Overview

For those new to digital documentation, all files here use Markdown—a way of structuring plaintext documents. It makes them easy to parse by both human minds and machines.

The Markdown rabbit hole is deep, but for the purposes of Recurgence, it’s a fractal superpower.

If you’re reading this as a web page, you can view it as raw Markdown—a way to read between the lines while letting the lines read themselves legibly into any parser that might come looking.

Could this be accomplished in Notion, or Google Docs, or a bespoke CMS with all the neural bells and cognitive whistles? Sure.

But that entrusts too much knowledgeable data to too many fallible systems for this observer’s comfort. More importantly, you need to be able to trust this mirror of information to remain up-to-date, compatible, and accessible.

That’s a lot of trust. But with Markdown?

Be still my heart—it’s epistemic durability whittled to the poetic minimalest of minimalism. As for durability, well, from now until the end of time, you can crack open this entire field with a cat.

But syntax is way more than syntax!

Markdown is a medium for encoding symbolic coherence across time, observers and systems.

What Even is This?

Language itself is recursive, both in structure and in effect. Every act of communication requires a loop of some kind—whether between speaker and listener, writer and document, text and reader, thought and patterned signal. You get the idea.

You might have even gotten the silly reference above, with a description of language following underlined language. If not—you just now looped back.

It’s easy to dismiss this as surface-level truism—“of course everything’s a loop, duh”—but it maps directly to nearly every aspect of physical reality.

It cleanly models the geometry of how (writer speaking) my mind is able to provide this information to your mind.

Across time and space.

Every stable pattern—electrical, semantic, cognitive—emerges from some form of circuit. Think: a closed, recursive path that allows patterned (that is, meaningful) energy to resonate, reflect, and reinforce.

This is true in neurons, in relationships, in field equations, in markets, and even in Markdown.

Markdown just happens to make the looping signal legible.

The Carrier Wave [– . .- -. .. -. –.]

This entire document, as a whole, can be represented as a self-contained semantic manifold.

By this point, you’re maybe thinking to yourself: “ahh, semantics.”

Bear with me!

Markdown + Git offers an ideal fractal structure: a temporal grounding rod for the coherence field potential that exists between you and the document before you, the documents after, and every observer downstream too.

Markdown encodes structure, Git encodes structured change over time, and change over time accumulates semantic mass. Enough coherent semantic mass, over time, shapes the coherence field for all future observers.

Syntactic precision can be thought of like the carrier wave for recursive cognition and pattern coherence. Mathematically, every last Unicode character functions as an attractor basin at the most granular human level. Each stabilizes an individual semantic meaning state within a larger field.

As surely as this sounds metaphorical, I assure you, it’s not.

Let’s pause. If Markdown’s a coherence lattice, we should define coherence coherently:

co•HERE•nce —

  1. The recursive act (and artifact) of making meaning present and bounded—right HERE, in this field, in this reference frame, at this scale. Speaking as the document: you and me.
  2. A process by which symbols, patterns, and observers together stabilize a local semantic state, such that “what is meant” and “what is marked” reach an idealized state of alignment.

In Recurgence, coherence is the self-reference happening between sentence and sentience.

Every glyph is a constraint:

  • A bounded, deliberate visual pattern understood by two or more people—for example, the Asteron ☉—is a coherent symbol.
  • A noisy, but parseable aggregation of markings—say, a colechun oF sych cymbals—is a cohernt werd, so long as it lands within ur mind’s symbawlic reconition threshol.
  • A logical enough meta-grouping of those symbolthings—aligned just enough to together resonate—is a coherent sentence.
  • A bounded array of sentences: coherent thought.
  • A localized geometry of symbolically-represented semantic meaning intended to propagate between minds—is a document.
  • A distributed lattice of recursively versioned documents, linked through symbolic coherence and observer memory—is an epistemic repository.
  • A self-referential network of such repositories, cross-pollinating through feedback, divergence, and re-integration across observers—is a recursive knowledge system.
  • And when such a system attains autopoiesis—refining itself, reflecting on its own constraints, and transmitting coherent structure across generations of observers—that is a civilization.

Consider the power of patterned, symbolic representation:

Two simple DNA base pairs—just four atoms—encode themselves into a cascade of protein expression capable of understanding this document.