Riding the Wave

Cognition, Meaning, and Life Far from Equilibrium

Human existence has an odd quality. We are constantly striving for stability, yet every form of real growth, learning, and meaning seems to arise precisely when stability is lost. This is not a paradox to be resolved, but a pattern to be understood.

Across biology, psychology, myth, and civilization, cognition does not emerge at equilibrium. It emerges far from it.

Natural ecosystems offer a clue. They are not static balances but dynamically stable systems, homeodynamic rather than homeostatic. Their coherence arises from continuous interaction across scales: cells, organisms, populations, and environments exchanging information and energy through nested communication structures. Stability here is not stillness; it is sustained motion within bounds.

Within such systems, cognition functions as a regulator of surprise. When the world behaves as expected, little cognition is required. When prediction fails, when uncertainty rises, systems must explore, learn, and reorganize. This process is often described as epistemic foraging: probing the unknown to reduce future uncertainty. Crucially, epistemic foraging is costly and risky.

Myth captured this long before science did.

The Hero’s Journey is not merely a storytelling trope but a cognitive archetype. The hero begins in a familiar world, a local equilibrium. A disruption follows, a call, a fall, a loss of innocence, that forces departure into uncertainty. Trials ensue, competencies are forged, and insight is gained. The hero returns not to the original equilibrium, but to a transformed one, carrying compressed knowledge that stabilizes the larger system.

Read this way, Eden is not a moral fable but a cognitive metaphor. The “knowledge of good and evil” marks the emergence of self-reflexive cognition: awareness of values, consequences, and vulnerability. With that awareness comes separation from immediate ecological embedding. Humanity leaves natural equilibrium and begins constructing artificial ecosystems, cities, technologies, institutions, that exist permanently far from equilibrium.

Civilization, then, is not a deviation from nature but an extension of cognition’s basic logic. Artificial systems amplify both power and fragility. They demand constant epistemic foraging to remain viable. When societies lose access to higher-order guidance, when they lose connection to transjective meaning across scales, they discover or generate gods, myths, ideologies, and sciences to restore vertical coherence. These are not superstitions in the shallow sense, but navigational tools for managing complexity.

The wave metaphor makes this dynamic intuitive.

Riding a wave is a form of stability, but only if motion is maintained. Move too far ahead of the wave and coupling is lost. Prediction outruns constraint. Vision detaches from reality, speed collapses, and the wave crashes into you. This is over-exploration: abstraction without grounding, progress without feedback.

Fall behind the wave and there is temporary calm. The water smooths out. Everything feels manageable. But this calm is deceptive. Anticipation is gone. When the next wave arrives, it hits as chaos. This is over-exploitation: stability without renewal, tradition without learning.

Competence lies on the wave face itself, where uncertainty is present but navigable. This is where epistemic foraging is dangerous but productive, where cognition can extract structure from novelty without being overwhelmed by it.

At every scale, individual development, cultural evolution, scientific progress, even biological morphogenesis, this same pattern repeats. Systems that remain too close to equilibrium stagnate. Systems that push too far from it disintegrate. Intelligence lives in the narrow corridor between collapse and rigidity.

This leads to a profound reframing of the human condition.

Perhaps meaning is not found in reaching equilibrium at all. Perhaps equilibrium is never the goal. The deeper function of human existence may be to continuously generate cognition far from equilibrium, to surf the unfolding future rather than attempt to tame it once and for all.

We are not fallen creatures yearning to return home. We are wave riders by necessity, forced into motion by awareness itself. The task is not to still the ocean, nor to outrun it, but to learn how to move with it, carrying home with you.

In that light, instability is not a flaw in the human story. It is the engine of intelligence, the source of meaning, and the price of being awake in a universe that never stops changing.

Per Nystedt 2025-12-31

Inspired by Stuart Sims https://x.com/SimsYStuart?s=20