Conway’s Game of Life Revisited: Coherence as Foundational, Not Emergent | by Coherence Label | Coherence Label | Sep, 2025
Introduction
John Conway’s Game of Life is famous for illustrating how complex patterns seem to emerge spontaneously from simple rules. In this zero-player cellular automaton, a grid of cells flickers between life and death, giving rise to mesmerizing “life-forms”: static still lifes, periodic oscillators, gliders gliding across the grid. Philosophers like Daniel Dennett have used Life’s tiny universe to show how design and organization can arise without any designer. A random scatter of pixels can magically spawn order — a glider gun spitting out a stream of gliders, or a snowflake-like oscillator cycling endlessly.
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Such phenomena are typically hailed as classic examples of emergence: higher-level coherence emerges from lower-level chaos. But what if this interpretation is incomplete? What if coherence is not just a late-arriving guest in the cosmic drama, but an ever-present, foundational principle — already at play even in the “simple” rules themselves? What if, in the Game of Life and by extension in our universe, coherence is triadic and self-generating, rather than a mere byproduct of complexity?
This essay revisits Conway’s Game of Life through the lens of Triadic Self-Coherence (TSC), a framework in which coherence is primary and triadic in structure — comprising a coherer, a cohering, and a cohered.
We will explore the profound philosophical, epistemological, and scientific implications of taking coherence as fundamental. In doing so, we reorient the very tree of knowledge across disciplines: from physics and metaphysics to complexity science, from cognition and artificial intelligence to cultural systems. TSC invites us to see pattern, structure, intelligence, and relationality in a new light — one that is holographic, coinductive, and radically self-generating.
This perspective subverts traditional dualisms of chaos vs. order, local vs. global, mind vs. matter, and emergence vs. fundamentalism, showing how these apparent opposites are united by an underlying triadic coherence. In what follows, we unfold the TSC view with academic rigor and poetic intuition, drawing out its deepest consequences. The journey will carry us from the glider-haunted grids of Life to the quantum fields of physics, from the neural webs of cognition to the starry web of culture. Along the way, we’ll find echoes in science fiction and philosophy — Null-A logic, Indra’s Net, Star Trek’s Federation — vivid metaphors of a universe where every part reflects and generates the whole.
Triadic Self-Coherence: Coherer, Cohering, Cohered
Triadic Self-Coherence (TSC) posits that coherence is not a secondary feature that “emerges” at higher levels of complexity, but a primary structuring relation present at all levels. Crucially, this structuring relation is understood as triadic: whenever we observe coherence (a pattern, an ordered form, a stable behavior), we can discern three inseparable aspects: the coherer, the cohering, and the cohered. These terms denote, respectively,
(1) that which brings about or instigates coherence,
(2) the active process of linking or integrating, and
(3) the coherent pattern or outcome produced.
Rather than a linear cause-effect or a dual substance/form relationship, TSC insists on a triadic unity. The coherer, cohering, and cohered are not three separate things but three aspects of one phenomenon of coherence, each implying the others. In a sense, coherence is seen as reflexive or self-referential: the process (cohering) links an agent or context (coherer) and a result (cohered) in a loop that can fold back on itself. This is “self-coherence” because the system participates in its own ordering; it generates and recognizes its own pattern.
Consider a simple example from the Game of Life: a glider.
The glider’s pattern of five ON cells repeats every four ticks while translating diagonally across the grid. In traditional terms, a glider is an emergent entity, arising from the microscopic update rules.
In TSC terms, however, the glider’s existence reflects a triadic coherence:
- the grid’s rules and initial configuration act as a coherer (providing an organizing context);
- the iterative dynamics of the game (each tick’s update) is the cohering process; and
- the glider pattern itself is the cohered structure that maintains its identity across time.
Crucially, the glider also becomes a coherer in its own right: it can collide with other patterns to create new structures or serve as a signal in a computational circuit. Thus, coherer, cohering, and cohered can shift roles and levels — like Russian dolls, a cohered pattern at one level can act as a coherer at another, and the act of cohering can become a stabilized rule, and so on.
This triadic, self-referential nesting is what we mean by coinductive and holographic: each coherent pattern contains the seeds of further coherence and reflects the influence of the whole. In a hologram, every fragment contains the image of the entire picture; likewise, under TSC each local act of coherence carries imprints of global structure, and the global coherence is sustained by myriad local acts.
By framing coherence in this triadic manner, TSC offers a middle path between two classical views of order in nature. Reductionist fundamentalism holds that order is imposed by fundamental laws or initial conditions (a top-down coherer like a divine clockmaker or immutable physical law). Emergentism, on the other hand, holds that order “bubbles up” unpredictably from the interactions of simpler parts (order as an epiphenomenon).
