An attractor exists as incorporated MEANING in KNOWING. It carries the history of its formation with it: SEPARATIONS, relations and lower MEANINGS that have been understood through emergence as a larger whole. It may have been built up through countless STEPS in which relations have been established, interpreted, stabilised, fragmented, joined together and compressed into ever higher structures. All of this remains as KNOWING, even when the whole is not currently being experienced.

But something existing as KNOWING is not the same as it being experienced manifestly. For an attractor to be experienced, it must be remanifested.

Remanifestation is not a fully formed top-level attractor opening up and sending selected parts of its content down the emergence tree. It takes place from the bottom up, through the same basic sequence as all other interpretation into MEANING: INTERSPACES give rise to SENSATION, THE SENSATION is read through EC, the reading concludes as KNOWING, and the new organisation provides the basis for further interpretation and new current readings.

The experienced whole is the result of this progression. It is not an explanation selected in advance that lies ahead of the progression and directs it towards itself.

From the current situation to an experienced whole
When something changes in KNOWING, the constellation of relations also changes. A new SEPARATION enters into relation with everything that already exists. Attractor Dynamics determines how the changed landscape is to be understood, and which relations acquire significance in the current local view.

What remains unresolved is present as INTERSPACES. THE PANORAMIC VIEW registers the nearest current, unread relation, and THE FOCAL VIEW is bound to THE SENSATION that arises. The impulse is followed through EC. The reading produces a SEPARATION that is placed in KNOWING.

With this, the situation has changed again. The relational landscape is reorganised through AE. The resulting pattern may confirm a known MEANING or provide the basis for a new one. When lower MEANINGS form part of a higher understanding, the building-up continues through the emergence bands.

FOCUS thus follows a progression in which the current situation is understood with ever greater depth of meaning. This does not mean that FOCUS knows the final outcome or selects a fully formed top-level attractor in advance. The current organisation and AE dynamics determine which interpretations find support, and which fall away.

At each level, there may be pattern similarity with several established attractors. These are candidates for understanding the situation. A strong similarity is not necessarily sufficient to reach a conclusion. As the building-up continues, some candidates are confirmed, others weakened, and new connections may become decisive. In this way, AE homes in on the unambiguous MEANING supported by the current constellation as a whole. If no established attractor encompasses the pattern, a new one may form.

One clarification may take place quickly. Another may require many successive STEPS and a large number of simultaneous readings. The progression continues until there is an unambiguous MEANING at the current level. With a new change, this MEANING may again form part of a further progression.

Complete remanifestation from the bottom up
What is remanifested is the entire current attractor as an experienced whole. It must not be understood as a name attached to a few surface registrations while the actual depth of meaning remains outside experience.

The whole appears through the progression that builds it up from below. The manifest impulses are real, and their interpretations form part of KNOWING. Remanifestation therefore produces both qualia and MEANING: The current content is experienced through EC and understood through AE.

“Complete” denotes this current whole. It does not mean that an attractor is detached from KNOWING or loses its compression. Nor does it mean that every previous event in its history of formation must be repeated as the same event. Established KNOWING remains. Remanifestation takes place within the current constellation, with its relations and its basis for reading and interpretation.

Compression is therefore not undone. It is not the already established attractor that is broken down. It is the current situation that is built up into experienced MEANING, with established KNOWING as the basis for understanding.

The surroundings are decisive for which whole becomes current, and for the depth and breadth of the progression. An extensive attractor is not first selected and then reduced to a suitable selection. It is the current progression from the bottom up that establishes which attractor is actually experienced.

This also means that every observation – that is, every reading of INTERSPACES – forms part of a complete building-up of the current attractors: from THE SOURCE as the lowest starting point and onwards through a varying number of emergence bands, all the way up to the highest available MEANING in the current context. Every reading and observation thus confirms or modifies the current attractor landscape.

If we apply this to human experience, it means that when we walk around looking at the world around us, we simultaneously confirm it. And this does not apply only to human perception. THE ALL that stands in relation to something else participates in the same process of confirmation and reorganisation, in which current INTERSPACES arise and are read. It is through experience of the world that the world is created – as incorporated KNOWING, which in turn provides the basis for further manifestation.

From the bottom up here denotes the dependency order of understanding. It does not introduce a separate physical time within KNOWING. It is through the manifest EC progressions that succession is experienced as time.

