Followup to: Balance of context.
What makes a scene whole, as opposed to collection of unconnected parts? Parts (patterns) influence each other, so that some collections of patterns are balanced, and some are not. Balance is in stability of local reconstruction of structural contexts, and the process of balancing the scene in waves of local structure brings it together. There are many properties present in balanced scene and not in an unconnected collection of parts, but functionally the distinction comes down to local balance.
A balanced scene is consistent: different paths reconstruct the same pattern in approximately the same way. This notion is tricky, since one could say that if different paths create different reconstructions, these are reconstructions of different patterns, not of the same pattern. What is the identity of a pattern, when should we say that two slightly different structural contexts are approximations of the same, and when they should be considered separately?
Identity of a pattern is a functional property, it reflects the fact that all reconstructions of the same pattern are affected by changes in the pattern. Different reconstructions of the same pattern interfere with each other. In unbalanced scene, reconstructions constantly change each other, identity of patterns isn’t localized, they are mixed together. Changes accumulate to affect the global context, interfering with all kinds of patterns throughout the scene.
Pattern interference establishes structure on the implicit pattern graph. Different structure waves propagating through it interact by interference of enumerated patterns, even if they don’t share exact structural contexts along the way. There is a huge number of patterns and paths in the pattern graph, and interference allows them to interact with each other when the match isn’t exact.
As the scene becomes more balanced, each reconstructed pattern interferes with less and less other patterns. Change in a slightly unbalanced scene takes the form of a conceptual slippage, a localized interference that directly influences only reconstruction of the same pattern, with minimum influence on the global context. However, interference doesn’t refer to all changes initiated by variation in a pattern, only to changes in the first affected step of reconstruction in other structure waves, in immediate effect of changes in map salience on pattern matching. A local conceptual slippage could initiate a wave of reconstruction that eventually rewrites the whole scene, through local interference of reconstructions of the slipped pattern and global effects of structure waves that subsequently passed through it, changed by the interference.