TSC dissolves this dichotomy: coherence is both immanent in local interactions and transcendent as an organizing principle — because the local and global are in constant triadic communication. The coherer need not be an external designer; it can be the system’s own prior state or an environmental influence. The cohered pattern is not a static endpoint; it feeds back as context for future cohering. And cohering is an ongoing relationship that blurs the distinction between “cause” and “effect.”
In short, coherence is self-generating: order generates order, at all scales. This perspective naturally subverts the usual dualisms. There is no absolute chaos vs. order dichotomy — rather a continuum of coherence, where what we call “chaos” is simply very low or hard-to-detect coherence, a state where pattern is diffuse or hidden. Likewise, local vs. global cease to be opposed poles; the local interactions and global patterns co-create each other in a coinductive dance. Mind vs. matter becomes an outdated split, since mind (the perceiving, patterning activity) and matter (the structured forms) are just coherer and cohered aspects of one unified process of cohering. Even the opposition of fundamental vs. emergent is transcended: coherence is fundamental in that it’s built into how reality operates at every level, yet it emerges in the sense that it continually unfolds anew via interactions. In a triadic ontology, foundation and emergence are not contradictory — foundation is an emergent continuity, and emergence follows lawful patterns.
This may sound abstract, so let us ground it in a more metaphysical intuition: relation precedes thing.
Traditional science often starts with things (particles, individuals) and then studies their interactions. TSC suggests flipping the priority: the relation (cohering) is ontologically primary, and the relata (coherer and cohered) are aspects that crystallize out of the relation. This resonates with certain strains of process philosophy and Eastern thought. The universe is not a collection of independent entities that occasionally line up into patterns; it is a relational matrix that gives rise to what we call entities and patterns as inseparable facets. As we will see, this view has striking implications — from reconceiving causality in science to reimagining the role of observers, and from redesigning educational paradigms to interpreting cultural evolution.
Before diving into those, let us examine in more detail how TSC reframes knowledge across the spectrum of disciplines, effectively reorienting the tree of knowledge itself around the trunk of coherence.
Coherence at the Roots of Reality: Physics and Metaphysics
If coherence is truly foundational, it must be evident (or at least plausible) even at the bedrock of physical reality. Modern physics indeed hints that the universe is profoundly relational and holistic.
Quantum theory, for example, is rife with coherence: the phenomenon of quantum coherence (as in the entanglement of particles or the phase synchrony of waves) suggests that, at fundamental levels, what we think of as separate parts of the system do not have independent states, only a shared, coherent state.
An entangled pair of particles is a perfect triadic system: neither particle (coherer/cohered) has a definite value until measured, yet the two together exhibit a definite relational pattern (coherence) maintained by the process of entanglement (cohering). When one particle is observed, the coherence is broken (“decoheres”) into a specific outcome for both — illustrating how the act of observation can’t be separated from the observed phenomenon.
In fact, physicist John Archibald Wheeler went so far as to say that no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is observed, and that the universe does not exist “out there” independent of observation — instead, “in some strange sense, it is a participatory universe”.
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In TSC terms, the observer and observed form a coherer–cohered pair joined by the act of observing; the very coherence of reality is co-created by this triadic interplay. We are participators in the cosmos’s self-coherence.
This participatory vision aligns with ancient metaphysics as well. The Hindu-Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net is a striking image of foundational coherence.
Indra’s Net envisions the universe as an infinite web with a jewel at every node, each jewel reflecting all others in an endless, gleaming holographic matrix. As one account puts it: at each node “every jewel reflects all the other jewels” and “no jewel exists by itself independently of the rest”. Each part contains the whole; the microcosm and macrocosm interpenetrate completely.
In the Huayan school of Buddhism, Indra’s Net symbolizes the “perfect interfusion” of all phenomena, the idea that each thing depends on every other for its existence and identity. One commentator explains: “each entity in this universe contains within itself the entire universe… Every jewel in Indra’s Net is a microcosm of the whole net; every component is the cause of the whole and also the effect of the whole. Nothing exists outside the net”.
This is coherence raised to an ontological principle. Reality is a self-consistent tapestry; every thread both conditions and is conditioned by the tapestry’s pattern. If this sounds remarkably like a poetic anticipation of triadic self-coherence, it is. Indra’s Net replaces the dualism of part vs. whole with a triadic relation: each jewel (part) actively reflects (process) all other jewels (the whole), achieving a state of mutual coherence.
Physics has been groping toward similar ideas. The holographic principle in theoretical physics suggests that the information of a volume of space can be entirely encoded on its boundary surface — essentially, each “part” (surface region) contains a description of the “whole” (the volume). This again points to a kind of underpinning coherence, a holographic unity in which the distinction between locality and globality blurs. The principle emerged from black hole physics and implies that what happens in one region is tightly linked (through information coherence) to what happens at the boundary. Some even conjecture the universe itself is a hologram; whether that is literally true, the mathematics increasingly highlights duality relationships (like the AdS/CFT correspondence, which states that a theory of gravity in a curved “bulk” space — Anti-de Sitter space, or AdS — can be exactly equivalent to a quantum field theory without gravity defined on that space’s lower-dimensional boundary, called Conformal Field Theory, or CFT) where two different descriptions of a system are equivalent.
