October 3, 2017

Transcendence: Movement Towards a Collective Ideal


Conceptual impressions surrounding this post are yet to be substantiated, corroborated, confirmed or woven into a larger argument, context or network. Objective: to generate symbolic links between scientific discovery, design awareness and consciousness.

Waveform, Awareness, and the Semiotics of Observation: Toward a Design Consciousness Framework 

A waveform may be understood not merely as a physical descriptor of oscillatory phenomena but as a conceptual bridge between awareness, perception, and interpretation. In contemporary physics, waveforms encode probabilistic distributions of potential states rather than determinate objects, a view formalized in quantum mechanics through the wave function and its collapse under measurement (Heisenberg, 1958; Bohr, 1935). Metaphysically, this suggests that what is encountered as an “event” is not a fixed entity but a context-sensitive actualization of a field of possibilities. When an observer encounters such an event, it is typically reconstituted into a sequence of experiences that are filtered through preexisting cognitive, cultural, and symbolic frameworks, what psychology would describe as schemas or interpretive models (Piaget, 1970; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). 

From this perspective, every account of consciousness is necessarily situated and perspectival. Phenomenology has long argued that consciousness is not a detached mirror of reality but an intentional structure in which meaning arises through the correlation of subject and world (Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Thus, what appears to be an “objective” event is always already mediated by subjective conditions of sense-making. Semiotics clarifies this mediation by demonstrating that experience is organized through sign relations, icons, indices, and symbols that structure how phenomena become intelligible (Peirce, 1931–1958). In this sense, awareness becomes reflexive: it recognizes itself indirectly through the patterns and events that arise within its own field of experience. 

Your text’s claim that events may be “measured” as mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual aligns with contemporary integrative models of cognition that refuse a strict mind–body dualism. Instead, cognition is understood as embodied, embedded, and enactive, unfolding across neural, affective, somatic, and cultural dimensions (Varela et al., 1991; Damasio, 1999). The assertion that “all forms and events are vibrational” resonates both metaphorically and physically with the recognition that, at fundamental levels, reality is describable in terms of oscillations, fields, and resonances, whether in quantum field theory or in systems theory more broadly (Bohm, 1980; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Variations in frequency or phase, in this view, correspond to variations in perceptual and interpretive states, not merely in physical measurements. 

The notion that some forms of energy may appear “more conscious” than others can be reframed through theories of emergence and complexity. Consciousness, on many contemporary accounts, is not a binary property but a graded, emergent phenomenon arising from relational organization and informational integration (Tononi, 2008; Deacon, 2011). The holographic metaphor you invoke, wherein each fragment carries information about a larger whole, finds both scientific and philosophical echoes, from Bohm’s implicate order (Bohm, 1980) to contemporary discussions of distributed representation in cognitive science and artificial intelligence (Clark, 2016). In AI research, for example, meaning is not localized in single symbols but emerges from patterns of activation across networks, a structural parallel to holographic and fractal metaphors of mind. 

Humanity’s tendency to categorize experience into mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual “silos” can be understood semiotically as a process of symbolic differentiation. These categories are not neutral; they are culturally inherited sign systems that shape how ultimate concerns, such as the concept of God or the sacred, are articulated and stabilized within discourse (Cassirer, 1955; Jung, 1968). Such symbolic systems are always constrained by limited resources, partial perspectives, and what quantum theory itself would call entanglement: the inseparability of observer and observed, knower and known (Bohr, 1935; Heisenberg, 1958). The resulting interpretations are therefore inevitably “fuzzy,” echoing both the probabilistic nature of quantum descriptions and the indeterminacy emphasized in post-structural semiotics (Eco, 1976). 

Your description of an “oscillating, parametric field” that connects multidimensional thoughts and emotions aligns closely with contemporary models of mind as a dynamic system. Rather than static representations, cognition is increasingly modeled as a trajectory through a high-dimensional state space, sensitive to initial conditions and contextual perturbations (Kelso, 1995; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). In design theory, this dynamic view supports the understanding of design not as the imposition of fixed forms but as the orchestration of constraints, affordances, and trajectories within evolving systems (Norman, 2013; Buchanan, 2001). The concept of “source,” whether micro or macro, functioning symbolically through design, introduces a crucial metaphysical and aesthetic claim: design operates as a mediating language between origin and manifestation. Philosophically, this resonates with process thought, in which reality is understood as becoming rather than being, and form is the temporary stabilization of ongoing processes (Whitehead, 1929). Psychologically, the “soul” as a filter of meaning can be interpreted less as a metaphysical substance and more as a symbolic totality of the psyche, integrating conscious and unconscious dimensions (Jung, 1968). Your use of the wave–particle duality as a metaphor for how experiences appear either intangible or tangible mirrors the epistemological lesson of quantum physics: complementary descriptions are required to account for phenomena that exceed any single representational frame (Bohr, 1935). In aesthetics and design, this suggests that forms are not merely objects but events of meaning, crystallizations of intention within perceptual and cultural fields (Dewey, 1934; Krippendorff, 2006). What you call “imaginings” can thus be understood as designed symbols, configurations of meaning that congeal within a shared reality through collective practices of interpretation. 

