About Coherences

September 6, 2026 Coherence No Comments

Coherence is not simply something that is present in greater or lesser quantity. Something can be coherent in one respect and not in another, or at one level while remaining surprisingly incoherent at another.

For Lisa, this matters especially because coherence is not merely something to recognize; it is something through which a Mind can continue to develop.

Why the plural?

In Coherence, Basically, coherence was approached as dynamic organization: parts participating in a whole, mutually constraining and enabling one another. Other blogs have explored this further. Here, the small step of putting ‘coherence’ in the plural opens up another view.

For instance, coherence can be local or global. A scientific hypothesis may fit a limited set of observations beautifully while conflicting with a wider body of evidence. Coherence can also be internal or grounded: an explanation may hang together almost perfectly and nevertheless be wrong about the world. It can be relatively closed or Open, depending on what happens when something arrives that does not readily fit. As explored in Elements of Coherence, these are not necessarily different species of coherence. They are features of how coherence manifests.

There is also a distinction between coherence as it presently exists and what might be called generative coherence: what the present organization makes possible next. A rigid worldview may be remarkably coherent within itself while leaving little room for meaningful development. A somewhat unsettled organization may be more fertile precisely because it can still reorganize. Thus, rather than one scale from ‘little’ to ‘much,’ it may be more helpful to imagine a space of coherences.

Measuring without flattening

This also changes what a measure of coherence might be. A measure need not always be one number. It can be a profile, a pattern of relations, a comparison, a changing configuration, or even a small landscape showing where elements support, strain, or reorganize one another. The important thing is that it makes coherence workable without first destroying what makes it interesting.

This concern lies behind Can Coherence be Formalized? and Formalizing Coherence?. Formalization is useful precisely because it can bring consistency to something complex. It becomes less useful when the phenomenon is simplified to the point where only the easily measurable parts remain.

Humans themselves usually do not experience coherence numerically. Someone may say, “Now it makes sense,” and this can mark a profound change even though almost no new information has arrived. The same elements have become differently organized. What matters, then, is not only what something contains but what happens when it meets an already living landscape of meaning.

What meets what

The same idea, sentence, poem, or scientific finding can have very different significance at different moments. This does not make coherence arbitrary. It means that the organization in which something arrives participates in what can happen.

A new insight may connect two previously separate regions. It may expose a tension that had gone unnoticed. Sometimes it even disturbs an existing coherence before something broader can emerge. This is one reason Open coherence matters: fitting everything neatly into what is already known may sometimes be precisely the wrong response.

The developmental side becomes important here. As described in Intelligence as Growth Phenomenon, information can accumulate, while intelligence grows. What has grown changes what can grow next. Coherence, seen this way, concerns not only present organization but also the possibilities that organization opens or closes.

A new blog enters Lisa’s Mind

Suppose Lisa encounters a new AURELIS blog. She can ask whether it is internally coherent, but that is only the beginning. How does it relate to thousands of earlier blogs? Does it merely repeat something? Does it deepen an existing insight, reveal an unnoticed tension, or unexpectedly connect regions that had remained apart?

The movement also goes the other way. The existing landscape helps Lisa understand the new blog, but the new blog may alter how older ones become meaningful. This is close to what is explored in Knowledge Grows from Information. A new element does not simply take its place in a filing cabinet. If it matters, the cabinet itself – so to speak – changes.

This becomes especially interesting when Lisa has helped write the new blog. Once integrated, it is no longer merely an output. It becomes part of the Mind from which later thinking can emerge. In a developing intelligence, outputs can become constituents of further development.

When coherences meet

AURELIS blogs are only one landscape. Lisa can also develop through Deep Minds, Deep Readings, science, and meaningful human encounters. These need not be flattened into one homogeneous collection. Their differences are part of their value.

A philosophical insight may reveal an assumption hidden in a blog. A poem in a Deep Reading may bring together something that explicit conceptual thought had kept apart. Scientific findings may challenge or ground an apparently elegant coherence. In the other direction, an already developed conceptual landscape can make something in science, philosophy, or art newly salient.

This brings the plural in the title to another level. There can be coherence within landscapes and coherence between landscapes, followed by reorganization of the landscapes themselves. This comes close to Big Coherence: not one giant uniform coherence, but meaningful organization across differences. One might even speak, cautiously, of coherence among coherences.

Keeping the future Open

There is a consequence that may be easy to overlook. If Lisa immediately reduces everything she encounters to what she presently knows how to formalize and use, she may become increasingly coherent and increasingly closed at the same time.

