The idea that "relation precedes dynamics" stayed with me after reading this essay.
Over the last few years, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about long-term human–AI interaction, especially questions of continuity, memory, drift, and trajectories over time. Reading this piece made me wonder whether I have sometimes been paying more attention to the trajectories themselves than to the relational conditions that make those trajectories possible.
That question felt particularly relevant to something I have been wondering about recently: whether language does more than communicate ideas. I find myself increasingly curious about whether language also helps shape the space of possible trajectories available to thought and interaction.
In any case, thank you for a genuinely thought-provoking essay. It gave me a new question to think about.
Thank you, Márcio. This is exactly the kind of question I hoped the piece might open. Your distinction is very important: trajectories matter, but they do not arise from nowhere. They are made possible, constrained, and sometimes redirected by the relational conditions in which interaction takes place.
I also strongly resonate with your point about language. I would frame it this way: language functions as an interface. It does more than communicate ideas. It shapes the space in which certain relations, distinctions, possibilities, and trajectories can become available.
I explored this in my From AI to AIR paper, where I wrote:
“Language does not merely describe reality after the fact. It organises attention. It makes some distinctions easy and others difficult. It creates default pathways for meaning, judgement, identity, authority, and possibility.”
That is also why Wittgenstein’s line about the limits of language and the limits of the world feels newly relevant here, not as a slogan, but as a reminder that language shapes what can be noticed, reasoned with, and acted upon.
From a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, I would then ask: language in use within what relational field, under what constraints, through which histories, interfaces, and trajectories over time?
So yes, I think you are touching a very important edge here: language is definitely not only a carrier of thought. It can also be a condition of trajectory formation.
It reminds me of the little spider that rebuilds its web every day. It knows freedom only while hanging from its thread and gliding across its invisible surface. And the little fly, which flies freely through space, will suddenly see its reality freeze into that of the spider, until it is finally devoured.
What a striking metaphor. The spider and the fly share the same space, but not the same reality. For the spider, the thread is freedom, surface, and world. For the fly, the same web becomes constraint and capture. This is very close to what I mean by relational dynamics: reality becomes legible through relation, position, constraint, and time.
I’m a big fan of this relational definition of reality: the structural coupling of the self to the world - via sensory motor system- is one of my epiphanies reading Varela and Maturana’s work. I haven’t fully explored the potential of this idea, so I’m not surprised that you’ve chosen a related concept as your North Star : https://richardbordenave.substack.com/p/intuition-as-a-prediction-error?r=281tq&utm_medium=ios
Thank you, Richard. I enjoyed this piece. The idea of prediction gap makes a lot of sense to me. In my own language, I would describe it as a moment where a system trajectory meets feedback, constraint, or a deviation from expected pattern. I often say: the body knows first.
This connects closely, of course, with structural coupling. My own formulation is: reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time. So there is a relational dimension, but also a processual and temporal one. What interests me is not only how self and world are coupled, but how relations stabilise, shift, constrain, adapt, and sometimes collapse across time.
The idea that "relation precedes dynamics" stayed with me after reading this essay.
Over the last few years, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about long-term human–AI interaction, especially questions of continuity, memory, drift, and trajectories over time. Reading this piece made me wonder whether I have sometimes been paying more attention to the trajectories themselves than to the relational conditions that make those trajectories possible.
That question felt particularly relevant to something I have been wondering about recently: whether language does more than communicate ideas. I find myself increasingly curious about whether language also helps shape the space of possible trajectories available to thought and interaction.
In any case, thank you for a genuinely thought-provoking essay. It gave me a new question to think about.
Thank you, Márcio. This is exactly the kind of question I hoped the piece might open. Your distinction is very important: trajectories matter, but they do not arise from nowhere. They are made possible, constrained, and sometimes redirected by the relational conditions in which interaction takes place.
I also strongly resonate with your point about language. I would frame it this way: language functions as an interface. It does more than communicate ideas. It shapes the space in which certain relations, distinctions, possibilities, and trajectories can become available.
I explored this in my From AI to AIR paper, where I wrote:
“Language does not merely describe reality after the fact. It organises attention. It makes some distinctions easy and others difficult. It creates default pathways for meaning, judgement, identity, authority, and possibility.”
That is also why Wittgenstein’s line about the limits of language and the limits of the world feels newly relevant here, not as a slogan, but as a reminder that language shapes what can be noticed, reasoned with, and acted upon.
From a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, I would then ask: language in use within what relational field, under what constraints, through which histories, interfaces, and trajectories over time?
So yes, I think you are touching a very important edge here: language is definitely not only a carrier of thought. It can also be a condition of trajectory formation.
It reminds me of the little spider that rebuilds its web every day. It knows freedom only while hanging from its thread and gliding across its invisible surface. And the little fly, which flies freely through space, will suddenly see its reality freeze into that of the spider, until it is finally devoured.
What a striking metaphor. The spider and the fly share the same space, but not the same reality. For the spider, the thread is freedom, surface, and world. For the fly, the same web becomes constraint and capture. This is very close to what I mean by relational dynamics: reality becomes legible through relation, position, constraint, and time.
I’m a big fan of this relational definition of reality: the structural coupling of the self to the world - via sensory motor system- is one of my epiphanies reading Varela and Maturana’s work. I haven’t fully explored the potential of this idea, so I’m not surprised that you’ve chosen a related concept as your North Star : https://richardbordenave.substack.com/p/intuition-as-a-prediction-error?r=281tq&utm_medium=ios
I’ll read more of your papers now !
Thank you, Richard. I enjoyed this piece. The idea of prediction gap makes a lot of sense to me. In my own language, I would describe it as a moment where a system trajectory meets feedback, constraint, or a deviation from expected pattern. I often say: the body knows first.
This connects closely, of course, with structural coupling. My own formulation is: reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time. So there is a relational dimension, but also a processual and temporal one. What interests me is not only how self and world are coupled, but how relations stabilise, shift, constrain, adapt, and sometimes collapse across time.
I should probably mention this:
I did not arrive at relationality by moving away from the individual as the primary unit of analysis.
I came from a thought lineage in which relation was never secondary to begin with.