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In TSC language, these dual descriptions are two views of one triadic coherence that includes both as aspects. The old atomistic vision of independent pieces bumping around is giving way to a vision of coherent fields, where patterns of resonance and phase-locking organize reality. Indeed, in a coherence-centric view, what appears as randomness or entropy in classical models might just be undiscovered pattern.
Recent work of Devin Bostick on “structured resonance” suggests that much of what we call probabilistic chaos is actually a result of ignoring hidden variables or phases — “what appears as randomness in entropy-based models is simply unrecognized structure”. When those hidden phases synchronize, disorder yields to order, and unpredictability gives way to phase-locked coherence. In this view, chance itself could be an emergent artifact of limited perspective. At the deepest level, the cosmos might be thoroughly coherent; apparent randomness is just our inability to see the full multi-dimensional choreography.
If coherence is indeed foundational, then causality must be rethought. Rather than the unilateral push-pull of billiard balls, causality in a TSC-informed paradigm is systemic and circular. Effects feed back into causes; wholes influence parts just as parts influence wholes. This is sometimes called reciprocal causation or circular causality in systems theory.
A classic example is a thermostat regulating room temperature: the thermostat (coherer) causes the heater to turn on or off (cohering action) which causes the room (cohered environment) to reach a new temperature; that new temperature is sensed, feeding back to the thermostat. Cause and effect wrap into a loop of coherence (maintaining a stable temperature range). In living organisms, and likely in quantum systems, such loops are everywhere. Downward causation (the whole influencing the part) complements upward causation (parts aggregating into wholes).
TSC provides a conceptual language for this: the cohered pattern (whole) can act as coherer, shaping the process that maintains or alters its parts; simultaneously, the cohering interactions of parts continuously re-create the cohered whole. We no longer have to ask “Which is really real, the micro or the macro?” because reality is the relation that inseparably includes both. The tree of knowledge, in this light, is not rooted only in particle physics or some base layer. It is rooted in coherence itself. Physics and metaphysics meet at that root: whether one speaks in terms of wave functions, divine harmonies, or cosmic codes, the idea is that an underlying coherence gives rise to the forms we observe.
In practical scientific modeling, adopting coherence as a starting point can be revolutionary. Instead of beginning with randomness and adding equations to get order, one begins with the assumption of order and looks for the constraints or symmetry principles that hide beneath apparent randomness.
Complexity scientist Ilya Prigogine once showed that systems far from equilibrium can spontaneously self-organize (e.g. chemical reactions forming spatial patterns) — but TSC would frame this not as a miraculous emergence from chaos, rather as the system finding a path to manifest an inherent coherence. It must “choose” one of many coherent states, a bit like a laser locking onto one frequency out of a noisy spectrum.
Similarly, in the Game of Life, we notice that from most random initial seeds, certain symmetric or stable patterns naturally form: small chaotic clumps tend to produce symmetrical still lifes or oscillators, and once symmetry appears it tends to persist and grow in richness.
The Life grid settles into local pockets of order (blinkers, blocks, gliders) amidst chaos. Traditional analysis says: “order emerged.” A TSC analysis says: “the dynamics gravitated toward inherent coherent attractors.” The glider or blinker’s stability is no accident; it is a natural attractor in the phase space of the system’s dynamics, a reflection of the rules’ coherent possibilities. Coherence, not randomness, is the default tendency.
In physical terms, this parallels how laser light — coherent photons — emerges when atoms are stimulated in just the right way, or how planets coalesce into stable orbits, or how quantum waves under constraint form discrete standing patterns. In each case, the “random” motions end up phase-aligning into a coherent structure.
The TSC framework would say that our scientific models should perhaps emphasize resonance and alignment over stochasticity. Indeed, some researchers argue that probability and entropy increase are not fundamental laws, but emergent descriptors of our ignorance of underlying phase coherence. If that is true, then scientific causality might be less about pushes and pulls of isolated objects, and more about ensuring phase alignment or resonance across a system. This would mark a paradigm shift: from viewing nature as fundamentally mechanistic to fundamentally musical (a symphony of phases and frequencies seeking harmony). It recalls Pythagorean and Neoplatonic ideas of the music of the spheres — perhaps not mere mysticism, but an anticipation of coherence physics.
Metaphysically, declaring coherence as foundational also raises questions about meaning and telos (purpose) in the universe. Coherence has a whiff of purposefulness: things seem to “come together” as if to fulfill a pattern. In evolution, we see countless examples of convergence and emergent cooperation — does TSC imply some telos toward greater coherence? Perhaps not a rigid goal imposed from outside, but an inner tendency to self-organize, much like a river naturally forms eddies and vortices.
