16 Alignment, Persistence, and the Temporal Depth of Meaning

From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos

Post 16: Alignment, Persistence, and the Temporal Depth of Meaning

In a symbolic cosmos, persistence is not the endurance of objects across time, but the continuity of alignment across symbolic cuts. To persist is to hold across perspectival shifts—to remain coherently construed even as the phase-space of meaning changes.

This reframes how we think about memory, identity, and time. A memory persists not because it is stored like data, but because it is recoverable into alignment. An identity persists not because it is static, but because it coheres through construal. And time itself is not a container through which things move, but a structuring of phases that allows coherence to be maintained—or lost.

In this view, time becomes a modulation of construal. Temporal depth is not a sequence of moments, but a layering of symbolic alignment:

• The past is not simply ‘what happened’, but what holds in the present through persistent construal.

• The future is not ‘what will be’, but what can be phased into the system of alignment.

• The present is the site of symbolic cut: the moment in which reflexive construal enacts coherence across phases.

This has implications for how we understand historical change, cultural memory, and even scientific theory. In each case, persistence is symbolic: what continues is not the substance, but the pattern of alignment that makes the substance meaningful.

For example:

• A tradition persists not because its rituals survive, but because its symbolic coherence continues to hold within a changing social phase-space.

• A scientific concept persists not because it ‘corresponds to reality’, but because it maintains coherence across shifts in symbolic alignment.

• A person persists—not as a body in time, but as a reflexive system of meanings that continues to phase itself across contexts.

So when we speak of ‘deep time’, we are not just referring to geological epochs. We are speaking of the depth of alignment—the capacity of meaning to hold across massive shifts in context, structure, and scale. The deeper the symbolic coherence, the more resilient the construal.

This also means that symbolic collapse—when alignments can no longer hold—has ontological consequences. What was once present becomes inaccessible, not because it has ceased to exist, but because it can no longer be cut into coherence within the current system of meaning.

Thus, in a symbolic cosmos, to persist is to be recursively re-construable. Meaning is not carried forward like cargo. It is re-enacted in each phase—each symbolic cut—that aligns the present with a possible past and an imagined future.

Persistence, then, is not continuity through time, but coherence across reflexive construal.