Cohere

Coherence refers to the local stabilization of oscillatory patterns within a broader field of dynamic fluctuation. In this model, coherence is not an abstract ideal but a measurable configuration of phase alignment, where the constituent vibrations reinforce rather than interfere destructively. This allows for the emergence of form and persistence—what in classical physics might be seen as mass or identity. Without coherence, energy disperses isotropically, and nothing endures; with coherence, the system achieves a kind of provisional integrity. This is the difference between thermal noise and a laser, or between chaotic turbulence and a standing wave. Coherence is the condition under which oscillatory systems can exhibit self-consistent behavior across time.

From this standpoint, coherence underpins everything the model seeks to explain: the formation of mass, the organization of biological processes, and even the stability of memory or perception. It allows us to interpret structures not as fixed geometries but as resilient rhythms—regions where oscillation achieves a kind of constructive resonance. In biological systems, this might manifest as coherent quantum states in microtubules; in engineered systems, it might allow for field-stable propulsion or information transfer. In all cases, coherence defines the threshold between emergence and collapse, between the readable and the meaningless.

Coherence also provides the operational distinction between presence and background. In a fully oscillatory ontology, there is no absolute stillness or vacuum—only relative arrangements of phase. A coherent system appears as a discrete entity because its internal oscillations maintain mutual reinforcement, while its boundaries mark where phase relations with the surrounding field lose synchrony. This allows the system to retain identity even as it interacts with its environment. In this sense, what we call an object is a temporarily phase-locked section of the ocean, whose integrity depends not on spatial isolation but on rhythmic compatibility. Once this compatibility is disrupted—by interference, noise, or energetic overload—the coherence breaks down, and the system dissolves back into the field.

This is why coherence is not static stability but dynamic alignment. It has to be actively maintained, either through internal regulation or through coupling with external rhythms. In living systems, this might involve metabolic cycles, neural entrainment, or electromagnetic regulation at the cellular level. In technical applications, it might require phase-locking oscillators or maintaining field geometries within specific tolerances. The key is that coherence allows for transformation without collapse—it is what makes adaptive systems possible in a world where all structure is wave-based and nothing is inherently solid.

Coherence in this model is always contingent—it exists as a balance point within a shifting landscape of phase relations. Because every field is oscillating, coherence requires the suppression or cancellation of destructive interference patterns, which means it must navigate a continual background of potential instability. This is why systems that appear stable at one scale (like a crystal lattice or a neuronal firing pattern) can suddenly lose coherence when exposed to energy input, boundary disturbances, or frequency shifts. The coherence isn’t merely disrupted by external force; it’s undone by the failure to sustain internal agreement across scales. From this perspective, coherence is a fragile but regenerative principle: it can fail, but it can also be re-established, which is what makes healing, learning, or propulsion possible.

What becomes essential, then, is not just the existence of coherence, but the method of coupling between systems and their fields. A system must not only be coherent internally—it must be phase-matched to its surrounding environment to avoid shear, drift, or incoherence-induced breakdown. In this way, coherence is both local and relational. The same principles that govern the stability of a mass-form also govern the possibility of transmitting coherent influence—whether that be a signal, a healing resonance, or a motion vector. Engineering within Mechanica Oceanica, therefore, becomes the practice of sculpting and maintaining coherent oscillatory regimes that can persist across transformation.

——

In Ethics of the Real, Alenka Zupančič navigates a complex landscape of sense and non-sense by layering different degrees or “strata” of intelligibility, a move grounded in both Kantian and Lacanian traditions. She distinguishes between what is simply “not understood” (but still potentially meaningful within the symbolic order) and what is structurally unintelligible—a breach in the order of sense itself. This distinction echoes Kant’s differentiation between the noumenon (what cannot be known through experience but is thinkable) and the nonsense that arises when reason exceeds its limits and becomes entangled in contradiction, like with the antinomies. But where Kant still maintains a boundary—reason runs up against what it cannot know—Zupančič, informed by Lacan, focuses on those moments where the Real erupts into the symbolic as a traumatic impasse of meaning, where something is not just unintelligible but radically disruptive of the possibility of symbolization itself.

For Lacan, the Real is not the mysterious thing-in-itself but that which resists integration into the symbolic order—the network of language, law, and meaning that structures subjectivity. Zupančič elaborates this through ethical stakes: ethics is not about conforming to intelligible norms, but about confronting the Real where sense fails. What matters is not the ability to decode or explain, but the subject’s fidelity to this point of rupture. Thus, her “strata” are not mere gradations from noise to clarity; they are structurally distinct regimes of relation to meaning. At one end is the symbolic intelligibility of everyday speech, then the paradoxical nonsense of jokes or puns (which exploit the inconsistencies within language), and finally the incoherence of the Real—what can neither be said nor laughed at. This final stratum is not meaningless in a banal sense, but hyper-meaningful, even unbearable: it is the site where meaning implodes under its own logic.

