Experiential Patterns & Symbols

Where early humans are concerned, the experiential field is densely differentiated — both externally and internally. Experience presents itself not as isolated reactions, but as a relatively unified, ongoing field capable of holding multiple differentiated states in relation. From this stability, the gradual expression of symbolic behaviour becomes easier to trace as an extension of the same deepening pattern of experiential organisation.

Early humans across separated populations created similar forms—stone shapes, pigment marks, spatial arrangements. These recurrences indicate to me that certain experiential patterns had achieved sufficient coherence to externalize consistently. An experiential pattern that stabilizes—through repeated engagement, affective resonance, or survival relevance—naturally externalizes through behavior. When others recognize and repeat the pattern, it becomes transmissible. These early forms are traces of experiential coherence becoming stable enough to propagate: pattern held internally, expressed externally, recognized and carried forward by others. From this foundation, increasingly complex symbolic systems develop—not as a break from experiential organization, but as its continued articulation through social and cultural forms.

Experiential patterns arise as contrasts - light known against dark, warmth against cold, safety against danger. The pairing is not arbitrary but structural: each pole of the contrast defines the other, and both emerge from the oscillation between cohesion and differentiation that operates at every scale.
This is why I believe early marks, tools, pigments, gestures, and spatial arrangements resemble each other across distances. A form persists when the underlying experiential structure is coherent enough to reproduce itself through different bodies in different places.

In my view, symbols work the same way, a form of experiential deepening that then transforms into symbols that compress a pattern of experience. It is my opinion that earliest symbols do not arise solely from human imagination or cultural invention. They emerge from the structure of experience itself, long before language and long before conceptual thought. A symbol begins as a stable differentiation within affect, at a time when affect functioned as the primary registration of coherence. When an organism encounters a contrast that matters for its continuity, and when that contrast recurs reliably across the rhythms of its life, the nervous system begins to internalise the pattern. This internalisation does not produce a concept. It produces an axis within experience, a felt differentiation that becomes recognisable across time.

Human consciousness can be understood as an experiential field capable of sustaining internally differentiated patterns across extended intervals of time. This temporal is an articulation of the same structural dynamic that appears in all forms: distinctions held in relation through patterned coherence. What changes in the human configuration is the way these distinctions can stabilize, recur, and relate to one another even after the immediate conditions that produced them have passed. Experience becomes capable of holding its own differentiations long enough for them to overlap, accumulate, and form layered patterns.

Long before conceptual thought, affective axes such as light and dark, warm and cold, open and enclosed had already stabilized as recurring experiential structures. They were not cultural inventions; they were the first durable differentiations within the experiential field, shaped by repeated encounters with contrasts that mattered for orientation, safety, or continuity. When these differentiations became coherent enough to persist internally, they provided stable points around which further experiential patterns could organize. Human consciousness inherits these primordial distinctions as the deep grammar of its experiential field.
Once distinctions can be retained internally, they can relate to other distinctions, even when the organism is not currently perceiving the contrast that first produced them. This capacity for internal retention allows the experiential field to carry multiple patterns at once. A warmth-pattern, a spatial-pattern, a vigilance-pattern, a proximity-pattern—each can remain active within the field, overlapping and modulating one another. This multi-patterned coherence allows the organism to recognise relational similarities across different situations, not by abstraction but by resonance: a new configuration corresponds to a previously stabilised pattern. This correspondence is the beginning of analogy, not as a cognitive operation but as a structural echo within experience.

As these internal patterns accumulate, some distinctions become reference points for others. They function as coordinates within the experiential field, allowing new variations to be compared, aligned, or layered onto existing ones. This simply reflects the field's increasing ability to sustain differentiated patterns long enough for them to relate. Through this relational capacity, experience becomes capable of forming recurring shapes—proto-symbolic articulations that came before language but already structured perception, action, and meaning.

As experiential distinctions stabilize and accumulate, they begin to coexist rather than appear as isolated shifts. When several patterns are active at the same time, their relations become part of the experiential field itself. The field does not acquire a new function; it simply holds enough stability that variations can overlap. This overlap gives experience a layered quality: patterns influence one another, align, diverge, or combine while remaining part of the same coherent whole. Human symbolic and conceptual abilities arise from this increased stability and overlap, not from a new layer of mind, but from the growing complexity of how experience organizes its own differentiations across time. 

In this view, the symbolic capacity associated with humans is not an added layer but a further articulation of experiential patterning. When a distinction is held with enough stability, and when its modulation aligns with other internal patterns, it can be expressed outwardly in gesture, arrangement, rhythm, or mark. These expressions arise because the experiential structure is coherent enough to reproduce itself externally. Others who share similar experiential architectures recognise the pattern, not because they have been taught, but because it resonates with their own internal differentiation. 

This is how symbols propagate in my view: through the coherence of the experiential field, not through explicit instruction.

Human consciousness, in this architecture, is therefore not defined by language, thought, or self-recognition. It is defined by the field's ability to sustain and relate experiential patterns across time in a way that allows them to stabilise, overlap, and return. Language emerges from these stabilised patterns, not the other way around. Concepts arise because distinctions have become durable enough to be named. The symbolic, reflective, and narrative dimensions of human life express the same structural dynamic that shapes all experience, only articulated through a configuration that supports temporal experiential coherence, layered relations, and the internal re-entry of its own patterns.