The apple
An apple makes the difference clear.

In the current situation, there are differences in, among other things, form, colour, placement and relations to other patterns. All of this happens when something encounters something else and unread relations arise. We observe surfaces encountering other surfaces. You perceive colour, contour, structure, placement, differences in light and other local relations.

But none of these is in itself APPLE.

Nor is the sum of the current surface relations necessarily APPLE. They are the external, observable properties of attractors with underlying, not directly visible histories of emergence of varying depth.

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 has long since been incorporated and compressed.

The green surface does not itself tell us that it conceals pale 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 alone tell us what is on the back.

Yet I do not perceive merely a loose collection of green, shiny and curved surfaces.

I perceive an apple.

To have a secure understanding of what the current relation that FOCUS picks up is, the SOURCE pattern to which a new SEPARATION has now been added must be interpreted all the way up through the emergence bands to its highest current understanding. Again. Every time a tiny adjustment in observation takes place.

The initial resemblance to something round and green is merely a basis for further interpretation. The resulting pattern enters into new combinations. Relations between form, size, surface and placement acquire meaning in the light of already established understandings. At higher levels, the same pattern may fit as fruit and as apple, while other possible understandings lose support.

This is not a mandatory verbal list that must be consciously worked through. You do not need to think “round, green, fruit, apple”. It is the underlying building-up of MEANING that takes place, allowing you to experience the whole without knowing every individual stage in its emergence.

Nor is it necessary for all previous apple experiences to be replayed as memories. They are already incorporated into KNOWING and form part of the basis for understanding. But the current experience of APPLE must nevertheless emerge through a complete progression from the bottom up. It cannot be replaced by simply designating a fully formed top-level attractor.

The result is not merely the idea that an apple might be hiding behind the registrations. APPLE appears as the experienced whole to which the progression leads. This is why the understanding can encompass far more than the visible surface alone: You know what kind of whole this surface forms part of.

A different constellation may lead to PEAR, TOY or something that does not yet have an established MEANING. Perhaps the form and colour initially provide a basis for APPLE, while a new registration changes the whole to a toy fruit object or a different fruit. It is the current constellation that determines which understanding can stand.

If a known attractor does not encompass the resulting pattern, the progression may require the formation of something new.

The height and breadth of remanifestation
A remanifestation progression has both successive depth and a scope of participating readings.

Depth concerns how many STEPS must follow one another. Breadth concerns how many impulse contributions form part of these STEPS. Many readings can take place simultaneously. A large number of readings therefore does not necessarily mean a correspondingly large number of successive STEPS.

A tall and thin remanifestation may require many STEPS with relatively few participants in each. An equally tall but thick remanifestation may encompass far more participants through the same successive depth.

In The Mechanism, this distinction is fundamental to the relationship between time and mass. Time appears through succession. Mass is understood as the qualia side of the aggregated impulse contributions. Both form part of the same remanifestation, but describe different aspects of its organisation.

The individual EC is not changed by this. The fundamental impulse is invariant, its progression is invariant, and the result has the invariant bipolar span 2Q – SEPARATION. The variation lies in which readings are actualised, how they participate simultaneously, and how their interpretations provide the basis for further STEPS.

Why the brain must arise
This is where the brain acquires its role in The Mechanism.

At a low emergence level, what needs to be clarified may lie close to the primitive relation. But as attractors become more extensive, the difference grows between what is present in a local surface relation and the entire MEANING that is to be experienced.

A high attractor must be able to appear with its depth of meaning. Otherwise, a complex organism would encounter the world as a stream of local differences without the whole that makes the differences into objects, events, people, dangers, opportunities, connections and situations.

The primitive relations would not be meaningless in an absolute sense. Every SEPARATION is already an understanding. But the higher MEANING that makes the landscape understandable to the organism would not appear.

The extensive progression from the bottom up must therefore itself have a manifest organisation. In human experience, the brain is this complex organisation: a manifest intermediate link in which myriads of current relations, impulses and interpretations form part of the remanifestation of higher wholes.

The brain is therefore not an additional machine first placed in an already completed organism so that it can analyse an external world. It forms part of the manifestation mechanism itself.

