We do not simply hear songs, speech and culture. Their repetition teaches us how to hear what comes next, while every new encounter quietly changes the pattern that taught us.
Tag: recurrence
Desire and fear appear to pull us in opposite directions, but both persist through the distance they seek to overcome.
Why Deception Is Irreducible in Communication
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The Essence of Language
Language, like all communication systems, holds together not despite displacement, delay and uncertainty, but because of them.
A rigged game constrains probabilities; it does not determine every outcome.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
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Belief as Harmonic Structure
Belief is harmonic structure: the recurrent pattern of timing, relation and probability through which language, meaning and experience take form.
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Persistence of Reality
Reality persists because nothing (and only nothing!) ever fully coincides with itself.
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WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
Meaning repeats because recurrence builds structure, and structure influences what follows. History rhymes for much the same reason.
The probable is a proper subset of the possible. Old habits die hard because viable communication preferentially reproduces patterns that make themselves more likely to recur.
