Affective Coordination: the Feeling of Understanding and the Dynamics of Constraint

This presentation begins with a demonstration of a novel system which analyses the changing constraints in a conversation as it unfolds. Rather than concentrating primarily on the semantic content of individual utterances, the system estimates sequential changes in redundancy, entropy and conceptual constraint, producing a dynamic representation of movement between more and less constrained states.

I describe this process as "affective coordination" because what is being coordinated is not simply information in the conventional sense. Participants continually adjust to shifting constraints underlying the concepts articulated. These adjustments are experienced before, alongside, and sometimes independently of any explicit judgement about what particular words mean. Communication therefore has an affective dynamics: each contribution changes the field of possibilities for what can follow.

Seen in this way, linguistic communication begins to resemble musical communication. Music can generate powerful experiences of anticipation, surprise, resolution, tension, agreement and disruption without needing to communicate propositions. Musicians coordinate through changes in rhythm, harmonic expectation, intensity and temporal constraint. Conversation similarly unfolds through a continuously changing organisation of possibilities. Words clearly introduce additional semantic and symbolic resources, but beneath these there may be a more general process through which interacting organisms continually constrain and reorient one another.

The demonstration is intended to make this normally tacit process visible. If a conversation can be represented as a trajectory through changing configurations of constraint, it becomes possible to ask a more fundamental question: what changes when we come to understand something, or when two people come to understand one another?

Heinz von Foerster argued that understanding understanding requires an epistemological shift away from the representation of a mind-independent reality and towards relations between observers (von Foerster, 2003). If I say “I understand x”, what exactly is x? A proposition, a concept, an object—or a temporary stabilisation in the relations between myself, another person and the world?

In ordinary life, understanding is inferred from changes in performance: an appropriate response, a reformulation, a changed action, or the felt recognition that another person has “got it”. Such changes arise through learning. I suggest that learning itself can be understood as affective coordination: a recursive process in which participants constrain and are constrained by one another while their expectations, attention, concepts and felt experience are simultaneously reorganised.

Pask's conversation theory (Pask, 1976) and von Foerster's notion of eigenforms suggest that concepts are relatively stable products of recursive interaction. Yet self-reference alone does not explain what makes coordination move. For this, we need an account of the dynamics of constraint.

Following Ashby (1956), constraints can be organised hierarchically: some relations restrict possibility more strongly than others. Work on reconstructability analysis by Krippendorff (2009) and Klir (2006) provides ways of relating differences in constraint to entropy and redundancy. Leydesdorff (2021) further provided ways of mapping mutual redundancy to semantic coordination. Large language models make these ideas experimentally interesting because they encode statistical relations among words and concepts at enormous scale. They can therefore be used not simply to interpret utterances, but as instruments for estimating shifts in constraint as discourse unfolds.

However, an informational description alone appears insufficient. A measure of entropy can tell us that possibilities have changed, but coordination requires an account both of orientation and of why one change produces another. For this, the nilpotent geometric algebra of Rowlands can be used to provide a "spring" for affective coordination: differences may possess direction, opposition, rotation and relational structure rather than merely scalar magnitude. This addition to existing constraint analysis provides a differentiation which alters a relational configuration such that further compensating transformations are implicated if the overall structure is to remain coherent. We therefore obtain not merely a description of states, but a possible account of what drives their succession.

This suggests a different picture of understanding. Instead of information being transmitted and subsequently represented inside another mind, interaction proceeds through a sequence of distinctions, orientations, tensions and compensatory transformations. What we experience as understanding may correspond to moments in which this recursive coordination achieves a temporary stability—a resolution analogous, perhaps, to the felt resolution of a musical phrase.

The broader possibility is that affective coordination is neither exclusively linguistic nor exclusively human. Living organisation depends upon reciprocal constraint between cells, tissues, signals and environments. Cellular differentiation and collective cellular behaviour may exhibit analogous dynamics in which local changes alter possibilities elsewhere, producing continuing processes of orientation, tension and adjustment.

The initial demonstration therefore serves as an empirical provocation for the understanding of understanding. If linguistic and musical communication can both be viewed as forms of affective coordination, and if their dynamics can be represented as transformations in a structured field of constraints, then understanding may be better conceived not as possession of a representation but as a felt and temporary stabilisation within an ongoing process of mutual constraint.

References

Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall.

Foerster, H. von (2003). Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. Springer.

Klir, G. J. (2006). Uncertainty and Information: Foundations of Generalized Information Theory. Wiley.

Krippendorff, K. (2009). Information Theory: Structural Models for Qualitative Data. Sage.

Leydesdorff, L. (2021). The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge. Springer

Pask, G. (1976). Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology. Elsevier.

Rowlands, P. (2010). Zero to Infinity: The Foundations of Physics. World Scientific.