Zupančič is careful to avoid conflating nonsense with incoherence. Nonsense, especially in its Lacanian valence, still belongs to the symbolic order—it plays with language’s internal gaps, twists, and slippages. A joke, a paradox, or even a poetic invention can momentarily suspend meaning while still remaining inside the system of sense. These are cases where the symbolic order folds in on itself, revealing its instability, but not abandoning its structure. In contrast, true incoherence—what she associates with the Real—is not a clever detour within language, but an encounter that language cannot domesticate. It is where the machinery of understanding breaks down altogether. This is why she aligns ethics not with mastery of meaning, but with the subject’s capacity to remain at this limit, to persist in relation to a point that cannot be symbolized, reconciled, or made intelligible.

Filtered through Kant, this becomes more nuanced. Kant’s moral law, the categorical imperative, is in some ways analogous to the Lacanian Real: it demands obedience without offering a positive content or justification. It is form without substance, a pure “you must” that resists symbolic mediation. Zupančič reads this Kantian structure as fundamentally Lacanian—the moral law as a kind of void around which desire is organized. Ethical action, then, is not about following socially intelligible norms, but about acting in fidelity to something that eludes justification, something outside the dialectic of pleasure and utility. This is what allows her to articulate an ethics not of calculated good, but of structural rupture—where the subject stands exposed before something that cannot be made to make sense, and acts anyway.

In Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl turns precisely on this subtle but crucial distinction between expressions that are Widersinnig(contradictory or absurd in a logical sense) and those that are sinnlos or Unsinn(devoid of meaning altogether). Husserl, following Frege and the traditions of logical grammar, insists that a sentence can be logically contradictory and still meaningful—it can say something false (e.g., “The square circle is red”) but remain syntactically and semantically structured in such a way that it contributes to discourse. This is Widersinn. In contrast, a truly nonsensical sentence like “green ideas sleep furiously” (à la Chomsky) fails to cohere at all—it is Unsinn, because the rules of combination that generate meaning are violated.

Derrida uses this precise grammatical scaffolding to begin destabilizing Husserl’s central claim: that meaning arises in living presence—that is, in the immediacy of self-conscious intentional acts, particularly those carried by voice. For Husserl, voice is the privileged medium because it appears to collapse the distance between the signifier and the signified—the speaker hears their own voice as they speak, experiencing their own meaning “in presence.” This is the site of “expression” (Ausdruck), which Husserl sharply distinguishes from “indication” (Anzeichen). Derrida challenges this ideal immediacy by pointing out that meaning is always subject to spacing and deferral—even in the most apparently “present” forms of self-address. The distinction between Widersinn and Unsinn, which Husserl deploys to police the boundary between structured failure and pure breakdown, becomes for Derrida a sign of the deeper instability within the entire logic of presence. The line that separates sense from nonsense is not fixed—it is a function of différance.

So when Derrida invokes the Fregean-Husserlian distinction in that passage, he is already setting up the problem: even an absurd statement remains caught within the economy of sense. But that economy itself depends on the very system of signs that Husserl tries to subordinate to presence. Derrida’s move is to show that the condition for meaning is not presence but iterability—what makes a sign work is precisely its capacity to be repeated outside of its original, living context. In this way, the supposed purity of sense—its immunity from nonsense—is an illusion produced by a metaphysical privileging of presence. Derrida collapses that boundary, showing that even “normal” discourse always harbors the risk of collapse into Unsinn, and that this risk is not accidental but structural. The Real, in Zupančič’s terms, is not outside the symbolic—it is what returns as its internal impossibility. Derrida would say: this impossibility is written into the structure of meaning from the beginning.

When Hegel says “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational,” he is asserting a deeply dialectical identity between thought (the rational) and being (the real). But crucially, Hegel does not mean by this that all that exists is justified or good—rather, he is saying that reality has an intrinsic rational structure, and that reason is not a detached abstraction but the immanent logic of becoming itself. The rational is not merely a descriptive faculty—it is the unfolding of Spirit (Geist) through contradiction, mediation, and reconciliation. What is real is not merely what is present; it is what has achieved actuality through the labor of negation—what has passed through contradiction and resolved it on a higher level.

