Followup to: Phantom hierarchies of structure, Structural representation of uncertainty.
Structure waves operate locally, looking at a single structural context and finding ways of improving it. All the knowledge about the world, and knowledge about the structure of a particular scene, gets expressed in this single procedure. The direction of improvement comes as a generalization from previous scenes, and from intermediate results obtained during transformation of these scenes.
Direction of improvement depends on the global context, on what is known and what is salient. Monotonic restoration of details is one modification that can improve structural contexts, filling in absent details. At the same time, global context gradually shifts, changing the preference relation, and some of the details become abandoned, so that they should now be excluded from structural contexts. Structural contexts don’t just grow and become more detailed, they change according to the global context, and in its turn global context is formed by this process, which closes the loop. Choice of specific structural contexts for enumeration is determined by global context and by other structural contexts. Representation is ever in the process of seeking balance between structural contexts and overall global context.
When balance is disturbed, representation starts changing, trying to find a new balance. Changes in a global context can provoke local changes in an area of representation that was previously well-balanced, which in turn create local disbalance that can initiate significant reconfiguration of that area, waves reconstructing whole new structures from previous scenes and integrating them in the context. When the dust settles, balance is restored again, but representation is different. It describes more of less the same state of knowledge about environment, but it now expresses it differently, making some of the inferred details explicit, shifting to different levels of representation, looking at the scene from a different point of view. It is the same change of perspective that happens on a smaller scale during enumeration of structural contexts, when hierarchies of structure turn upside down.