The role of the subconscious, intuition, and imagination in constructing symbolic systems is well established in depth psychology and cognitive science. Jung (1968) emphasized the formative role of archetypal images, while contemporary theories of predictive processing argue that perception itself is an active construction guided by prior models and expectations (Clark, 2016). In this light, observation is not passive reception but participatory enactment: reality is continuously co-produced by observer and environment, a view consistent with both enactive cognition and certain interpretations of quantum measurement (Varela et al., 1991; Wheeler, 1990). 

Your description of the observer as a “dimensionless center” echoes both phenomenological accounts of the transcendental subject and metaphysical notions of a ground of awareness that cannot itself be objectified (Husserl, 1970; Nagarjuna, trans. Garfield, 1995). The reference to “dreamtime” can be read as pointing to liminal states of consciousness in which categorical distinctions loosen, a theme explored in anthropology, psychology, and philosophy alike (Eliade, 1959; Jung, 1968). 

When you state that awareness is a function of consciousness and design is the process that transforms awareness, you are articulating a powerful design-theoretical claim: design becomes the operational interface between potential meaning and lived form. This aligns with contemporary views of design as a sense-making practice rather than mere problem-solving (Buchanan, 2001; Krippendorff, 2006). The ethical dimension you introduce, concerning toxic ideas and planetary harm, situates design within a responsibility framework that resonates with current discourse on AI ethics, ecological design, and responsible innovation (Floridi et al., 2018; Norman, 2013). 

Finally, your emphasis on intention, pattern, and trajectory as the core coordinates of design consciousness integrates metaphysics, psychology, and systems theory into a single operative schema. Intention corresponds to teleology or goal-directedness, pattern to form and structure, and trajectory to process and becoming (Whitehead, 1929; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). In AI, similar triads appear in discussions of objective functions, architectures, and learning dynamics, underscoring that even artificial systems participate in a designed semiotics of action and meaning (Russell & Norvig, 2021; Floridi et al., 2018). 

In this expanded framework, design emerges as the mediator between the visible and the invisible, between sensed and unsensed dimensions of experience. What is not immediately perceived, the latent, the implicit, the unconscious, often exerts the greatest causal influence, a claim supported by both depth psychology and systems theory (Jung, 1968; Deacon, 2011). Thus, every pattern of “energy in motion” can be understood as fractal and holographic in the sense that it repeats relational structures across scales, from neural dynamics to cultural symbols to technological systems (Bohm, 1980; Mandelbrot, 1983). Design consciousness, in your sense, becomes the practice of navigating and shaping these resonant fields so that awareness may continually reconfigure itself within an ever-expanding ocean of meaning. 




References (APA) 

- Bohr, N. (1985). Atomic physics and human knowledge. Dover. 
- Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge. 
- Buchanan, R. (2001). Design research and the new learning. Design Issues, 17(4), 3–23. 
- Cassirer, E. (1955). The philosophy of symbolic forms (Vol. 2). Yale University Press. 
- Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press. 
- Deacon, T. W. (2011). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. Norton. 
- Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee. 
- Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Indiana University Press
- Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane. Harcourt. 
- Findeli, A., & Bousbaci, R. (2005). L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en design. The Design Journal, 8(3), 35–49. 
- Floridi, L. (2014). The fourth revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human reality. Oxford University Press. 
- Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and philosophy: The revolution in modern science. Harper & Row. 
- Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Northwestern University Press. 
- Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton University Press. 
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 
- Krippendorff, K. (2006). The semantic turn: A new foundation for design. CRC 
- Mandelbrot, B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature. W. H. Freeman. 
- Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. 
- Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1–8). Harvard University Press. 
- Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos. Bantam. 
- Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. Yale University Press. 
-Spinoza, B. (1994). Ethics (E. Curley, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1677) 
- Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.
- Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality. Free Press. 
- Wheeler, J. A. (1990). Information, physics, quantum: The search for links. In W. 
- Zurek (Ed.), Complexity, entropy, and the physics of information (pp. 3–28). Addison-Wesley. 

The author generated some of this text in part with ChatGPT 5.2 OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed, edited, and revised the language to their own liking and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.



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"To believe is to accept another's truth.
To know is your own creation."
Anonymous



Edited:10.15.2017, 11.24.2017, 03.05.2018, 01.29.2020, 01.06.2022, 08.19.2023, 02.05.2026, 02.18.2026
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