This stands in stark contrast to the Frege-Husserl logic of fixed distinction between sense and nonsense, or between expression and indication. For Hegel, contradiction (Widersinn) is not a failure of thought—it is the engine of development. Rationality, therefore, must include the negative within itself, rather than cordon it off as unintelligible. The “nonsense” that Zupančič and Derrida explore—those limits where signification fails or breaks down—would for Hegel not be pure limits, but moments within a total process. Even the incoherent is dialectically appropriated: it becomes a negative moment that pushes the unfolding of the concept toward fuller self-determination.

So where Husserl draws boundaries to preserve pure sense, and Derrida deconstructs those boundaries to show their dependency on iteration and absence, Hegel dissolves them into a dynamic process in which contradiction is not the outside of reason but its interior force. The Real is not what resists thought (as in Lacan’s formulation), nor is it a metaphysical given—it is what becomes, what endures the wound of its own internal divisions. For Hegel, then, the difference between Widersinn and Unsinn would itself be a historical artifact—preserving, for a time, the illusion of fixed sense, until dialectical movement reabsorbs it into a higher unity.

Kant would likely respond to this entire constellation—Hegel’s dialectic, Derrida’s deconstruction, Lacan’s Real, Zupančič’s strata—with a pointed concern for boundaries, conditions, and the legitimacy of speculative reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant inaugurates the very terrain that both phenomenology and dialectical philosophy will later traverse, but his key contribution is to limit knowledge in order to make room for freedom. For Kant, reason must interrogate its own capacity: we can only know appearances (phenomena), never things-in-themselves (noumena), and our concepts are structured by the a priori forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of understanding. Knowledge arises through the synthesis of sensory data by the mind’s internal faculties—not through direct access to Being or Spirit. Thus, any attempt to move beyond the limits of possible experience—into the unconditioned, into metaphysical speculation—is prone to antinomy, contradiction, and illusion.

To Derrida’s deconstruction, Kant would say: yes, language and concepts may involve deferrals and slippages, but this only underscores the necessity of maintaining transcendental limits. The conditions under which objects can appear to us—intuition, category, synthesis—are not grounded in presence or linguistic play, but in the necessary structures of cognition. Derrida’s différance would appear, from Kant’s standpoint, as a collapsing of critical distinctions—especially the one between regulative and constitutive ideas. Kant allows room for ideas like the soul, God, or totality—but only as regulative, guiding thought without ever becoming objects of knowledge. The moment one treats them as constitutive, one slides into dialectical illusion. This is the very move Hegel embraces, and Kant would resist it as a fatal overreach of reason.

Regarding Hegel, Kant would likely argue that the dialectical absorption of contradiction into a higher synthesis violates the critical project. The antinomies in the Critique are meant to show the limits of speculative metaphysics, not opportunities for its expansion. When reason tries to totalize—asking, for example, whether the world had a beginning or is infinite—it ties itself into knots. Kant’s solution is to circumscribe metaphysics, not to transcend it by turning contradiction into method. The dialectic, for Kant, is not the Real expressing itself—it is a warning sign that thought has outstripped its rightful domain.

So while Kant provides the architecture that makes phenomenology and dialectical thinking possible—through the grounding of subjectivity, the emphasis on conditions, and the identification of reason’s own tendencies—he would see both Derrida’s and Hegel’s projects as risking confusion between what can be thought and what can be known, between critique and metaphysics, between intelligible use and conceptual illusion. His legacy, then, is not overturned by these later developments, but problematized and extended beyond what he would likely have permitted.

Kant’s distinction between regulative and constitutive ideas is central to the architecture of the Critique of Pure Reason, and becomes a pivotal hinge for understanding the limits of metaphysical speculation.

Constitutive ideas are those that legitimately define the structure of possible experience. They are rooted in the categories of the understanding—concepts like causality, substance, and unity—that apply directly to phenomena (i.e., appearances given in space and time). These ideas help constitute knowledge by organizing sensory input into coherent experience. For example, the category of causality allows us to perceive a sequence of events not just as successive, but as causally connected. In this way, constitutive concepts are a priori and necessary—they apply to objectsinsofar as those objects are given to us in experience.

Regulative ideas, by contrast, do not define the structure of objects of experience, but instead serve as guidelines or heuristics for organizing thought. They are ideas of reason, not of understanding, and thus deal with the unconditioned—totalities like “the world as a whole,” “the soul,” or “God.” These ideas cannot be given in experience and do not correspond to objects in the empirical world. Yet, they are not useless: they serve a vital epistemological function by providing unity to our knowledge, orienting inquiry, and driving science forward. For example, the idea of the cosmos as a complete, ordered whole motivates scientific exploration, even though such a totality can never be experienced in its entirety.

