Here we approach a new concept.
When an attractor remanifests its depth, its internal structure becomes available in a new relation.
If this relation encounters another attractor and changes its landscape, the remanifested meaning has had an effect outside the original attractor’s internal structure.
This is communication.
Remanifestation and communication therefore lie very close to one another.
An attractor that never makes any of its compressed depth manifest cannot participate as the whole it is in a new complex relational landscape.
It can exist in KNOWING, but its depth of meaning remains latent in the current encounter.
When the depth is remanifested, it can be read.
- It can be interpreted.
- It can activate other attractors.
- It can reconfigure another landscape.
Communication can thus be understood as a continuation of the same mechanism that is already necessary inside the brain.
- The brain makes internal depth of meaning available for new experience.
- The human being makes internal depth of meaning available to other human beings.
- A network of human beings makes combined depth of meaning available to new networks.
The same structural pattern can in principle repeat itself for as long as new emergent levels are formed. Remanifestation preserves depth through emergence
This points towards a more general function.
Compression is necessary.
Without compression, ever more relations would have to be carried explicitly, and the complexity would quickly become unmanageable. Emergence requires that many details can become one new whole.
But compression simultaneously creates its own danger. When many relations have become one attractor, the details disappear from the immediate boundary region.
If they could never have an effect again, every new emergent transition would simultaneously entail the loss of the depth that made the new whole possible.
After many levels, the result would be structures that still carried their history latently, but could not use it.
Remanifestation prevents this.
It makes it possible to preserve the compression while bringing forth the part of the depth that a new relation needs.
The two processes thus complement one another:
COMPRESSION makes many relations into one active whole.
REMANIFESTATION makes the necessary depth in this whole available again when it is to enter into a new relation.
This may be one of the prerequisites for emergence to be able to continue at all through ever higher levels.
The established attractor’s depth need not lie explicitly on the surface.
But neither can it be permanently inaccessible.
It must be able to be remanifested.
Towards communicationThe brain has thus taken us beyond a theory of the brain. The question began with how an organism can navigate a landscape of complex attractors.
The answer was that it is not sufficient to encounter the attractors through their manifest boundary regions. Their compressed depth of meaning must be able to become active in the current encounter.
In human beings, this happens through an extremely complex and centralised remanifestation mechanism: the brain.
But the same need arises again when the human being itself participates as a complex attractor in larger landscapes.
Our internal depth of meaning must then acquire an expression that can encounter others.
- We speak.
- We move.
- We make signs.
- We leave traces.
- We remanifest.
And what in KNOWING is already a relation between complex attractors thus acquires a manifest expression that can be experienced and interpreted further.
At this level, remanifestation receives a name we know well:
communication.