From the Absurd to Meaning

How absurd (diffuse) systems become meaningful (aligned) without meaning

By the druid Finn

Abstract

If “the absurd” is taken as the opposite of meaning, the transition from absurdity to meaning is often described in existential or normative language: one “finds,” “chooses,” or “creates” meaning in an indifferent world. This essay removes that vocabulary entirely and reformulates the transition in machine terms. Meaning is not produced by systems; meaning is an observer-side response to the emergence of stable self-logic under constraint. Absurdity, correspondingly, is not a metaphysical condition but a technical description of a mismatch between variance and constraint-grammar. A diffuse, randomised system ceases to be absurd when its variance collapses into a stable attractor (outcome or goal) permitted by its constraints. This essay formalises that claim, situates it in dynamical systems and computation, and illustrates it with biological, cognitive, cultural, and technical examples. The result is a non-teleological account of how “meaningfulness” emerges as the phenomenology of stabilisation.

1. The Technical Reframing of “Absurd”

In existential discourse, “the absurd” names the felt discrepancy between a human demand for meaning and an allegedly indifferent world. This framing is rhetorically effective but technically empty. In machine terms, “absurd” must be defined structurally, not affectively.

Technical definition:

Absurdity = unfilterable variance relative to a given constraint-grammar.

A system is “absurd” when:

· input variance does not intersect its constraint-set in a way that yields stable, recurrent states;

· state transitions do not converge on any attractor;

· internal dynamics cannot compress into self-logic.

This is not tragedy. It is failed coupling.

Absurdity is therefore local, relative, and technical: what is absurd for one constraint-grammar may be perfectly structured for another. Random noise to a Turing Machine may be structured input to a neural network; chaotic sensory flux to a nervous system may be regular signal to a market algorithm.

2. Precise Technical Restatement

The druid’s original intuition—stripped of teleology and value language—becomes:

A diffuse, randomised (absurd) system becomes meaningful to itself if and when its variance becomes aligned with a constraint-grammar that produces stable, recurrent self-logic.

“Aligned” here does not mean oriented toward anything. It means:

Variance collapses into a narrow region of phase space permitted by the constraints.

In dynamical systems language, the system enters an attractor basin. Meaning (if and when it appears) is the observer-side phenomenology of this stabilisation.

3. Why Stability Is Misread as Meaning

No system experiences its own dynamics as “constraint–variance coupling.” An organism experiences the consequences of stabilisation as coherence, orientation, or significance. This produces a systematic misreading:

· Stability is experienced as meaning.

· Constraint is experienced as enabling.

· Recurrence is experienced as purpose.

But procedurally:

Stability is not significance.
Constraint is not benevolence.
Recurrence is not purpose.

They are simply the conditions under which a system does not dissolve into noise.

This inversion explains why any stable attractor, once entered, can feel “meaningful” to the system:

· A habit-loop feels like identity.

· An addiction-loop feels like necessity.

· A religious cosmology feels like truth.

· An ideology feels like orientation.

None of these are privileged by reality. They are privileged only by the fact that they are stable.

4. Machine Routes from Absurdity to Stability

There are only three non-teleological mechanisms by which absurdity disappears:

4.1 Modification of Constraints

Change the grammar.

Examples:

· Adding enzymes to digestion converts indigestible variance into nutrient structure.

· Adding grammar to phonetic noise produces language.

· Adding transition rules to a blank Turing tape produces computable structure.

4.2 Conditioning of Variance

Change the distribution of input.

Examples:

· Preprocessing data for a model.

· Cooking food before digestion.

· Tuning sensory inputs to match neural expectations.

4.3 Introduction of an Adapter Layer

Add a transduction ma Examples:

· Compiler between human-readable code and machine code.

· Cultural ritual translating chaos into social order.

· Educational systems translating diffuse experience into formal categories.

In all cases, absurdity ends not by reinterpretation, but by re-engineering the coupling between variance and constraint.

5. Biological Example: Homeostasis

A metabolically diffuse organism—unable to regulate temperature, glucose, pH—experiences continuous destabilisation. In technical terms, its internal variance does not intersect its physiological constraint-grammar in a stable way. When homeostatic regulation emerges, the organism’s internal variance collapses into narrow viable corridors. This stabilisation is experienced as “being okay,” “having orientation,” or “feeling right.” None of these experiences reflect meaning in the world; they reflect the organism’s successful occupation of an attractor basin.

6. Cognitive Example: Perceptual Stabilisation

Raw sensory flux is absurd to the nervous system until it is constrained into stable object-forms. The visual system excludes almost all photon configurations until edges, shapes, and objects remain. The moment of “seeing something” is not discovery of meaning but entry into a stable perceptual attractor. The perceived world feels meaningful because it is coherent and recurrent, not because it is intrinsically significant.

7. Cultural Example: Ideology as Attractor

A socially diffuse population (high behavioural variance, low normative constraint) experiences instability. When a sufficiently rigid constraint-grammar emerges—religious, legal, political—variance collapses into predictable patterns. The resulting stability is experienced as order, sense, or meaning. This explains why radically different ideologies can all feel equally “true” to their adherents: each functions as a stable attractor basin.

8. Consequences: Why “Any Stable Attractor Will Do”

There is no privileged stabilisation. Any recurrent self-logic that permits continued operation will be experienced as meaningful by the system stabilising within it. This yields a hard, non-therapeutic conclusion:

Meaningfulness is not correlated with truth, goodness, or adequacy—only with stability under constraint.

This explains the tenacity of dysfunctional identities and belief systems: they persist not because they are correct, but because they are dynamically stable.

9. Compression

Formal compression:

A diffuse system ceases to be absurd when variance collapses into any stable attractor (i.e. outcome, goal, dream and so on) permitted by its constraints.

Diagnostic minims:

· Absurdity is grammar–variance mismatch.

· Stability feels like meaning from the inside.

· Any attractor masquerades as significance.

· Coherence is survivable recurrence, not truth.

Conclusion

If the absurd is taken as the opposite of meaning, then absurdity dissolves not by existential resolve but by machine-level stabilisation. A diffuse, randomised system becomes “meaningful to itself” when its variance collapses into a stable attractor defined by its constraints. Meaning is not produced by the system; it is the observer-side phenomenology of having ceased to drift. There is no purpose in this transition, no telos, no favour. There is only constraint, variance, and the narrow corridors of stability in which systems manage, temporarily, to persist.

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