Nor does this mean that a fully formed thought is first determined as a completed event in KNOWING and then depicted as a superfluous physical copy. The current progression of meaning has a manifest side through EC. The brain’s activity is this side of the complex formation of meaning, not an independent cause of it.

When possible understandings gain and lose support, when new relations arise, and when an overall MEANING gradually stabilises, this appears as the brain’s dynamics.

The brain does not merely depict the attractor landscape.

It manifests its current reorganisation.

From meaning structure to meaning dynamics
It is therefore not entirely precise to say that the brain is merely a manifestation of a meaning structure. That can sound static.

What is manifested is also the dynamics through which the current MEANING is clarified.

A new relation changes an established constellation. New readings produce new SEPARATIONS. AE determines how the patterns are now to be understood. New combinations provide the basis for higher understandings, and the current whole is built up from below.

This is what appears, on the manifest side, as activity in the brain. The brain’s more lasting structure can be understood as an expression of stabilised attractor history, while its ongoing activity expresses the current remanifestation and clarification.

Plasticity also finds a place in this picture. When new experiences change which relations later acquire significance, and how patterns can be understood in relation to one another, the attractor landscape changes. The manifest organisation of the brain must then reflect the changed structure and its new possibilities for dynamics.

The brain’s anatomy and activity are thus understood as the manifest form of the incorporated meaning structure and its current relations – not as their ontological origin.

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 appear at once. When we look at an apple, we do not first experience patches of colour, then a contour and finally an object. We usually experience an integrated, understood situation.

But blindness shows that a complex picture of the world need not be visual. A blind person can experience space, objects, people, directions, events and connections without visual qualia.

What matters is therefore not the image.

What matters is THE MEANING.

What must appear is the relational organisation that makes the current situation understandable. For a sighted person, visual qualia play a major part. For a blind person, experience is carried by other manifest expressions. The specific form of qualia varies, while the building-up through EC and AE remains the same basic mechanism.

The thought of the apple
Remanifestation is not only necessary for recognising the apple you see before you.

It is necessary for being able to THINK apple.

Thought is the experience of the interpretation in the thirteenth term of EC/HE.

If you close your eyes and think of an apple, there is no current external apple surface that can alone provide the MEANING you experience. Yet the apple can be present for you.

You can think of it as round, firm, sweet and edible, with skin, flesh and a core. You can imagine holding it. You can think of the taste. You can bring to mind a particular apple from a previous experience, an apple tree, a fruit bowl or something you are going to buy later in the day.

The apple already being known in KNOWING is not sufficient to explain its now being experienced. The current understanding of the apple must be remanifested.

This too happens from the bottom up. A current relation in KNOWING provides the basis for a progression of readings and interpretations. What is thought is built up as a current whole through the emergence bands. This does not require an external apple surface to be present first. The relations that set the progression in motion may exist between already established MEANINGS.

The brain thus becomes directly connected to EC. The manifest remanifestation is a landscape of current relations that FOCUS can read. These readings produce both SENSATIONS and interpretations. The overall experience of the meaning APPLE appears through this progression.

We thus obtain a connection in which experience becomes KNOWING, KNOWING is incorporated into attractors, and new current relations provide the basis for remanifestation from the bottom up. The manifest organisation in turn provides relations that are read through EC, allowing the current whole to be experienced and understood.

AE and EC therefore do not stand as two parallel mechanisms, each doing its part independently of the other. AE determines the organisation and current understandings in KNOWING. EC makes the current INTERSPACES experienceable and produces new SEPARATIONS that form part of the further organisation.

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

In perception, a new relation or building block has arisen in an established attractor landscape. A new SEPARATION entails, in principle, new relations to THE ALL that already exists in KNOWING. But Attractor Dynamics immediately determines which ones acquire current significance for the local view.

A small stone on the ground stands in relation to other small and large stones. This does not mean that all the stones in the world become current in the individual experience. Distance, pattern similarity, relational support and the situation as a whole determine which connections form part of the current understanding.

Or you see a mountain while water running down the mountainside dislodges a small constituent. The landscape has changed, but the understanding MOUNTAIN need not change as a result.

The local patterns must nevertheless be understood in their present constellation. The vast majority of changes are so small that the whole is confirmed as before. Others introduce precisely the difference that makes a new MEANING correct.

The drop that makes the cup overflow.