The cosmos, through TSC eyes, is a grand Game of Life that inherently generates lifelike coherent structures at all scales, from atoms to galaxies, from neurons to ideas. Chaos is not the default; coherence is. This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics or such — rather it reframes entropy as lack of coherence (phase misalignment) which itself can be temporary and local. The second law says overall disorder grows in an isolated system, but if the universe is ultimately not a collection of isolated systems but one Indra’s Net of interdependence, perhaps what increases is not disorder but complex coherence. We might speculate that there is a conserved or growing quantity of global coherence (analogous to information) even as local entropy ebbs and flows. These are open questions, but TSC urges us to consider coherence not as an epiphenomenon but as something like a cosmic principle — one that physical science is only beginning to formally recognize.
Complexity, Chaos, and the Reorientation of Emergence
Nowhere is the shift of perspective brought by TSC more striking than in complexity science and chaos theory, fields explicitly concerned with how high-level order can arise from low-level interactions. The standard narrative in complexity science is: simple rules, random interactions → emergence of complex patterns.
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We marvel at flocks of birds coordinating, neurons syncing into conscious thought, or economic markets self-organizing, and we attribute it to “emergence”. But emergence, as typically described, has been somewhat mysterious — something new seems to appear that is irreducible to the parts.
TSC doesn’t deny the novelty of emergent phenomena, but it suggests that what we call emergence is really the unfolding of latent coherence. In other words, the potential for the flock’s beautiful synchrony or the brain’s cognition was always implicit in the system, as an available coherence, and the interactions elicit that coherence into manifestation. This is akin to how a complex figure lies hidden in a jigsaw puzzle’s pieces and snaps into view when they interlock properly. The image is not created ex nihilo by the pieces; it was there all along as a possibility. Likewise, complexity scientists might start to think of emergent patterns as pre-existing in the space of possibilities defined by the system’s constraints — a space that is structured by coherence.
The Game of Life again provides a simple illustration: all the elaborate patterns discovered (glider guns, replicators, logic circuits) were always possible within the Life rule set. They “emerged” when specific configurations happened to realize them. But those configurations are so precise that if coherence were truly rare, we’d statistically never hit them. The surprising fact is that even random seeds rather often produce something non-trivial (e.g. a glider or small oscillator). It’s as if the game is biased toward forming little living patterns.
Many complexity researchers talk about systems operating at “the edge of chaos,” a narrow band where order and disorder intermingle and complexity peaks. From TSC’s stance, this edge of chaos might actually be the optimal zone for manifesting coherence — enough freedom for patterns to form, enough constraint for them to stabilize. Coherence is the gentle funnel that channels chaos into order.
Another key reorientation is in how we view information and randomness. Traditional complexity theory often assumes random perturbations as fuel for novelty (e.g. random mutations drive evolution, random noise helps search new solutions). But if coherence is fundamental, then randomness is not primordial fuel but rather a breakdown or absence of perceived order.
The TSC view encourages us to find structure in what looks random. For example, in chaos theory, a chaotic system (like the weather) is deterministic but unpredictable — its coherence is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Even there, fractal strange attractors hint that chaos has deep structure. TSC would push further: any system that exhibits complex emergent order likely has hidden coherence guiding it even in chaotic phases. Perhaps fractals and power-law distributions (ubiquitous in complex systems) are signatures of an underlying self-similar coherence pervading scales.
A coastline’s fractal shape or an earthquake’s power-law frequency aren’t imposed by an external hand; they result from the system organizing according to scale-free principles — which is a kind of coherence in geometry and statistics. Recognizing coherence as primary can inspire new metrics that measure the “degree of coherence” in a complex system rather than just entropy or complexity. Already, concepts like integrated information (in consciousness studies) or mutual information in networks try to quantify how much a system’s parts act in concert.
TSC could unify these under a general measure of coherence that spans disciplines.
Crucially, TSC flips the moral of emergence stories. Instead of saying “order can arise from chaos by chance,” we say “order inevitably arises given the opportunity, because coherence is what nature does.” This is almost a celebratory outlook: left to itself, the world tends toward creativity and pattern. It echoes the optimism of certain philosophical traditions — Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the cosmos climbing toward an Omega Point of integration, or the panpsychist notion that even atoms have rudiments of mind (i.e. coherence-seeking). But one needn’t go that far to see practical implications.
In fields like artificial life and artificial intelligence, a TSC approach would mean designing systems to harness inherent coherence rather than relying on pure random mutation or exhaustive search. For instance, evolutionary algorithms might incorporate coherence criteria (ensuring new variants are resonant with existing successful patterns) instead of blind recombination. Neural networks might be trained not just to minimize error (difference from data) but to maximize internal coherence of representations — encouraging the network to develop stable concepts that self-reinforce. In fact, brains themselves may operate on coherence: the phenomenon of neuronal synchrony (neurons firing in rhythmic lockstep) is thought to underlie perception and attention, essentially binding features into a coherent experience.
