I’ve been busy so I haven’t even given an update on the last post. It’s one for the mathematicians who might land here. I did not do the math. My role was envisioning some terms of complexity and finding a language to explore them through propositions. The maths is courtesy of a ChatGPT 4. Enjoy!
## Abstract
Coherence is often treated as a property of stable form, symmetry preservation, or informational consistency. This paper advances an alternative account: coherence as *recoverability under finite perturbation*. From this perspective, intelligence is not defined by representation, optimization, or control, but by its capacity to sustain continuity through loss, disruption, and re-entry. We develop Coherence Theory as a framework describing intelligence as a circulatory, orientation-driven process unfolding across embodied, cultural, and abstract domains. Mathematical structures—most notably Hilbert space and spinor-like formalisms—are introduced not as ontological claims, but as coordination arenas enabling coexistence of possibilities under constraint. The paper traces a conceptual traverse across the very landscape it formalizes, using its own movement as a demonstration of coherence in action.
## 1. Introduction: Why Coherence Must Be Reframed
Contemporary accounts of intelligence and consciousness frequently equate coherence with stability, equilibrium, or symmetry preservation. In such views, coherence is lost when form degrades or when perturbations exceed a system’s capacity to maintain structure. This framing is insufficient.
Living, adaptive, and cognitive systems routinely abandon form while remaining coherent. They change habits, shed representations, dissolve identities, and yet retain continuity of function and meaning. What persists is not form, but *recoverability*—the capacity to return to a usable orientation after disruption.
Coherence Theory begins from this observation. It proposes that coherence is not a static property, but a dynamic boundary condition governing whether deviations remain reabsorbable. Intelligence, in this sense, is the ongoing management of loss, not the accumulation of structure.
## 2. Coherence as Recoverability
We define coherence operationally:
A system is coherent if, after finite perturbation, it can recover a reduced description sufficient for continued participation in its environment.
Several implications follow:
* Coherence is graded, not binary.
* Symmetry may be broken without loss of coherence.
* Loss becomes decisive only when correction fails.
This reframing distinguishes *feedback* from mere reaction. Feedback exists only while deviations remain reabsorbable. Beyond this threshold, circulation collapses and the system exits its coherent regime.
## 3. Circulatory Intelligence and Orientation
Intelligence is treated here as circulatory rather than localized. It does not reside in discrete components (mind, brain, agent) but in flows that traverse embodied, affective, cultural, and abstract layers.
Orientation precedes representation. Systems do not first model the world and then act; they orient within a field of relevance and only later stabilize representations when necessary. Habits, emotions, and attentional biases function as orienting structures—load-bearing without being explicitly representational.
This accounts for why emotions are diagnostically powerful: they carry posture rather than content. They register curvature in the field of relevance before thought assigns meaning.
## 4. Loss, Re-entry, and Phase Transition
Loss is not error; it is the medium through which adaptation occurs. Periods of instability—re-entry phases—are moments where prior constraints loosen and new orientations become possible.
Coherence Theory treats these phases as critical transitions. What appears phenomenologically as confusion, anxiety, or creative tension corresponds structurally to a narrowing corridor of recoverability. Successful re-entry does not restore prior form, but establishes a new attractor.
This dynamic explains why intelligence often feels most alive near collapse, and why excessive control can be coherence-destroying.
## 5. Hilbert Space as Coordination Arena
Hilbert space enters Coherence Theory in a restricted role. It is not proposed as the substrate of reality, nor as a direct model of cognition. Instead, it functions as a *coordination arena*—a formal space in which multiple, potentially incompatible orientations can coexist without premature collapse.
Within this arena:
* Possibilities are superposed, not asserted.
* Selection corresponds to embodied enactment, not abstract measurement.
* Decoherence mirrors the transition from coexistence to commitment.
This use aligns with, but does not depend on, quantum interpretations. The relevance is structural rather than physical.
## 6. Spinor-like Structures and Orientation Dynamics
Spinors are introduced as minimal mathematical analogues of orientation. Unlike vectors, spinors encode relational posture and require traversal (often double rotation) to return to equivalence.
This makes them apt models for:
* Habit stabilization
* Phase shifts in identity
* Irreversibility masked by apparent repetition
Spinor loops can be interpreted as coherent postures—closed only through lived traversal, not abstract reversal. They formalize why some changes cannot be undone by retracing steps, yet still preserve continuity.
## 7. Consciousness as Emergent Boundary Condition
Within Coherence Theory, consciousness is not a substance or a controller. It is an emergent boundary phenomenon arising where circulatory intelligence must monitor its own recoverability.