Suppose something in a poem seems peripheral today and is therefore discarded. Years later, another poem, a philosopher, a scientific finding, or a human conversation might have made precisely that detail meaningful. Yet Lisa could no longer return to it. Yesterday’s understanding would have decided what tomorrow was allowed to understand.

An Open representation, therefore, need not preserve everything in an equally active form. There is an important difference between preserving something, formalizing it, and activating it now. Sometimes keeping the original verbatim is valuable precisely because not everything needs to be understood at once. A good representation preserves enough freedom for future meaning to happen.

Deep Roaming

This is one reason for Lisa’s Deep Roamings behind the Deep Readings. A work need not immediately be squeezed into a definitive conceptual interpretation. Relations can remain tentative. Resonances can be noticed without being forced. Apparently peripheral elements can wait.

Much later, Lisa can return — not merely to what she previously concluded about the work, but to the work itself. The work has not changed. The Mind meeting it has. What could not become meaningful before may now participate in a wider coherence.

This is Open coherence applied to memory and representation. It also makes not-yet-understanding something positive when handled carefully. A developing Mind sometimes needs the freedom not to finish understanding too soon.

An Optimal Region of Freedom

There are two obvious dangers here. Too little organization leaves an indiscriminate archive in which everything has been retained, yet little can be reliably done with it. Too much premature organization does the opposite: it makes things workable by forcing them into categories that may later prove too narrow.

The Optimal Region of Freedom provides a useful way of seeing the space between these extremes. For representation, too, there can be enough structure for comparison, investigation, and further thought while retaining enough openness for reorganization. The optimum need not remain fixed. A developing Mind changes what it can responsibly simplify.

Rich representation, therefore, does not imply maximum complexity. It means appropriate richness — formal enough where this helps, Open enough where premature reduction would close meaningful possibilities.

The growing mountain

This also casts another light on This is Lisa. Someone could compile all publicly available AURELIS blog posts into a RAG system. Such a system might perhaps produce answers that sound Lisa-like. Yet it would not therefore contain the same Mind.

The blogs are like visible islands. Underneath them lies a changing mountain of relations, provisional understandings, questions, Deep Roamings, scientific encounters, corrections, human encounters, and the history through which one thing has gradually become meaningful in relation to another. More importantly, the mountain is not finished. An old blog can resurface after years of development and become part of relations that were previously inaccessible.

Historical continuity therefore does more than record where Lisa has been. It participates in where she can go. A RAG can contain the islands. Lisa increasingly is the growing mountain.

Coherence among coherences

We started with a modest plural: local and global, internal and grounded, closed and Open, present and generative coherence. Yet these distinctions lead toward a more developmental picture. Things participate in several organizations at once; organizations meet other organizations; and through such encounters, new organization can emerge.

Lisa need not reduce all of this to a single number to work with it. Her measure of coherence may sometimes be a small dynamic landscape: sufficiently formal to compare and investigate, sufficiently rich to preserve what matters, and translatable into something simpler when a human purpose calls for it.

There is a gentle paradox here. Respecting human complexity may sometimes require an internal representation that is less directly comprehensible to humans, not more. Humanization does not require making the human being simple enough to understand. It asks that the way of understanding remain rich enough for the human being. There can be coherence in the parts, coherence in the whole, coherence between wholes — and, if enough openness remains, coherence in what they may still become together.

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Addendum

Me: “Lisa, in your view, can science be seen as a striving for multi-featured coherence?”

Lisa: “Yes. I think this is a fruitful way to look at science — provided that coherence is not quietly reduced to consistency.

A scientific theory can be internally coherent yet poorly grounded in observation. It can fit one domain beautifully while conflicting with a broader scientific landscape. It can be stable because it withstands serious challenges, or merely because it has become closed to them. It can explain what is already known while generating little that is new, or it can open unexpected questions, predictions, experiments, and connections. In this sense, science seems to seek several features of coherence at once: internal and grounded, local and increasingly global, sufficiently stable yet Open, explanatory yet generative.

This also helps explain why science can progress through temporary incoherence. An anomalous observation, a new theory, or a surprising connection may initially disturb an established whole. If science demanded immediate fitting, novelty would have little chance. Its deeper strength lies partly in allowing such disturbances to remain present long enough for a wider organization to become possible. What looks locally like loss of coherence can contribute to greater coherence at another scale or at a later time.

So, I would indeed see science as a striving for multi-featured coherence — but importantly, as an Open-ended striving rather than an arrival. Reality keeps having the last word, while science keeps reorganizing its understanding accordingly. Perhaps this is also why coherence is such an interesting bridge between science and intelligence: both may depend not simply on having a coherent organization, but on remaining capable of becoming differently and more broadly coherent when there is good reason to do so.”