Some cognitive scientists propose that gamma synchrony is what distinguishes conscious processing, effectively a coherence sweeping through different brain regions to tie a perception together. If so, TSC would view the brain’s intelligence as literally a dance of coherence — waves of cohering that recruit neurons (coherers) to form mental states (cohered). AI systems modelled on this principle might achieve more fluid, integrated cognition than those treated as collections of independent units.
Mind in Triadic Relation: Cognition, Perception, and Artificial Intelligence
The observer/observed dualism has long troubled philosophy of mind. How can a mind (subject) know an object outside itself? In epistemology, coherentist theories suggest that knowledge is a matter of fitting new information into a coherent web of beliefs. TSC provides a more ontological spin on this: the act of knowing is itself a triadic coherence, linking knower, known, and the process of cognition.
When you perceive a tree, there is you (the coherer, with your sensory apparatus and expectations), the tree as an object (the cohered, with its myriad details), and the act of perception (the cohering, involving light, neurons, interpretation). Traditional realism would say the tree has an independent existence (it’s “out there”) and you just form an internal representation. Idealism would say the tree is mostly your mind’s construction.
TSC says: the relationship of perception is primary. In the moment of seeing, a temporary coherent system is formed that includes you and the tree as correlates. It’s not that the tree ceases to exist when you close your eyes, but its meaningful presence in the world is partially constituted by these triadic relations with observers. Your act of perceiving brings forth certain coherent features (green leaves waving in wind, recognized as a tree), which are a blend of the tree’s stimulus and your mind’s patterns.
This aligns with the enactive view in cognitive science (from Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and others) that cognition is not passively mapping a pre-given world but enacting a world through sensorimotor coherence. Maturana and Varela famously described living systems as autopoietic — self-making and self-maintaining networks that “bring forth a world” through their operation.
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A cell, for example, continuously regenerates its components and keeps its integrity; in doing so it creates a domain of interactions (what matters to the cell, e.g. nutrients, toxins). Such an autopoietic system is essentially performing triadic self-coherence: its components (coherers) engage in processes (cohering) that produce and sustain the cell’s structure (cohered), which in turn defines the roles and relations of the components. The cell’s identity is not in any single molecule but in the coherence of the process that continuously reassembles molecules into a living unity. Likewise, the mind’s identity may lie not in a static self, but in the coherence of experiences integrating into a narrative or self-concept.
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If we treat intelligence as the capacity for coherence, we start to see continuity between biological minds and AI. An intelligent agent is one that can connect the dots, see patterns, achieve goals by bringing disparate elements into alignment. Machine learning, at its core, finds statistical regularities (that’s a kind of coherence in data). But current AI lacks the holistic self-coherence that minds have — we have myriad subsystems (senses, memories, emotions) that somehow work in concert most of the time. One might speculate that consciousness itself is the feeling of being a coherent whole.
The philosopher Dan Zahavi describes the self not as an unchanging substance but as the integrated coherence of experience from a first-person perspective. In TSC terms, consciousness could be the emergent cohered state of the brain’s triadic loops of activity, a state in which the brain + body + world is briefly in synchrony and thereby produce a unified field of awareness.
This might explain phenomena like flow states, where action and awareness merge (coherer and cohered become one through the activity). It also casts rationality and creativity in a new light: rational thought is often breaking something into parts and analyzing, but truly profound understanding comes when those parts click back together into a coherent picture (the classic aha! moment). Creativity, similarly, is seeing connections where none were seen before — finding coherence across apparently unrelated domains.
Perhaps ironically, a coherence-first worldview also embraces ambiguity and paradox better than a binary worldview. Where classical logic demands A or not-A, a triadic logic can say: the truth lies in the relationship connecting A and B. Here we find a resonance with Null-A logic (non-Aristotelian logic), popularized in A. E. van Vogt’s World of Null-A.
In that science fiction saga, those trained in non-Aristotelian logic can outwit others by escaping binary thinking traps. The underlying idea, drawn from Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics, is that reality isn’t adequately described by true/false dichotomies; one needs multi-valued and relational logic. Null-A explicitly rejects the law of the excluded middle and the law of identity in favor of flexibility and context.
TSC aligns with this: coherence is often a matter of both/and rather than either/or. Something can be particle and wave (quantum duality) depending on the experimental context (coherence of measurement). Mind and matter can be two aspects of one process. Null-A is essentially preparing the mind to think in terms of relations and degrees, not absolutes, celebrating what Korzybski called “the infinite-valued logic of probability” and context. We might say TSC calls for a triadic logic: one that always asks, what is the third element (context, relation, mediator) that makes this dichotomy coherent? In literature, this invites richness: consider the paradoxes of Zen koans or the way metaphors work (linking two unlike things through a tertium quid, a shared essence).