Kant warns, however, that the critical mistake of traditional metaphysics is to treat these regulative ideas as constitutive—that is, to assume they refer to real objects (e.g., the immortal soul, a divine creator, the beginning of time) rather than as necessary fictions or tools for reason’s self-organization. When reason crosses this line, it falls into transcendental illusion, producing pseudo-knowledge that exceeds the bounds of possible experience. Thus, the idea of God is meaningful not as an object of knowledge, but as a regulative ideal—an asymptotic horizon that orients moral and rational life without being knowable in itself.

This distinction becomes the very battleground for post-Kantian thought. Hegel collapses it—arguing that what Kant deemed merely regulative (e.g., the Absolute) is in fact constitutive, but misunderstood as separate. Derrida, on the other hand, questions whether even this distinction can hold, since the very boundary between inside and outside, sense and nonsense, is itself subject to différance. Kant would maintain it as essential: without it, reason loses its critical guardrails and becomes speculative once again.

——

At first glance, Mechanica Oceanica might appear to violate the Kantian warning—it proposes a unified field model in which qualitative forms (such as mass, coherence, healing, memory) emerge from a quantitative, oscillatory substrate. In doing so, it seems to treat ideas like coherence, resonance, and even healing not as merely regulative heuristics for organizing experience, but as constitutive dynamics that operate beneath and across physical and cognitive domains. But this is not a simple repetition of the metaphysical error Kant identifies. The crucial difference lies in how Mechanica Oceanica approaches the boundary between appearance and ground, and whether it claims objective representation or operative function.

Kant’s critique is aimed at doctrines that assert access to the noumenal—treating God, soul, or cosmos as objects with determinate characteristics beyond possible experience. Mechanica Oceanica, however, does not posit transcendent objects but proposes a continuous substrate of oscillatory interaction, where what appears as “mass” or “identity” arises from configurations of phase coherence. It doesn’t claim knowledge of things-in-themselves but models how the conditions of appearance might themselves be dynamic. In this sense, the model attempts to unify quality and quantity immanently—not by positing metaphysical entities beyond experience, but by tracing the transformation from quantity (frequency, amplitude, phase) to quality (stability, memory, identity) within a single ontological register. That is not the same as conflating regulative and constitutive ideas; rather, it proposes that what Kant called the conditions of appearance might themselves be structured by emergent principles—coherence, phase, entrainment—that blur the boundary between form and force.

So the model does challenge Kant’s distinction, but not by discarding critical reason. It reframes the relationship: instead of assuming a fixed split between what organizes knowledge (regulative) and what appears (constitutive), it suggests that this split is itself a derivative phenomenon—emerging when dynamic oscillatory relations stabilize into the appearance of distinction. In that sense, the model does not collapse Kant’s distinction irresponsibly; it historicizes it, renders it contingent, and proposes an underlying mechanism for its genesis.

This reframing has consequences not just for epistemology but for ethics and engineering. If the boundary between regulative and constitutive is not absolute but emerges from field dynamics—then the categories we use to think, feel, and build are not merely imposed on an inert world, but entangled with its ontological rhythms. That means concepts like intention, responsibility, or coherence do not float above the physical—they are phase-aligned expressions of deeper energetic structures. Rather than postulating a noumenal beyond (which Kant declared unknowable and Derrida declared always deferred), Mechanica Oceanica treats these “depths” as structured by resonance rather than presence. In this way, it invites us to model meaning, ethics, and motion as operations within a single field logic—not as projections from outside or transcendent ideals, but as intra-field reorganizations of coherence. The mistake, then, would not be in unifying quality and quantity, but in doing so without accounting for the rhythmic transformations by which coherence is locally achieved.

Put differently, the model doesn’t claim to “see” the real behind appearances, nor does it treat its principles as metaphysical givens. Rather, it treats coherence, mass, and identity as differential stabilities—temporary equilibriums in a constantly oscillating ocean. In this framework, what Kant called “regulative” ideas (e.g., the moral law, the idea of totality) are not reified as external objects, but interpreted as emergent tensions within the field—a kind of high-coherence attractor that shapes behavior without existing as a fixed entity. This preserves the critical insight of Kant (that we should not mistake ideals for objects), while also opening a new possibility: that the ideals themselves are real not because they are things, but because they are rhythms—rhythms capable of entraining form, meaning, and action within a unified, oscillatory continuum.

