Once remanifestation is understood as a general requirement, there is no longer any reason to identify the mechanism with the organ we call the brain.
The brain is one particular manifest form.
The fundamental function is:
An established attractor must, when it is actively involved in a new complex relation, be able to make the relevant part of its compressed depth of meaning available again.
In principle, this can happen through very different manifest structures.
A complex, centralised brain is necessary for the kind of rapid, tightly integrated and extremely rich formation of meaning that takes place in a human being.
But simpler or differently organised attractor landscapes can solve the same basic problem in other ways.
What matters is not where the structure is situated.
What matters is whether relevant depth of meaning can become active in the current relational landscape.
No necessary centralisationIt is easy to think in terms of centralisation because human beings themselves are built this way.
We have a clearly bounded organism and a highly concentrated neural structure in which large amounts of relational dynamics take place at high speed.
But this may be a consequence of what kind of attractor a human being is.
A human being is a very high, tightly integrated and relatively strongly bounded attractor. An enormous number of relations must continuously be held together as one functional unit.
Body, identity, history, memory, expectation, sensation, language, action, social relation and a large number of other structures must at all times be able to form part of the same current landscape of meaning.
A centralised brain suits this attractor form.
But that does not mean that the general remanifestation mechanism needs the same architecture.
A distributed organism or a network may have a corresponding function distributed across many nodes and relations.
What appears at one level as many separate actors may, at a higher level, form part of one overall attractor.
The compressed structure of this higher level must then also be able to influence the further relations.
Remanifestation therefore becomes more than something that takes place inside individual organisms. It must be able to exist wherever higher attractors arise and in turn enter into new relations.
The whole human being as a manifestation mechanismThis becomes particularly clear when we move one level up from the brain.
Your brain makes a complex attractor available to you.
You can think APPLE, love, gravity or a particular human being.
But if this meaning is to enter into another human being’s attractor landscape, your internal attractor cannot be transferred directly.
It must be remanifested again.
- You say something.
- You write.
- You draw.
- You act.
- You change your facial expression.
- You move your body.
The compressed meaning acquires a manifest boundary expression that can encounter another complex attractor. Thus, the brain is not the only manifestation mechanism.
The whole human being becomes one.
An internal complex meaning structure is remanifested through the organism’s overall expression and becomes available for new relations at a higher level.
This is exactly the same structural problem that the brain has already solved internally.
A heavy attractor contains more than the boundary region can show.
Relevant depth must therefore be made manifest.
The only difference is which emergent level we are considering.
Human beings themselves form part of higher attractor landscapes
A human being is not a final destination.
We continuously form networks with other human beings.
My understanding influences yours.
Your understanding reconfigures mine.
A word can activate large attractor structures in both of us. New connections arise. Previous structures are strengthened, weakened, split or compressed anew.
After a conversation, there may be an understanding that none of the participants had before the conversation began.
This means that attractor building continues across the boundary of the individual.
Human beings can themselves be components in higher emergent structures.
Families, groups, professional communities, cultures, languages and other social systems can be understood as relational landscapes in which already highly complex attractors serve as building blocks.
The same principle repeats itself:
Each actor carries an enormous compressed depth.
Only a small part can be manifested in the individual encounter.
But through continuous remanifestation, this depth can have consequences for the larger landscape.
Remanifestation thus becomes a necessary mechanism for emergence between complex organisms as well.
Everything stands in relation to everythingIn KNOWING, there is no absolute isolation between attractors. All form part of the same total relational landscape. In this sense, everything stands in relation to everything.
But this does not mean that all relations are equally operative.
The attractor dynamics create extreme differences in relational strength.
Some connections are direct, heavy and continuously active. Others are so weak, indirect or distant that in practice they do not affect the current landscape.
The communication systems that we can actually observe thus arise. Not because the connection with the rest of the world is ontologically absent, but because the attractor dynamics determine which relations actually become relevant to the current emergence.
This also applies to the brain.
Not all possible existing attractor structures are active simultaneously.
A current landscape activates particular candidates.
These draw in related structures.
Others remain latent.
In this way, an extremely large KNOWING-landscape can function without everything having to be manifested simultaneously.
Compression reduces complexity.
The attractor dynamics select relevance.
Remanifestation makes the necessary depth available again.