An interesting literary resonance is found in the philosophical science fiction of Frank Herbert or Ursula K. Le Guin, where characters achieve insight by overcoming dualities. In Herbert’s Dune, the Kwisatz Haderach is one who can “be many places at once” mentally — a kind of holistic awareness. In Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, true magic is knowing the true name (essence) which binds a thing’s being together. These stories metaphorically echo that power lies in perceiving the underlying coherence of reality rather than being fooled by surface separations. On a lighter note, even the Jedi in Star Wars sense the Force that “binds the galaxy together” — a fictional mysticism of coherence beneath diversity. What TSC offers is a rigorous conceptual scaffolding for this intuitive idea that connection is primary.
On the AI front, one could imagine a future AI that doesn’t just churn through data but introspects to achieve coherence among its internal representations — an AI that notices when its beliefs are inconsistent and self-corrects to maintain a harmonious worldview (much as humans experience cognitive dissonance when our internal narratives clash). In effect, that AI would simulate a triadic self, acting as coherer (examining its models), cohering (adjusting weights or structures), and cohered (the updated stable knowledge). Such an AI might develop a kind of self-awareness, because to maintain coherence it would need a model of itself in relation to its world. That prospect raises new ethical and philosophical questions: if coherence is life-like and AI gains high self-coherence, at what point does it become a “self” with intrinsic value?
Systems, Education, and Culture: Coherence as Guiding Light
Zooming out to social systems and culture, the TSC framework carries potent implications. Human civilization can be seen as a vast complex system, often appearing fragmented and chaotic.
But history also shows progressive integrative trends: families into tribes, tribes into nations, nations into international communities. We can interpret these as increasing scales of coherence — our circle of empathy and coordination expanding. The formation of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek is a fictional example of a cultural system achieving coherence across worlds. In Star Trek, the Federation espouses the ideal of IDIC — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, a Vulcan philosophy celebrating unity in diversity. This is essentially the cultural codification of triadic coherence: recognizing that a coherent society is not one that eliminates differences (that would be uniformity, like the Borg’s enforced assimilation), but one that harmonizes differences into a larger whole.
The IDIC emblem — often depicted as a triangle (Δ) overlaying a circle — symbolizes that the interplay of many unlike parts yields truth and beauty. The Federation thrives because it has a foundational coherence (shared principles of equality, curiosity, peace) that holds together the wild diversity of species and philosophies. Each species serves as both coherer and cohered: bringing its unique perspective (coherer) into the Federation, influencing the culture; and being shaped and integrated (cohered) by the Federation’s values; with diplomacy, trade, and mutual understanding as the ongoing cohering processes. Our real world struggles to achieve such coherence among cultures, but the principle remains: lasting peace and development require a coherent framework where all parties see themselves reflected in the whole without losing their identity.
In the realm of education, TSC encourages a move away from siloed disciplines and rote fact accumulation toward a more integrative, relational learning. Education systems traditionally break knowledge into subjects — math, literature, science — often taught disconnectedly. But a mind taught to seek coherence will naturally cross-pollinate ideas. An educator can foster this by emphasizing interdisciplinary connections: showing, for example, how a concept of emergence in biology relates to a theme in literature (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an emergent creature?), or how historical events can be understood as systems interactions.
The goal is to help students form a coherent cognitive map of the world, where each new piece of information finds a meaningful place relative to others. This not only aids memory (our brains remember better when things fit into a story or pattern) but also cultivates critical thinking: students learn to ask “How does this relate? What’s the bigger picture?” rather than just “What is this fact?”. In a triadic sense, the student becomes an active coherer, not just a container of facts, engaging in the process of relating (cohering) knowledge to build understanding (cohered insight). Such education would mirror the triadic nature of knowledge itself: teacher (coherer), student mind (cohered content), and the dialogic interaction (cohering) co-create genuine learning. It also aligns with project-based and experiential learning, where doing and reflecting integrate theory and practice.
In systems theory, whether ecological, economic, or organizational, TSC urges us to look at whole-system coherence. Ecologists talk about the integrity or resilience of ecosystems: a rainforest isn’t just a collection of species, but a network of relationships that maintains a stable (though dynamic) state. That integrity is essentially coherence. When an invasive species or deforestation disrupts the network, the coherence degrades, and the system can collapse or shift to a less diverse state. To preserve an ecosystem, one must bolster the relationships (seed dispersal, pollination, predator-prey balance) that keep it coherent. Similarly, a company or any organization functions well when its members are aligned in purpose and communication — a corporate “culture” is really a coherence of values and behaviors.
