Definition
A110 §20: “The emergence of stable meaning within a community need not imply faithful retention of ancestral meaning. A cultural attractor may represent a shared decoding convention rather than a preserved historical object.” Earlier: A50’s “attraction toward certain regions of communicative state space”, A86’s “a natural information-theoretic explanation of cultural attractors”, and C6 §8’s heading “Iterated reconstruction, drift, and cultural attractors”.
What it is not
Not a preserved original: an attractor is where the chain goes whatever its start, so reaching it is evidence of forgetting the start (CLAIM-081). The manuscript keeps the phenomenon (“A stable conventional endpoint may be far removed from the ancestral utterance while remaining interpretable”, §8) and drops the word and the reading as a convention (CLAIM-068).