Taste as a System: Part 3

Each concept that we begin with carries a history of recurring phenomenological motifs. A motif is a recognizable pattern that recurs across connected environmental and bodily experiences as information becomes ritualized through repetition, or pattern-cycling. Depending on the observer’s position, the same motif can appear as a concept, construct, or aesthetic. We can frame this positional grouping as a “trifecta of observed reality.”

Bodily experience within this lens includes interoception, or the way signals from inside the body become sensed and interpreted by the organism.¹ These signals do not make a motif on their own, but they can become part of one through repetition and association with exteroceptive perception, memory, environment, and reconstructed scenes. A feeling of tension, ease, hunger, warmth, or arousal can become cross-associated with other things until the same felt pattern becomes recognizable across them.

Thinking more deeply about what the motifs represent, we can participate in a type of “play” that explores our motifs and their handshaking with another human’s motifs. Both humans observe a temporary synchronicity when each independently assumes that a pattern in the other’s motifs corresponds to one of their own. In this reverse reading of the original loop, the matched motifs define the aesthetic, which can be traced backward through the construct to the concept.

Their individual trifectas of observed reality can then enter into an interplay between embodied, autopoietic players engaged in cybernetic signaling handshakes and metaphysical negotiations within rules. Autopoietic here refers to the players as living systems that continually produce and maintain their own organization.² It does not mean that one player transfers meaning directly into another. Each player reconstructs the signal through their own motifs, memories, bodily experience, and position.

Simply put, we play games with each other that have explicit and implicit rules, some public and some private, that define the boundaries of the observed game.

An example of a motif is the feeling and memory of familiarity associated with a song from the past. That same accumulation of sensation and memory can become cross-associated with other things through motif-matching. Maybe a painting from the same era was displayed during the song’s popularity. Maybe a particular food item was served at that time. Maybe the lighting, temperature, bodily state, or emotional tension of the environment returns as part of the same familiar pattern.

The motif is not the song, painting, food item, or bodily sensation on its own. It is the recurring felt pattern that remains recognizable across them. There could be many things associated within an endless graph of motif mapping.

Now that a motif is understood in the terms above, we can imagine motifs as a recursive network through which concepts emerge, recombine into constructs, become observed as aesthetics, and return again through the loop.

A Taste position is a temporary synchronous state of motif alignment between players. An infinite player can then introduce an intentional projection that functions as disruption or jitter in the movement between shared positions. By reducing predictability, the disruption allows the handshaking of signals—and the game itself—to continue.³

Once the disruption itself becomes predictable and the handshaking of signals slows into familiarity, that familiarity can accumulate across repeated handshakes and more players. A motif observed in the long tail can then move toward the short head within the power law of that particular game.

If we propose that Taste as a System is an intersubjective system between players, we can further ask whether Taste is necessary as a concept, a construct, or even an aesthetic topology. Can we replace it with a more general symbolic reference for the relational system through which motif matches become observable?

If we are to create a new game right here, we can say that this is possible.

We can represent Taste as a System using a symbol, not because the specific words matter, but because the particular understanding of the mechanics of such feedback systems does.

New Boundaries

For this next game, we use a small symbolic reference. These symbols do not claim any universal mathematical meaning. Their meaning is negotiated within the rules of this particular game, just as the meaning of Taste is negotiated between its players.

The first rule of this game is:

Taste as a System ≔ ⟁

The unindexed ⟁ names the relational system as a whole. Once the symbol is indexed by players and time, ⟁ᵢⱼ(t) names one temporary shared-reality state produced within that system.

We begin with the motif network of one player mapping into their observed trifecta:

Mᵢ ↦ △ᵢ(t)
△ᵢ(t) ≔ ⟨cᵢ, kᵢ, aᵢ⟩

The triangle does not represent Taste on its own. It represents one player’s temporary organization of concepts, constructs, and aesthetics through their available motifs at a particular position in time.

Another player arrives with another triangle organized through another motif network.

When the two players begin motif handshaking, their trifectas enter into relation:

△ᵢ(t) ⋈ △ⱼ(t) → ⟁ᵢⱼ(t)

We use the indexed form ⟁ᵢⱼ(t) as the symbol for the temporary shared-reality state produced inside the boundaries of the observed game.⁴ Its outer triangle holds the game boundary, while its inner triangle represents a shared trifecta emerging through motif alignment.

This does not signify complete or permanent agreement. It signifies a position where both players can temporarily infer how the other is organizing motifs across concepts, constructs, and aesthetics.

The apparent alignment is therefore not the merging of two players into a single observing system. It is a temporary relation in which each player can infer enough of the other’s organization for a shared state to become observable.

Once an infinite player’s intentional projection functions as noise or jitter for another player, the shared position changes. The ε rests on the transition because it names an effect on the movement between states rather than a quantity added to them:

⟁ᵢⱼ(t) ─ε→ ⟁ᵢⱼ(t + 1) ↻

The next indexed state of ⟁ may preserve some motif alignments, lose others, or produce new ones before returning into another round of play.

The symbol therefore does not name a final object called Taste. It names a relational system whose temporary states of shared reality remain observable only through continued feedback.

The players can be understood as autopoietic living systems. The relational system represented by ⟁ is recursive and maintained through feedback, but this does not necessarily make ⟁ autopoietic in the stricter biological sense.

Taste has served as the initial game board. By following its feedback mechanics, we begin to observe a relational system through which embodied players negotiate temporary shared-reality states. Whether Taste is one expression of this system, rather than the limit of the game, remains open to continued play.

Footnotes