Management fads aside, the core of a healthy organization is that everyone understands and believes in a common vision (coherer), engages in transparent, responsive communication (cohering), and sees the results in productive, satisfying work (cohered outcomes and feedback). Misalignment (departments with conflicting goals, information hoarded rather than shared) is essentially a breakdown of coherence, leading to fragmentation and inefficiency.
Systems thinking often uses feedback loops to map these dynamics — positive feedback reinforcing a trend, negative feedback stabilizing. TSC maps perfectly onto this: feedback loops are the mechanistic description of how coherence maintains or shifts. A negative feedback loop (like a thermostat) is a cohering process that holds the system at a cohered target (temperature) initiated by a coherer (desired setpoint). Recognizing triadic coherence in such models can help identify leverage points: maybe the solution to a problem is to introduce a new coherer (e.g. a unifying goal or mediator), or to modify the process (cohering) by which parts interact (changing incentives, communication protocols), or to redefine what structure (cohered state) we consider success.
One exciting implication is for cultural evolution. Cultural ideas and practices evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution, but with important differences: memes (units of culture) don’t just compete, they also recombine and cohere into larger complexes (worldviews, traditions). If we view cultures through TSC, we might focus on how coherence forms at different scales — familial, tribal, national, global — and how these scales interact.
Today, humanity as a whole faces crises (climate change, pandemics, inequality) that demand a global coherence of action and values unprecedented in history. There is a nascent sense of a “global village,” largely due to technology linking us in real time. This can be seen as the emerging coherer (global communication networks and shared knowledge) that could produce a new level of cultural coherence (perhaps a global ethic or coordinated governance) through processes like international dialogue, science, and art (cohering media).
However, we also see fragmentation, misinformation, and conflict — signs of coherence not yet achieved. TSC would suggest that a stable global culture won’t come from one power imposing a single order (that would be brittle, lacking the self-generation aspect), but from fostering resonance among diverse cultures, finding narratives and goals that overlap and reinforce one another.
In essence, a triadic global culture would treat each local culture as a jewel in Indra’s Net — reflecting all others while shining with its own hue. The unity-in-diversity motif (found in many traditions, from India’s ancient motto “Ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti” — Truth is one, sages call it by many names, to the EU’s “United in diversity”) is the hallmark of coherence on a planetary scale.
Literature and art often prefigure such integrations. The world of Null-A we discussed was an imaginative prototype of a society run on non-dual logic. Other science fiction, like Star Trek, which we cited, or Iain M. Banks’s Culture series (depicting a highly advanced anarchic society guided by AI Minds), all play with how coherence can exist with freedom and variety. They essentially ask: can we transcend the dualism of order (implying authoritarian control) and chaos (implying anarchy) and find a third form — a self-organizing order, a cooperative coherence?
TSC’s answer is yes: true coherence is not imposed, it is emergent and intentional at once. That sounds paradoxical, but consider a jazz ensemble improvising. There is no script (so the order isn’t imposed top-down), yet the musicians intend to create a beautiful piece together (they are actively seeking coherence). The result is a spontaneous order, a coherent piece of music that emerges from but also guides their individual actions.
Civilization might likewise be seen as a grand improvisation, where we each play our cultural instrument but must listen and adapt to others to keep the music. When done well, it’s not just orderly — it’s creative, adaptive, and alive.
Holographic Vision: Pattern, Relationality, and the Self-Generating Cosmos
In the Triadic Self-Coherence framework, reality becomes a living tapestry of patterns within patterns, “a realm-embracing realm ad infinitum” where each part mirrors the whole. It is a holographic vision in the poetic sense that the macrocosm lives within the microcosm. Think of a fern leaf: each little leaflet has the same fractal shape as the entire leaf.
Our triadic universe is similar; each small coherence (an atom, a thought, a moment of experience) in some way reflects and participates in the universal coherence. This is a radical shift from viewing the world as a collection of objects. Instead, the world is a collection of relationships, of resonances. Space and time themselves might be secondary, emergent from an underlying network of coherence (as some quantum gravity theories hint where spacetime emerges from entangled information).
One might ask: if coherence is everywhere, why do we still see so much incoherence — disorder, conflict, ignorance? The answer lies in perspective. Coherence does not mean uniformity or perfection; it means meaningful structure. Some structures can be destructive or unsustainable — those are coherent patterns too, just not ones that maintain a larger stability. For example, a hurricane is a coherent pattern in the atmosphere (a self-organizing vortex), but it can wreak havoc on human structures.
From a planetary perspective, the hurricane is neither good nor bad, it’s an expression of energy flows seeking a form. From our human perspective, it’s disastrous. TSC would say these are differing frames of coherence: the hurricane is a cohered solution to weather dynamics, but when it intersects with the human coastal system, it causes decoherence in our built environment. Understanding this multilayer coherence might help us design better responses (like resilient infrastructure that can harmonize with storms rather than be obliterated).