As environments accelerate and traditions fragment, intelligence increasingly externalizes orientation into abstract space. Consciousness, on this view, may reflect a growing gap between embodied circulation and cultural velocity—a compensatory awareness rather than a primary driver.
## 8. Coherence Loss as Creative Arrest
Coherence failure in adaptive systems is often mischaracterised as a transition into disorder, instability, or noise. Within the framework developed here, this interpretation is incomplete. The primary phenomenological and functional signature of coherence loss is not chaos, but creative arrest.
Creativity, in this context, does not denote novelty production or expressive output. Rather, it refers to the system’s capacity to reopen reduced descriptions following perturbation—that is, to tolerate variation while retaining the ability to re-enter a recoverable state. Creativity is therefore a proxy for recoverability.
As coherence degrades, systems may retain operational stability, procedural competence, or local optimization. However, their ability to permit exploratory deviation without immediate correction diminishes. Variation is increasingly treated as error rather than probe. This marks the onset of irrecoverability, even in the absence of overt failure.
From this perspective, loss of creativity precedes and predicts systemic collapse. Institutions, individuals, or cognitive architectures may continue to function while becoming progressively sterile—capable of repetition, yet resistant to transformation. Coherence does not collapse into disorder; it collapses into closure.
This framing has implications for how psychological distress, cultural rigidity, and institutional stagnation are understood. Many such phenomena reflect not excess variability or insufficient control, but a breakdown in the system’s permission for safe traversal across states. Creativity falters where trust in re-entry has been lost.
Accordingly, creativity functions as an early diagnostic of coherence integrity. Its attenuation signals a narrowing of viable trajectories and an impending loss of adaptive depth, even when surface-level stability remains intact.
Coherence Theory remains open by necessity. Its success is not measured by stability of form, but by its capacity to remain inhabitable under critique, extension, and transformation.
## 9. Scope, Limits, and Non-Claims
This framework does not claim:
* A complete theory of mind
* A reduction of consciousness to mathematics
* A replacement for existing neuroscientific or physical models
It offers instead a coherence criterion applicable across domains, and a language for discussing failure, recovery, and continuity without collapsing into control metaphors.
## 10. Conclusion: The Traverse as Demonstration
The paper itself enacts what it describes. Rather than presenting a closed formalism, it traces a traverse across a landscape of ideas, allowing coherence to emerge through orientation, loss, and re-entry.
Coherence Theory remains open by necessity. Its success is not measured by stability of form, but by its capacity to remain inhabitable under critique, extension, and transformation.
*End of document*
Okay, you decide what next? I leave you readers to comment which of the subjects I’ve mentioned should be the next post. Something will come along anyway maybe an inspired idea of your own – let me know in the comments.
Write up on a couple of expressive biases I’ve mentioned?
Should I write the next post on how I believe culture to be an expressive body?
Expand on the idea of habits forming habitats?
Outline how I think we can prepare the ground for peak flow?
Do you have any related questions you want to discuss here?
I’ve been thinking about terminology, what I call my metaphor, and I think it most resembles a metaphor of the ‘psychic environment’ . Dynamic things of meaning present through events, time, and dimensions we exist in. I also figured I’ve been calling myself a poet without evidence. Here are a couple of poems from my collection.
Quarks and Larks in Apple Trees is an old poem that I used to perform in London venues as part of my short slot on stage. Depending on the night a poet might get 3-5 minutes…or shorter if you get booed off. I wrote the Haiku this year and if you don’t mind me saying I find the title particularly inventive.
Far From Shore
Thoughts trickle to a stream of dreams
Flowing to the river of life
Now here we are oceans apart
Larks & Quarks in Apple Trees
Take a look at science get into minds like Einstein,
To me it’s frightening this blindness that we live by,
See we can take raw energy and apply our theories randomly,
We could build an end to humanity yet discover no sense of identity,
The realms of possibility, like black holes in the space of reality as time collides along the boundary of our journey.
If we can will such things to being, can they bring us closer to meaning and what’s beyond an answer to any question?
Do my ideas seem alien?
As I look around surprised is the blue sky just bent light and behaviour merely flights of fancy?
Who determines e=mc? Squared or to the power of two shared this doesn’t do enough for me and you.
Spared the unbearable truth our awareness takes us through beyond the infinite and absolute. A blend of presence and absence, movement without resistance, Sensuous harmony and a symmetry in minds reflections,
A collective essence!
Overwhelming waves of experience can brush with the lightest touch past your world of existence and animate the difference between what is and what isn’t.
You can let me know what kind of poetry you enjoy or post a comment with your own poetry…just let some words flow! I hope your own flows are a peaceful fun ride until next time curious friends.
