Locality: The Hidden Protagonist: 3 The Illusion of Globality

We have seen that local lawfulness is ubiquitous. Systems can succeed perfectly within frames while failing to compose into coherent worlds. The natural question arises: why, despite this, do we persist in expecting global coherence?

The answer is that globality is an artefact — a projection of our cognitive habits, not a property of the systems themselves.

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Why We Expect Global Coherence

Humans have a deep-seated inclination to see the world as a single, inhabitable whole. We are trained to integrate:

• Causes with effects

• Parts with wholes

• Observations with models

This expectation serves us well in many domains, but it becomes a source of misperception when applied to systems whose lawfulness is strictly local.

We assume that if local rules hold perfectly, global closure must follow. When it does not, we experience surprise, confusion, or the temptation to “repair” the system.

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Artefacts of Global Imposition

The insistence on global coherence produces artefacts wherever it is applied:

• Dark matter and dark energy arise when cosmologists demand a globally closed universe.

• AI hallucinations become interpreted as errors rather than signals when outputs are treated as globally referential.

• The perception of impossibility emerges in Escher-like constructions when we attempt to inhabit the total composition.

In all cases, these phenomena are not intrinsic failures of the system. They are artefacts of imposing an expectation of globality onto structures that only promise local lawfulness.

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Seeing Through the Illusion

Recognising globality as artefactual allows a profound shift in stance:

• We stop diagnosing breakdown where none exists.

• We distinguish between local success and the human imposition of universality.

• We cultivate a more precise understanding of the system’s affordances and limits.

Global coherence is seductive because it promises completeness, but it is often illusory. Locality, not globality, is the invariant principle.

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The Practical Consequence

By attending to locality and accepting global artefacts as projections, we:

1. Reduce unnecessary interventions and repairs.

2. Reframe anomalies as information rather than errors.

3. Open a space for orientation instead of compulsion.

The next natural step is to ask: if global closure is illusory, how do we inhabit these systems meaningfully? How do we live in a world where local lawfulness reigns but global coherence is never guaranteed?

That is the question Post 4 will take up.