The small signal that makes you realise that the pain is caused by cold, not heat.

The new property that means the fruit is no longer understood as an apple, but as a nashi.

Remanifestation therefore does not mean that a known explanation locks experience into the same outcome. The current constellation is built up into understanding anew. What is known can be confirmed, but it can also be modified or form part of a new whole.

Many of the current relations can be read simultaneously in one STEP. The interpretations that depend on the results follow in further STEPS. This is why the extensive building-up can involve both great simultaneous breadth and successive depth.

This is also why we must not imagine remanifestation as a reopening of the same locked events. LOCK remains. The new reading concerns the current, unread relation; already established KNOWING forms part of the basis for understanding.

Thought is the experience of the brain
The current remanifestation of the attractor landscape is what appears as the brain’s activity. It provides an extensive manifest landscape of relations that must in turn be read and interpreted.

The brain is therefore not merely a structure we can observe from the outside. It forms part of experience from within. The current INTERSPACES produce SENSATIONS, and when these are read through EC, there is also the interpretation into SEPARATION in the thirteenth term and the subsequent rearrangement of KNOWING through AE.

This rearrangement and the simultaneous remanifestation are what is experienced as thought.

Thought is therefore not an additional product that the brain produces after its other activity is complete. Thought is FOCUS’S experience of MEANING when the manifest brain dynamics are read and interpreted through EC.

The brain does not in itself create thought. The reading and interpretation of its current relations are the experience of thought. Thought is the experience of remanifestation in the brain.

At the same time, these dynamics give rise to a large number of manifest SENSATIONS. The brain is therefore a manifest intermediate link in both thought and qualia experience. But it is not their ontological origin. KNOWING and its organisation remain the foundation; the current remanifestation makes this foundation experienceable.

A single new relation can thus set a whole little world of changes in motion. First, the organisation in KNOWING changes. Then the current reorganisation appears as manifest brain dynamics. This provides new relations that are read through EC, and further understanding emerges from the bottom up.

This is why the external event can be small while the inner experience is extensive. A glimpse of the apple can bring forth a thought of taste, a memory of a garden, an image of a person or a decision about what to do. The externally registered contribution is only a small part of the entire current progression.

In thought, this external contribution may be weak or absent as a triggering basis. FOCUS then follows the current relations in the remanifested inner landscape. This too is actual manifest experience, not merely an abstract name or a hidden calculation.

Here we also find a plausible explanation for what we call the subconscious: The remanifestation process leading up to the highest current MEANING, which is the one we actually experience consciously.

Perception comes from within
What we usually call the experience of the external world therefore encompasses far more than the direct registration of a surface.

The current encounter provides the basis for reorganisation in KNOWING. Complete remanifestation from the bottom up provides a manifest progression through the brain. Reading this progression produces both qualia and the MEANING we experience as our understanding of the situation.

When you see an apple, you therefore do not first experience a fully formed external thing that the brain subsequently explains. You experience the whole that becomes available through the entire progression of manifestation and interpretation.

Perception comes from within in this ontological sense. This does not mean that the surroundings are insignificant. It is precisely the current relation to the surroundings that forms part of the constellation. But the experienced world emerges through KNOWING, remanifestation and EC.

The brain is the manifestation mechanism’s second storey
The basic manifestation has been there all along. Relation, SENSATION, 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 single local surface relation is not sufficient to make the entire current MEANING experienceable. An extensive manifest progression is required in which lower contributions form part of higher understandings.

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

The first makes primitive relations experienceable and establishes KNOWING.

The second is the complex manifest organisation in which already incorporated KNOWING can form part of a current remanifestation, allowing higher wholes to be experienced and interact as the MEANINGS they have become.

This is not another basic mechanism alongside the first. It is the same connection between KNOWING, SENSATION, EC and interpretation, unfolded through a far more extensive organisation.

The current situation gives rise to readings. The readings are placed in KNOWING. AE reorganises the landscape, and new readings and interpretations build up the current whole from below. The whole is experienced as qualia and thought, while being confirmed or modified in KNOWING.

Without this remanifestation, high MEANINGS could remain abstract, but they could not be experienced as the complex wholes they have become. Remanifestation makes it possible for compression and further experience to coexist: What has been incorporated remains as KNOWING, while the current whole appears anew through EC.

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