mathematics), and of stable relations between sentences that are applicable to things and to mental objects (logic). One possible reason for the incompleteness of such domains, as shown for mathematics by Kurt Gödel, is that pattern formation in the mind always requires the higher-order bootstraps that are necessary for consciousness. Thinking occurs in terms of synthesised patterns, not logic, and for this reason, it may always exceed in its reach syntactical, or mechanical, relationships.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, it is the meaning potential of language that provides higher-order consciousness. Through the mental processes of consciousness, afforded by language, a universe of meaning (phenomena) can be perceived, felt, thought and desired — meanings which can then be reconstrued as the meanings of science and other theoretical fields. Through the verbal processes of consciousness, the wordings that realise these meanings can be exchanged between individuals in a community. Any "incompleteness" in the domain of meaning relates to the fact that it is an evolving system whose material basis is the selection of variant neuronal groups in global mappings in the brains of individuals in communities, continuously down the generations.