Consciousness as Motion Through an Attractor Space

We’ve framed individuation as the shaping of a strange attractor in a person’s semantic space — a richly patterned, dynamic system that governs how they tend to mean.

Now let’s zoom in on consciousness as what happens when meaning traverses that space.

🌀 Consciousness Is Not a Line, but a Trajectory

Traditional models often treat consciousness as a linear stream — thoughts following one another in tidy succession.

But that’s not how experience feels, and it's not how minds behave.

In dynamical systems terms, consciousness is the unfolding of a trajectory within an attractor landscape:

• Never exactly repeating,

• Always constrained by past and present conditions,

• Yet capable of sharp turns, feedback loops, emergent stability, and sudden reorganisation.

This is why we can’t “choose” what we think next with full freedom — the attractor constrains us.

But nor are we deterministic machines — the system has degrees of freedom, sensitive to minute perturbations.

Consciousness is chaotic, but not random. It has shape, rhythm, and form — the mark of an attractor at work.

🪞 Reflexivity and Feedback

What makes consciousness unique as a dynamical system is its reflexivity:

• It doesn’t just traverse meaning space — it observes that traversal.

• It adjusts the attractor while being shaped by it.

This reflexivity is like a feedback loop curled into itself:

• I mean something → that act reshapes my attractor slightly → which in turn influences what I mean next → and I may notice this shift and respond.

That’s what allows for intentionality, learning, and self-regulation.

We could even say:

🗣️ Consciousness is the attractor becoming aware of its own attractor-ness.

Which is absurd — but maybe not wrong.

🧬 Emergence of the "Self"

What we experience as the self is not a central controller, but a stable-enough pattern in this chaotic motion — a subset of attractor states that recur, that cohere, that seem “me.”

In Edelman’s terms, it’s the result of reentrant mappings across neural circuits.

In SFL terms, it’s the continuity of meaning potential that constrains and shapes instances over time.

In attractor terms: the “I” is a metastable region — a zone in which meaning tends to loop, stabilise, and recognise itself.

But it’s not static. That’s why we feel like ourselves, even as we grow and change — because the attractor is evolving, not dissolving.

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If we now accept that consciousness:

• Is recursive motion within a strange attractor,

• Produces meaning in context-dependent, non-linear ways,

• Evolves as it moves,

• Is shaped by and shapes what it encounters,

Then this challenges our epistemological assumptions.

It means we don’t know the world by standing outside it and predicting its mechanics.

We know it by inhabiting it, recognising patterns, and adjusting our own attractor in response.

Which leads us to:

What does it mean to know, when both the knower and the known are dynamically unstable, and bound by attractors rather than rules?