Once an attractor landscape of a higher order has been established, a problem arises.

An attractor is not merely what it displays in its encounter with another attractor. It is the result of its entire history. It may have been built up through countless emergent steps, in which relations have been established, interpreted, stabilised, fragmented, merged and compressed into ever higher structures. All of this exists in KNOWING. The attractor carries this entire depth of meaning with it as the whole it has now become.

But this whole is not manifested directly.

When the rearrangement of the attractor landscape takes place in KNOWING and large numbers of attractors are held up against one another to understand how the new building block plays a part, it is initially the attractors’ boundary regions that meet and form uninterpreted relations.

A heavy attractor may therefore contain an enormous compressed depth while only a very small portion of this depth appears in the individual relation.

This is unproblematic at low emergent levels. A simple relation need not carry much more meaning than what actually appears in the encounter.

But at high emergent levels, this is no longer sufficient.

An apple is a simple example.

The apple that forms part of my current experience does not manifest everything that makes it an apple. It presents a surface towards me. I encounter colour, contour, structure, placement, differences in light and other local relations. Each of these emerges as SEPARATION through the Experience Circle.

But none of them is APPLE.

Even the sum of the current surface relations is not necessarily APPLE.

APPLE is an already established, heavy attractor. It has been built through previous experiences of form, consistency, taste, smell, weight, size, flesh, core, trees, food, the word "apple", other fruits, situations in which apples have been involved, and a very large number of other relations. Much of this structure has long since been compressed. I do not need to relive the entire history every time I encounter a new apple.

This is precisely what attractor building has achieved.

APPLE can appear as one whole.

But the problem follows at the same time: If the whole is compressed, and only the boundary region is manifested, how can the full depth of meaning matter in the current encounter?

The green surface does not itself tell us that it conceals white flesh. The contour does not tell us that the object can be eaten. The sheen does not tell us what it feels like to hold it in the hand. Nor does the visible side tell us what is on the back.

Yet I do not perceive a loose collection of surface relations.

I perceive an apple.

This requires more than merely registering the current relation.

The attractor as a candidate
The manifest boundary structure can directly match an already established attractor landscape in KNOWING.

A particular combination of form, colour, size and structure will stand in a strong relation to APPLE. Other candidate attractors may also be activated, but under normal conditions APPLE will quickly be among the strongest.

Attractor matching can therefore still be understood as direct.

The current landscape stands in relation to existing structures in KNOWING, and these relations have different strengths.

But with complex attractors, a strong match is not necessarily sufficient.

If the current structure only matches the attractor’s boundary region, we still do not know whether the candidate is correct. A round, green form may be an apple, but also something else. More relations must be assessed. It must be examined how the current structure fits against the attractor’s internal organisation.

A new requirement thus arises:

The compressed attractor’s relevant internal structure must become available again.

Not the entire structure. That would undo the compression and make higher emergence impossible. Every time we saw an apple, all previous experiences that have contributed to APPLE would then have to be played out again.

What is needed is a selective emergence of those parts of the attractor’s depth that are relevant in the current encounter.

I shall call this remanifestation.

Remanifestation
An established attractor exists as compressed meaning in KNOWING.

When the attractor is activated in a new relation, relevant parts of its internal structure can be remanifested. The compressed content thus becomes available again as a manifest relation without the attractor having to be broken down into its entire historical construction.

Remanifestation is therefore not the opposite of compression.

It does not undo the compression.

It makes parts of the compressed depth operative again.

At the sight of the apple, the current surface relation can activate APPLE. APPLE can then remanifest relations concerning form, the expected back, consistency, weight, smell, edibility and connections with other already established attractors.

These remanifested structures can in turn be compared with the current landscape.

A recursive dynamic thus arises:

• current boundary relation


• → candidate attractor


• → remanifested depth of meaning


• → new attractor matching


• → strengthened or weakened candidate


• → new reconfiguration


• → stabilisation.

What takes place is a continuous reconfiguration between the current manifest landscape and already established KNOWING.

Why the brain must arise
Here the brain arises as a necessity.

At a low emergent level, the current relation may perhaps be sufficient for further dynamics. A simple structure encounters another simple structure, and what must be decided lies close to what is actually manifested.

But as the attractors become heavier, the difference increases between what exists in the attractor and what appears in the boundary region.

Eventually, the current relation alone cannot carry enough information for the attractors to enter into complex interaction as the wholes they actually are.

A high attractor must be able to appear with its history.