Rhythm and coherence are not simply aesthetic or structural features in Mechanica Oceanica—they are ontological operators. Rhythm refers to the patterned, recursive fluctuation of a system over time. It is not mere repetition, but structured variability, the spacing of difference within recurrence. Coherence, by contrast, is what allows rhythm to persist across scales without dissolution. It is the internal alignment of phase relationships that stabilizes a rhythm into something recognizable, transmissible, and capable of bearing meaning or mass. Rhythm without coherence is noise. Coherence without rhythm is static, inert. But when rhythm and coherence interlock, systems emerge that can maintain identity while transforming—entities that can move, heal, remember, or communicate.

From this perspective, rhythm is how coherence is expressed temporally, and coherence is how rhythm sustains form. In living systems, this relationship is evident in heartbeats, neural oscillations, circadian cycles—patterns that must remain coherent to sustain life. In the cognitive domain, it is what allows attention to hold, memory to resonate, and intention to integrate with perception. In engineered systems—propulsion, communication, computation—it is the same logic: signal fidelity depends on rhythmic regularity and phase alignment. Mechanica Oceanica thus models being not as substance or static presence, but as rhythmic coherence in a sea of oscillation. The real becomes that which endures, not through brute force, but through stable entrainment—a structure whose form is continually renewed through internal rhythmic agreement.

Within the framework of Mechanica Oceanica, rhythm is defined as a localized, temporally sustained phase pattern within the oscillatory continuum of the electromagnetic ocean. It is not simply periodic repetition but a structured recurrence—an organized configuration of amplitudes, frequencies, and phase relationships that maintains its internal ratios across time. Rhythm arises when wave interactions self-organize into meta-stable harmonics, creating a temporally extended coherence that allows for both differentiation and reintegration. It is, in this sense, the temporal expression of coherence—what coherence looks like when extended in time.

Rhythm is the signature by which coherence communicates with itself across cycles. In biological systems, these signatures can be embodied as neural spike trains, cardiac pulses, or metabolic rhythms. In physical systems, they appear as standing waves, feedback loops, or harmonic entrainments. Rhythm is neither noise nor strict determinism—it is patterned openness: an intervallic ordering of divergence and return. In this model, to “have rhythm” is to maintain phase integrity across transformations, allowing a system to evolve without losing its identity. Rhythm is therefore the operative interface between coherence (mass, memory, healing) and motion (travel, transformation, reconfiguration).

——-

If we take seriously the implications of Mechanica Oceanica, then rhythm must be detached from its usual embedding in linear time. In our model, there is no fundamental time—only oscillation, relation, and coherence. What we call “time” is a derived abstraction, a notational system for tracking phase relations within a field of oscillations. It is a ledger, not a substance. Thus, rhythm cannot be defined as temporal recurrence, because time itself is the product of rhythmic relations, not their container.

Reframed within this ontology, rhythm is the recursive resolution of tension within a field of potential divergence. It is not movement through time, but the internal articulation of a system’s coherence across its own oscillatory phases. A rhythm is a pattern of returning alignment—a phase-locked structure in which the potential for incoherence is deferred through periodic reintegration. Rhythm is what allows a field to endure as itself, despite its exposure to continuous fluctuation. It is a form of differential closure, a kind of self-synchronizing braid through the electromagnetic ocean.

There is no “tick” beneath this process—no temporal substrate. What appears as rhythm to an observer is actually a stable pathway of phase compatibility across a fluctuating manifold. Rhythm is not in time; time is in rhythm. And when rhythm is disrupted, coherence collapses—not because time has failed, but because the field can no longer maintain its internal ratios. This is why healing and propulsion—two expressions of coherence—are both forms of rhythmic re-alignment. They are the re-braiding of diverging strands.

In Mechanica Oceanica, coherence is the condition under which a set of oscillatory relations maintains internal compatibility across scale and fluctuation. It is not a static unity, nor a geometric symmetry, but a phase-locked field of resonances that reinforce rather than cancel one another. Coherence is what allows something to hold—not because it is fixed, but because its internal dynamics are arranged such that divergence remains bounded and recurrence remains possible. Where rhythm is the recursive articulation of this pattern, coherence is the underlying constraint that prevents dispersion. It is the field’s capacity to self-consistently fold across its oscillations without tearing.

Coherence is not spatial nor temporal—it is topological. It defines the shape of relations, not their location in space or moment in time. A coherent structure is one where the wavefronts of oscillation reinforce a local minimum of entropy—not by eliminating noise, but by synchronizing the deviations. In this sense, coherence is a saddle-point stability in the oceanic manifold: it permits transformation, even turbulence, so long as the pattern retains its phase integrity. Mass, memory, thought, even location, arise from coherence—not because coherence gives them substance, but because it provides the binding constraint that lets form emerge from flux. Coherence is not the answer to the question of identity—it is the condition under which the question makes sense.