Much of our recent work has been about systems that work perfectly within their own frames, and yet resist being inhabited as worlds. At first glance, it seemed as if the focus had shifted from meaning, worldhood, and inhabitation to anomalies, failures, and hallucinations. But look closer: something else has quietly taken the lead.
It is locality.
Not as a physical quantity, nor as a metaphysical claim, but as the principle that governs what holds where. Local lawfulness. Frame-dependence. Non-integrability. These are the structural features that have been doing the explanatory heavy lifting — even when we weren’t naming them.
Locality as a Lens
Earlier arcs asked: what is meaning? what makes a world? how can it be inhabited?
Recent arcs — Escher, AI, cosmology — have answered differently. They show that:
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Each transition, each token, each move is lawful within its frame.
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Each system succeeds locally.
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Global composition is not guaranteed.
Locality is not a replacement for meaning; it is a condition under which meaning can appear at all. Meaning, worldhood, inhabitation — these are not absolutes. They are emergent properties of locally coherent structures, when the right constraints allow them to be stitched together.
Why the Plateau Matters
Naming this plateau changes the perspective. It allows us to see that:
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Attempts to enforce global coherence on locally lawful systems are often the source of artefacts.
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Repair, explanation, or optimisation can misfire when applied outside the frame.
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Failure, paradox, and anomaly often emerge from overextension of local success, not from breakdown or error.
By recognising locality as the hidden protagonist, we shift our stance: from chasing impossible global worlds to understanding and navigating the structures that actually exist.
What Comes Next
Once we see locality as the organising constraint, a series of natural questions emerges:
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How do locally lawful systems behave across domains?
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How do our expectations of globality produce artefacts?
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How can we inhabit and work with systems that cannot be totalised?
This series will explore these questions. Each post will illuminate a different facet of locality — its power, its limits, and its subtle guidance for how we live, think, and reason within complex, lawfully constrained systems.
Locality is not an afterthought. It is the stage, the scaffold, and the test of everything that follows.
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