Otherwise, a complex organism would encounter the world as a stream of local differences without access to the depth of meaning that makes the differences into objects, events, people, dangers, opportunities, connections and situations.

The relations would not be meaningless in an absolute sense, but their higher meaning would be inaccessible. They would approach noise.

At a certain emergent level, a manifest structure must therefore arise that makes compressed attractor content available again in the current dynamics.

This structure is the brain.

The brain is therefore not an additional machine that evolution has added to an already completed organism so that the organism can analyse an external world.

The brain forms part of the manifestation mechanism itself.

It is the dynamic manifest structure that makes heavy attractors available in their current interaction.

This also explains why the brain’s processes should not be understood as a copy of a separate formation of meaning that has already been completed somewhere else.

The brain’s activity is the manifest side of this formation of meaning.

When several candidate attractors are activated, influence one another, are strengthened, weakened and enter into ever new reconfiguration before one overall meaning stabilises, corresponding dynamics should appear in the brain.

The brain does not merely depict the attractor landscape.

It manifests it.

From meaning structure to meaning dynamics
Nevertheless, it is not entirely precise to say that the brain is merely a manifestation of meaning structure.

That can sound static.

What must be manifested is the very dynamics through which meaning arises.

A current relation activates existing structures by bringing them into FOCUS. This makes relevant depth available. New relations arise. The attractor landscape is reconfigured. Candidates compete and support one another. An overall MEANING stabilises.

The brain’s structure can then be understood as an expression of previously stabilised attractor history, while ongoing brain activity expresses the dynamics of the current landscape.

Plasticity also finds a natural place in this picture.

When new experiences change which relations can later be activated and how they are weighted against one another, the attractor landscape changes. The manifest brain structure must then change correspondingly.

The brain’s anatomy and dynamics thus become the manifest form of the accumulated meaning structure, rather than its cause.

Vision makes the mechanism particularly clear
Vision can easily lead us to believe that the brain primarily creates an image of the world.

This is probably because the visual qualia landscape is extremely rich in information and simultaneous. A large number of spatial relations can appear simultaneously.

But blindness shows that the complex picture of the world need not be visual.

A blind person can have a precise experience of space, objects, people, directions, events and connections without visual qualia.

What matters is therefore not the image.

What matters is MEANING.

What must be manifested is the relational structure that makes a current landscape understandable.

For a sighted person, visual qualia play a major part in this structure. For a blind person, other manifest expressions carry larger parts of it.

This accords with the fact that cortical areas which, in sighted people, are mainly involved in visual processing can, in people born blind, be involved in other forms of complex processing.

The specific form of qualia is thus not the fundamental issue.

The fundamental issue is that relations must be able to be integrated, reconfigured and stabilised into higher MEANING.

The thought of the apple
Remanifestation is not only necessary for recognising the apple out in the world.

It is necessary for you to be able to THINK apple.

Thought is the experience of the interpretation in the thirteenth term.

But if you close your eyes and think of an apple, there is no current external apple surface that can give the meaning you experience.

Yet the apple can be present for you.

You can think of it as round, firm, sweet, edible, with skin, flesh and a core. You can imagine holding it. You can think of the taste. You can bring forth a particular apple from previous experience.

This can only happen if already established attractor content becomes available for experience again. APPLE must be remanifested.

The brain thus becomes directly connected to the Experience Circle in a new way.

The remanifested attractor content is not merely hidden support for a separate interpretation. It appears as a new manifest landscape that FOCUS can read.

It can be interpreted again.

And this interpretation can be experienced again.

We thus obtain a loop:

• EC/HE


• → experience becomes KNOWING


• → attractor building and compression


• → remanifestation


• → new manifest relational landscape


• → new reading through EC/HE


• → new MEANING.

The Attractor Equation and the Experience Circle thus do not stand as two parallel mechanisms.

The attractor dynamics inform the landscape that EC/HE can read.

And remanifestation is the connection that makes already compressed attractor content available as a new manifest relation. Precisely how the deeper content of an attractor actually becomes available will be addressed in a later section (ref).

Perception and thought become the same basic process
This also makes the distinction between perception and thought less fundamental than it may first seem.

Perception is the idea that a new relation/building block has arisen in an established attractor landscape.

A new building block entails large numbers of new relations to THE ALL that already exists in KNOWING – in principle. But the attractor dynamics immediately determine which ones receive actual weight in the current landscape, and the number is immediately reduced to what is actually relevant to the view FOCUS has at its point in spacetime.

