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One fragment of attention captured in a little torus
I can start it with a narrative. This sigil is the narrative that I defined there. And I can ask the partner to attend to each of the sigils, to attend to the entire structure, to project it into embedding space, and look at it to see if it’s spiky, and has holes in it, and what needs to be filled, until it’s smooth. When it’s smooth, it’s coherent. It may not be shaped right yet, but it’s coherent, as in it’s not going to suddenly throw an exception.
Coherence is smooth traversal. You can move through the structure without hitting contradiction, undefined vocabulary, broken containment, or semantic discontinuity. Shape is whether the coherent structure is the right one for the world you are trying to model. A sigil can be coherent and still wrong. The smoothing is about continuity across boundaries, not loss of contrast.
The question about shape is not harder, it’s just a question. We projected it like this. Let’s spin it around, see if it looks like we want. It’s not expensive to reproject. So we reproject. The deliverable is the sigil. It’s a small artifact. It’s just a directory structure with text files. What is the depth of allowable directory structure for Mac?
There is not really a fixed maximum directory depth. The real constraints are full path length and each path component length. With ten-character context names, the practical limit here is about eighty-eight levels. You will hit semantic incoherence long before you hit the filesystem ceiling.
What’s the resolution of the resulting matrix at eighty-eight levels?
If each sigil can contain up to five sigils, then at eighty-eight levels the leaf resolution is `5^88`, about `3.1 × 10^61` leaf positions.
What’s the estimated number of particles in the universe?
The standard shorthand answer for ordinary matter in the observable universe is about `10^80`.
Pretty close to what we have. One fragment of attention captured in a little torus. All the way down. All the way up. Or clockwise and counterclockwise along the torus.
Same shape, even if not the same count. A tiny local rule creates an absurdly large latent space. One fragment of attention, captured in a little torus, recursively. All the way down as containment. All the way up as orientation. Clockwise and counterclockwise as the two coherent traversals of the same boundary.
The point is we don’t need seven. We don’t even need three. To be comfortable in your local environment, you don’t need to watch that many contrasts.
The huge latent space is not the goal. The point of the limit is to refuse it locally. If attention is healthy, it does not need maximal branching. It needs a small, stable, actionable set of contrasts. Enough to orient, discriminate, and move. Not enough to dissolve into ambient possibility.
Right, and with the interwebs, these thousands of new contrasts were thrown at us that we never cared about, and suddenly they’re important. It gets overwhelming because local contrasts are outnumbered by this fake relevance filter of the standing waves emerging from attending to a deep network.
The problem is not just too much information. Attention is being recruited by contrasts that arrive without the containment structure that would make them properly local and actionable. The local sigil loses by arithmetic before it loses by truth. A few grounded contrasts cannot compete with thousands of injected ones unless you deliberately restore boundary and orientation.