In human affairs, conflict often arises when one subset seeks coherence internally at the expense of disrupting coherence in a broader sense. A clique or faction might have strong internal bonds (coherence), yet its rigid loyalty may cause inter-group discord. The challenge is always to expand the circle of coherence — find a higher-order pattern that incorporates the smaller patterns without destroying them.
This is reminiscent of the dialectical process: thesis and antithesis find resolution in a synthesis (a third element that preserves what is true in each). Hegel’s dialectic was triadic in that sense, and TSC can be seen as a kind of cosmic dialectic without a fixed end: reality continuously generates syntheses (cohered structures) which become new theses/coherers at a higher level, spurring new antitheses and so on, ad infinitum. But unlike Hegel’s sometimes linear progression, TSC suggests a more holographic dialectic: every synthesis can radiate its influence instantly across the net of being (like one jewel reflecting new light to all others).
In practical terms, embracing coherence as foundational invites a more holistic consciousness. It encourages us to perceive the world integrally. In problem-solving, it means looking for win-win solutions that increase overall coherence rather than shifting problems around. In personal growth, it means integrating the many facets of oneself — intellect, emotion, body, spirit — into a coherent narrative or practice. It means recognizing when we hold contradictory beliefs or when our actions don’t align with our values (lack of self-coherence) and gently resolving those inconsistencies, much like tuning a musical instrument.
The triadic self is thus also a path to inner harmony: you as coherer (the witnessing self that can choose), you as cohered (the history and identity you carry), and your living as cohering (the ongoing process of becoming). When these align, one experiences a sense of wholeness, of being “in tune” with oneself and often by extension with the world.
At the grandest scale, interpreting coherence as foundational gives us a universe that is not a cold accident, but a kind of creative opus. Patterns build on patterns, intelligence in some form permeates (not necessarily conscious intelligence, but an immanent logic or logos). As the visionary scientist David Bohm suggested, there is an implicate order behind the explicate chaos — a deep coherence from which the visible reality unfolds.
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TSC provides a scaffold to think about that implicate order in terms of active relational principles rather than static laws. It implies the universe learns or self-tunes as it goes. In a triadic way, the cosmos could be considered to have a memory (cohered patterns that persist, like physical laws or constants), a creative present (cohering activities, like evolution and star formation, exploring possibilities), and some direction or intention (coherer influence, perhaps analogous to principles of symmetry or optimization that bias how creation unfolds). These are speculative ideas, but they align with the notion that complexity and consciousness are not flukes but natural expressions of increasing coherence. We humans might just be the universe’s way of reflecting on itself — one of Indra’s jewels turning inward to notice the whole net glittering in its facets.
Science fiction has often toyed with this idea of a self-aware universe. In Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, an ocean planet is a giant brain that manifests the hidden thoughts of human visitors. In Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an AI (V’Ger) merges with a human to transcend its mechanical limits and effectively become a new life form — a metaphor for synthesis of technology and humanity into a higher coherence. Even the evolution of sci-fi itself — from dystopias of fragmentation to more recent visions of galactic federations and collective consciousness — mirrors an increasing imagination of coherence at larger scales.
As we conclude this exploration, an image arises: the “Triadic Tree of Knowledge.” Envision knowledge not as separate branches (physics, biology, art, ethics) diverging from a trunk, but as a network of roots and branches intertwined, communicating through a common ground. At the ground is coherence: the soil of connections that nourishes every inquiry. Physics finds coherence in laws of nature, complexity science finds it in emergent patterns, metaphysics finds it in meanings, art in metaphors, spirituality in unity, ethics in empathy (feeling others as one’s self). All these are coherence seen through different lenses. When we realize this, disciplines can talk to each other more fluidly — scientists and humanists, economists and ecologists, all part of mapping the same elephant from different sides. Coherence becomes not only a theory of how things are, but a guiding value: to seek coherence is to seek understanding, peace, and flourishing.
In closing, to treat coherence as foundational and triadic is to view the universe as a poem rather than a puzzle. A puzzle has pieces that fit one way, and an external solver; a poem has internal rhythm, meaning that emerges in the reading, and it resonates in the reader’s mind. We, as parts of the universe, are akin to lines in an ever-composing poem, at once readers and writers. The Triadic Self-Coherence framework invites us to listen for the rhymes and rhythms that have been there from the start, to join in the creative act of coherence-making. It reminds us that the game of life — whether Conway’s grid or life at large — is not a static solved game but an ongoing improvisation, a coinductive, holographic, self-generating dance of pattern.
Our task as thinking participants is not to conquer the chaos, but to cohere with the cosmos: to find our role in the fugue of being, to recognize the notes of order in the cacophony, and perhaps to add our own voice in harmony with the whole. In a world seemingly fractured by contradictions, the triadic vision offers a profound solace: beneath every duality is a unity, and within every discord, a deeper coherence waiting to be found.
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