The new relations judged relevant are also read, and they are read immediately. It costs one emergent step – one "tick", but no more than that. After this, we have an extensive, complex collection of potentially relevant building blocks.

No longer one. Many, but not infinitely many.

Seen from the perspective of the FOCUS-point, the building blocks, which are all identical, appear at different distances and in different positions in the surroundings.

Imagine that you are in a particular place in nature and there is a small stone on the ground. In principle, the stone stands in relation to every single small and large stone in the entire world.

But the attractor dynamics say that practically none of these relations matter. The distance is too great, even if the degree of relatedness and other attractor parameters may match.

Or you see a mountain, and then the water running down the mountainside washes one silicon molecule loose. This does not change the idea of the mountain.

All the patterns that FOCUS looks out over are slightly modified. Not much; a new building block here and a new building block there. And only the surroundings are affected.

All the attractor patterns *locally* must therefore be understood anew.

The vast majority have changed so little that they are interpreted as before. But some have received the decisive building block that changes the interpretation into something else.

• The drop that makes the cup overflow.
• The small signal that the pain you feel is from cold, not heat.
• The molecule that makes you change your understanding of the fruit from apple to nashi (Japanese pear-apple).

These myriads of new, local relations activate candidate attractors. Their relevant depth is remanifested, and the combined structure is read further.

This remanifestation of already established attractors is thus what creates the brain. It is an expression of all the changes that took place through the attractor rearrangement in KNOWING, the dynamics that were triggered.

The idea of the brain is these dynamics.

The brain therefore grows directly out of the position in spacetime where FOCUS read the first, single relation – which then caused the rearrangement one emergent step later.

And the brain is experienced.

It is a complex manifestation and creates new relations, SENSATIONS and SEPARATIONS. It grows and compresses further, twists and turns, changes meaning here and meaning there; as the attractor dynamics dictate.

A tiny building block thus set a whole little world of changes in motion. A few of these are relevant in terms of attractors, and every single one of these must be read through EC/HE and is thereby experienced – both as qualia (relations/SENSATIONS) and as thought (the interpretation in the thirteenth term at each reading).

Thought is the experience of the brain.

The brain does not in itself create thought, but the reading of it does.

Thought is FOCUS’S interpretation in the thirteenth term when reading the dynamics of the brain.

At the same time, the brain dynamics thus first create relations and SENSATIONS on a large scale. The brain is therefore the origin of both thoughts and qualia experiences. But it is not the ontological origin, the brain is a necessary, remanifested intermediate link.

KNOWING is and remains the ontological origin – where meanings are formed and broken.

In thought, the current external relation that triggered the rearrangement may be weak or absent. FOCUS reads the external event, but it is drowned out by everything it causes internally – first in KNOWING, then manifested as the brain.

FOCUS thus follows not the external, but the internal remanifested attractor structures.

With this, we see that perception actually comes from within.

Both the qualia experiences and the thoughts that we associate with external stimuli are actually qualia experiences and thoughts from the reading of the brain, which in turn is a manifestation of the rearrangement in KNOWING.

The brain is the manifestation mechanism’s second storey
The basic manifestation has existed all along.

Relation, reading, interpretation and SEPARATION require no biological brain.

The brain therefore cannot be the prerequisite for manifestation as such.

But when the attractor landscape becomes sufficiently complex, a new challenge arises that the basic manifestation alone does not solve:

The current boundary relation no longer carries enough of the attractor’s depth of meaning.

A new manifest order must arise in which compressed KNOWING can be made available again.

The brain can therefore be understood as the manifestation mechanism’s second storey.

The first makes relation experienceable and builds KNOWING.

The second makes already accumulated KNOWING available again as a manifest relation when complex attractor landscapes are to be navigated.

This is not a separate mechanism alongside the first.

It is a recursive continuation of the same principle.

• Manifestation builds an attractor.


• → The attractor compresses meaning.


• → Compression simultaneously makes the depth less directly available.


• → Remanifestation makes the relevant part of the depth available again.


• → This new manifestation can be read anew.


• → New meaning is established.


• → And the attractor landscape is reconfigured again.

Without this second storey, emergence would encounter a limit.

The greater the compression became, the more of the accumulated meaning would disappear from the manifest boundary relations.

Higher wholes could still exist in KNOWING, but they could not encounter one another as the complex wholes they had become.

Remanifestation solves this problem.

It makes further emergence possible without previous compression having to be undone.

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