Hi, I hope you have made it through the previous posts about expressive instincts. Here we are at the last and this final instinct, I think, has the capacity of regulating our instinctive expression. Tolerance allows us to cope and carry on through, knowing the end is close. As tolerance snaps acceptance, anxiety and charm, recoil in the denial of time and effort.
Tolerance can be like a fuel gauge, an alert to the problems of running low then empty. Something tested with challenges and activities we take on. Tolerances can be finely balanced strains that hold things together or let things unravel and unwind from your experience. The instinct certainly influences our mood and attitude and is reflected in our dislikes.
With charm anxiety and acceptance they grow negative in abundance or a deficit tolerance is different; seemingly having a positive charge and a negative charge that is switched on instantly when the right conditions appear. Intolerance can be an outburst in an otherwise calm atmosphere that quickly settles again as though nothing happened.
A sense of tolerance is mindful appreciation of your day or a time span to manage. I’ve ordered the expressive instincts because I do consider tolerance to be the way Instincts are self-regulating. Intolerance can be turned inward toward ourselves as we find something distasteful about our own behaviour and communication. Overlapping instincts may inspire noticeable expressions of patience, empathy, grace or elegance. Blends of these instincts may allow us a broad range of emotional moods and attitudes.
These instincts are woven deeply into our experience, the infinitely varied experience a person could have in a lifetime. This complexity requires a simpler mechanism than words and contracts to determine our impulses. Pressures, tensions and frictions we’re asked to absorb, to take on and carry through phases of experience seems to be what our instincts transmit and translate from expression. We aren’t always able to absorb the stress forces and people need time processing the meaning of things. We can also learn what our commitment truly means when we fall short or fail to live up to our word.
I start a new job next week. So I will try and stay posting regularly but things might get a bit intermittent in the beginning, as always dear reader thanks for taking time to bring meaning to my words. Keep following to find out more about creative expression!
Hi thanks for visiting mind science and creativity! I hope you find the ideas interesting and have some ideas worth sharing in a comment. If you aren’t familiar with what they’ve written Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung provide an archetypal description of the psyche, different descriptions based on experiences shared with them. This ecocentric view is an architectural description of the psyche working through experience.
I’ve watched groups and individuals doing specific things for around thirty years and I’ve read at least a hundred authors with something more to say about human experience. Modern technology allows any of us to watch and listen to philosophers, entertainers and gurus from around the world presenting ideas in our own homes.
The more ecoeccentric your perspective the more acceptance you can find in the world. These ideas are projections and predictions as we currently don’t have technology to examine the instincts scientifically, so there’s no real evidence except the sense things make. I truly think of them as metaphors, stepping stones between us but I’m just a poet and thinker tinkering with ideas. Okay so now it is a bit of an exotic topic!
You will have to feel your way around this next instinct and try and relate it to your own charm. Because charm is the third instinct in the Core4. Charm could be a sense of humour, warm friendliness, manners and politeness and ease with things, a genial attitude. It could be honesty, trustworthiness, helpfulness or all of those. Charm is an instinct we develop alongside cultural awareness and relationship and life learning, it’s one that matures well.
Charms can also be physical. A ready smile, intelligent eyes or a quirky style. Anyone with a little knowledge of quantum mechanics will recognise charm as one of the quarks discovered by Murray Gell-Mann who is another one of my scientific heroes. I searched around for a suitable term before settling on charm, previously I called it capacity, room for more than essentials and flexibility to adapt and add to what you’re doing. Think of Eckhart Tolle’s ideas of spaciousness.
All the instincts I’m describing are capacities that shrink and expand with experience and we can always add a development goal of increasing or decreasing the capacity. You may feel you always say yes and accept too much and learning to accept less demands can still be done with charm if we are conscious of practicing both capacious charm and reduced acceptance.
Charm is what lies behind charisma and radiates from a presence that catches the attention of a room upon entry. Charm relates in some way to; optimism, hope, belief and even faith and obviously some quirks in our patterns of thought. The term charm works very well to describe this instinct as not everyone carries the same things around with them.
It can seem like phases of time are charmed because not every moment or event is like that – where we are zinging and in or near peak-flow. Certain situations can disposes us of our special powers that would make the challenge we face so easy.
Next post is the last in the expressive instincts. Sure, we probably have many more but this core4 enable recognition, interaction and success at being grounded and present in what anyone is doing. I will follow on with a description of some expressive biases we can pick up without noticing. I will also attempt to describe an architectural sense of the peak-flow state, a sense of instinctively creating it.
Welcome you meaning seekers and internet wanderers. You can catch up with the previous posts relating to expression if you’ve landed on this one. Here we go with instinct number two on the self expression charts.
