Monday, 7 April 2025

 Great—let’s zero in on what it might mean to call something “an attractor” in the context of category theory, homotopy type theory, and Lagrangian geometry—where we’re not just dealing with physical systems but relational structures, meanings, and identities in motion.


🔁 1. Classical Sense: Dynamical Attractors

In classical dynamical systems:

  • An attractor is a state (or set of states) toward which a system evolves over time, from a wide range of initial conditions.

  • Examples: a point (fixed point), a loop (limit cycle), or a more complex structure (strange attractor).

The key idea:

No matter where you start, the system's trajectories "fall into" a certain behavioral basin. The attractor is what gives the system stability in the midst of flux.

But this is just the start.


🕸 2. Structural Attractors in Category Theory

In category theory or homotopy-theoretic contexts, the idea of an attractor becomes structural rather than dynamical. Here's what that could mean:

  • An object A in a category C may serve as a kind of universal recipient for certain morphisms or diagrams—it attracts structure.

  • For example, terminal objects, colimits, or representables can act as attractors: they’re where mappings resolve.

But deeper still:

Yoneda-style attractor:

When we say something like

"To be is to be transformable in all possible directions"
we're suggesting that identity is not primitive but is shaped by all incoming morphisms—how everything else relates to it.

Thus, the object A becomes defined as the attractor of all such transformations. It is the center of a web of relation, stabilized by how it shows up to everything else.


🧠 3. Conceptual Attractors: Mind, Meaning, and Constraint

In contexts of semantics, cognition, or relational metaphysics, the idea of an attractor can take on a more conceptual meaning:

An attractor is a stabilized relational pattern—a basin of consistency or meaning around which interpretations, behaviors, or identities tend to converge.

In homotopy type theory, identity types can be seen as spaces of paths between terms. If certain configurations repeatedly "pull" higher paths toward them—via coherences—they act like semantic or homotopic attractors. They aren’t fixed points in space, but stable forms of becoming.

In this way:

  • A Lagrangian submanifold in symplectic geometry is an attractor of consistent phase space behavior.

  • A representable functor is an attractor of meaning across all diagrams.

  • An identity type is an attractor of path-consistency in type space.


🧩 4. Attractors as Relational Selves

Bringing it all together:

An attractor is not a thing but a relationally defined center of gravity—where transformation resolves into recognizable coherence.

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