nucleation

LIT-989: An ability to respond begins with inner alignment: How phase synchronisation effects transitions to higher levels of agency

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Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-773) in full; worth reading as a worked, bottom-up model of a group becoming a unit: bistable deciders that shift only the phase of their decision cycle toward partners they agree with come to synchronise within strongly coupled modules, and each module then switches as one in response to the others, where before it could not. Read it knowing that it is one clean simulated game at one parameter setting, that the modules are built into the couplings and timing finds them, that the phase rule is a payoff gradient only loosely like oscillator entrainment, and that imposed global synchrony does nothing. Registered for QUESTION-035; THEORY-265 is filed from it.
Version2
Tagsagency, complex-systems, individuation
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-773 — Tissot et al. — An ability to respond begins with inner alignment
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-265 — In Tissot et al.'s minimal model of bistable deciders in a modular coordination game (thirty modules of ten, couplings 1 within modules and 0.01 across), phase synchronisation within modules, driven only by each unit's local payoff, makes each module respond to the others as a single unit, and synchrony matched to the modules is needed: global synchrony does not

Graph View

Tazzio Tissot, Mike Levin, Chris Buckley, Richard Watson (2024), bioRxiv.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-773.

  • The set-up. 30 modules of 10 bistable units; couplings 1 inside a module and 0.01 across; 2^30 local optima and two global ones. Each unit’s decision cycle γ_i(t) = (sin(ωt + θ_i) + 1)/2 alternates between sensitive and inactive, and acting and insensitive.
  • The timing rule. θ_i ← θ_i + ν Σ_j (π/4) c_ij sgn(s_i s_j) sin(θ_j − θ_i): a unit moves its phase toward partners it currently agrees with. It is a gradient on cycle-averaged payoff, “loosely analogous” to oscillator entrainment.
  • The transition. Without the rule 0 of 50 runs reach a global optimum. With it, phases synchronise within modules, the modules “wake up” suddenly (mostly before t = 20,000), and 50 of 50 runs with the learned phases reach one. Blocks switch “like a single macro-scale unit”.
  • Specific, not global. Synchrony imposed across all units gives no transition. Membership is “who is synchronised with whom”.
  • Why it works. When a module’s members are all sensitive at once, none acts on the others, so only the weak outside pull remains: attention turns “from the ingroup to the outgroup”. No signal passes within the module.
  • Beyond one game. The learned timing solves other games over the same modules, arises by selection on timing (about 10⁶ against 10⁴ steps), and iterates to meta-modules, though not scale-invariantly.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-12 from the owner’s papers-feed for QUESTION-035, and read on 2026-10-14 in NOTE-773. The seed claim, that aligned timing makes a unit that acts as one, is confirmed for the model. It bears on CLAIM-172 with a qualification: what made the unit was synchrony matched to the strong couplings, not common timing as such. It bears on CLAIM-157 as a case where the block is there before and after, and only its behaviour as a unit changes. THEORY-265 is filed from it. It is the model that THEORY-232 and Watson’s essay (LIT-990) cite as unpublished.

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