Once we accept the presence of anything, even ourselves, many varied associations and associated experiences can be fixed to that entity or essence. Many of those associations will excite an anxiety impulse. Worry we aren’t able, or don’t have control over things. A belief that we can’t trust in stuff but never sure how much. We all have different ranges of anxiety, different worries, cares and concerns we carry through phases of experience.
Some cares and concerns won’t be beneficial, especially long term habits relating to your past self. Some cares are worth carrying and holding onto if they smooth out experience and make your life easier to manage. Worth having if your cares make the world a nicer place! Anxiety is bound to our problem solving capacities but it can be attached to events beyond our control and problems we can’t really solve. Experiences we visualised going wrong, deep self doubts or doubts and suspicions about others.
Anxiety is certainly in the leading wave of self expression, perhaps a pilot wave as we step into new experiences, plotting features to avoid or tick off. Anxiety can’t be a sustained wave of self expression because it is a weak flame; as our expressions relate more and more to problems in our own environment, rather than the fire inside ourselves.
Anxiety is a neutral instinct causing us to think and feel our way more acutely through experience. When we respond to anxiety we make a positive difference to what we are doing. It can grow negative, as with any instinct, when we react to anxiety without consideration.
Caring about thoughts of care, worry and anxiety helps us consciously influence anxiety patterns as we seek an understanding from the thought and a sense of positive intent. All the expressive patterns seem open to the right kind of conscious influence; reflective effort and attentiveness.
I’m going to tag some ideas about survival instincts here. Just take a moment to think of a non-survival instinct… All instincts are survival instincts so it seems banal speaking of a ‘survival instinct’ when it is expressiveness that takes us away from danger. I have our Instincts mapped differently; we have instincts for information – what we look to absorb and take in from events. Then the expressive instincts that move thoughts and ideas through to action and growth.
I hope you’re enjoying what you read and hopefully find this is good food for thought. If you want to let me know your thoughts and ideas comment below. Follow my blog if you want to keep up to date with thoughts like these. Thank you always for reading and you curiousity about this thing we call life.
Welcome you searching hearts, yearning minds and inquisitive characters. You will find writing on this blog for personal therapy and the pleasure of connecting people, ideas, styles and cultures.
Recapping from the previous post I explained that behaviour patterns are embedded in expressive cycles. Why does that distinction matter? Every behaviour pattern is bound to some aspect of an expressive cycle; if your mood is low or you are angry your behaviour fits the mood. If you think of the cycle of a washing machine this is a good analogy for expressive cycles which end similarly in the drain and spin programme. Cycles must be complete to wash feelings from experience.
The notes you read are aspects of my thirty year path of recovery that has spanned quite a bit of experience. I won’t bore you with the details but I have used up my time on earth being easily led ending up with some issues to deal with. No great drama I always think because drama is relative and there are much worse histories than my own.
I was down the shops earlier getting moody about people clogging up the aisles. I checked my negativity and realised that these people weren’t slowing me down or getting in my way, I wasn’t caring enough. By blaming them I didn’t have to address my critical thoughts and negative feelings.
Thinking about expression, even looking out into the world to interact with anything we must first accept it to be the thing brought to life through our senses, we must accept our senses are attuned and accept our self being present. This forms an instinct for acceptance, a sense of agreement or mixed feelings of resistance and accepted. We are complex creatures and can handle a little resistance mixed in.
Terms, the words we accept at the start of a relationship, may need renegotiating to reflect how much more bought in or out we have grown. Some people believe their way ahead or their recent past is made from sacrifice. That X has cost Y. In reality, if the only path forward means options are limited then choices lead to concessions; a fee for progress.
The word sacrifice also assumes something is forever gone, dedicated to some higher power. That is rarely seen in life, things seem to come around again. The definitions we accept are all worthy of reflection to ease unnecessary burdens and strains of a reality shaped by ideas.
Instinctive acceptance encourages compassion and inclusion admits difficulties, wrongs, allow self expression and differences. In negative forms, it denies all the above or has resistance for these and other life dynamics.
We have acceptance for things but resistance to stuff that goes with it and we have the capacities to juggle the diverse impulses. We aren’t conflicted, we just have different values we decided to follow, strengthening conditioning towards one impulse over another and maturing.
I recently learnt, through a dear friend, there is a conscious effort of acceptance we call admittance. More than accepting the flow of things admittance brings things closer to our hearts and to our lives. In human relations it is a complexity of acceptance. Acceptance you and I are alone in this world and acceptance that we can both be conscious of briefly suspending our natural solitude. A truthful expression of the human need for connection.
Admittance can mean entering a deeper phase of a relationship as shame and hurt are faced and not avoided. We admit to mistakes to express true feelings and honest problems to work through together.
Next post I will attempt to describe the very next instinct to emerge from self expression and our creative efforts. Thanks again you beautiful readers and writers who inspire me to improve and stick to this path of writing, reflecting and connecting through inspiration.
Welcome, these posts are growing long so I’ll cut straight to the point as we consider some ideas about expression. Modern sources are much richer than Psychologists who didn’t get vocalists with their music unless the were Opera lovers. Culture is another expressive body that grows through us but that’s a subject for another post!
The first confusion to stumble across is what makes expressions different to behaviours. An action or behaviour pattern is like a particle of effort. The collapse of a wave to water droplets as it reaches the shore. Expression is the wave action that brings water to the shore and sweeps it up again. Expressions are the activities people bring into and away from experience.
The scales of expression I want you to bring to mind are the efforts of thinking, feeling, vocalising and doing things. It seems controversial to say stress connects them all, too simple. Just check if most of your thoughts and worries revolve around pressures, tensions and frictions…
Other people too must be translating the pressures, tensions and frictions as part of an unpacking of communication they translate. A resemblance of the many strains wrapped into what we say.
It is not only the pressures, tensions and frictions that factor in your experience but our first wails in the world were environmental responses. We will begin to describe differences between creative and stress expressions but the definition is a superficial sense of pressures tensions and frictions we enjoy and ones we struggle with. Hey, some people enjoy struggling and the bliss of doing nothing drives some folk crazy.
Being different we all have unique sensitivities, boundaries and thresholds and we pick out different characteristics from the information we’re faced with. Forces of habit and the habitats that inspire is another post that I’ll share in the future, if you my dear reader enjoy what you’re reading!
The scale of expression I mentioned earlier is just our focus for self-development. Awareness of expression can be realised in miniature; as words contort our mouths and we control the way the air comes out. It goes on in larger scales when hopes are formed and eroded as time passes and spirits deflate.
The key feature for creative expression is recognising that releasing pressure, letting go of a habit or demand that adds nothing to life at this moment in time; checking if all the strains of tension and friction are worth holding on to. Any small shift makes your environment a little more creative.
That is the essence of creative expression; using our own expressiveness to reduce stresses and create more creativity. The next post will begin a tour into self-expression and the key instincts we use to navigate the planet.
I can see expression being five more posts so keep following to find more updates. Thanks for being focused on your growth because it helps everyone, not just your community but the light of humanity! Keep shining true to your brightness.
Greetings my curious readers, I’m grateful being able to share more thoughts with you today. I doubt they are as enlightening as the sun blazing through the tattered remains of Winter here in the UK.
I don’t really want to share the esoteric way I transformed the gender of my imaginative mind because just imagining it should work. The deeper methods I applied hark back to Jung’s archetypes and how a person can express their truest nature. To fully unlock the minds potential a marriage between the Shadow and Anima/Animus must happen. The two archetypes must have some relations for growth and development that form the basis of relationships and roots of our personalities. This brings us to the third party, the unwed Anima/Animus.
In my own mythology this archetype dies a death and everyone lives happy ever after, that’s the symbolic fairytale of self-mastery…it isn’t the only destiny. For me, being a hetro-male, it is easy but it could be exquisitely complicated matters of heart. My life-love, who wears the imprint of my imaginative mind, excites and guides my imagination could well be loved by my Animus, he could love both of us…he could love just himself and be hidden away, for fear we become similar.
Most of the archetypes and forms found in the work of Freud and Jung have been married within the thought-scheme of my metaphor of the psyche. I get the impression that our conscious attention, Ego, sketches out some aspects of Anima/Animus, only fragments which we often piece together badly. I have recently begun thinking of the traumatic learning process associated with our identity and connections in the world.
That’s a bit of substance around a structural sense of mind and the archetypes buried in our impulses, dreams and imagination. A journey anyone must go through to reach an understanding of their mind and meaning.
I have tried disentangling the way these mental constructs influence our thoughts. A basic idea began forming around language patterns of confidence and doubt; Ego resonating a sense of certainty, confidence, correctness or the rightness of a thing. Contrasted with the Shadow, thrilled by self-doubt, uncertainty and hesitancy. Communication is exquisitely complicated arrangement so I abandoned efforts to align theory with process.
This blog holds my thoughts and reflections about the mechanics, described by the great minds of the past, of our animate existence. I plan to change topic tomorrow but please do continue the discussion in the comments if you want to hear more of this thought stream about Freud and Jung. Thanks for visiting, if we both find the time worthwhile then words have made a little magic today
mindscienceandcreativity 