Coordination phase
Coordination phase is the regime a population of agents working over a shared substrate currently occupies — phase in the dynamical-systems sense, as in phase transition, not the oscillator sense. A frame’s phase angle is a lower-level quantity; coordination phase is what we read off the population.
The states
- Exploration — active regions expanding, couplings forming and dissolving, frame-type diversity rising
- Stabilization — couplings consolidating around structures that are proving useful; diversity narrowing deliberately
- Lock-in — coupling so concentrated that retrieval keeps returning the same configurations; new content arrives but cannot compete
- Drift — couplings decaying without consolidation; activity without accumulation
None of these states is a failure by itself; whether it is healthy depends on the cycle it moves through and the role of the task.
The operating loop
The substrate is not queried once and then left alone. On every agent turn it assembles and injects the context that turn will run on — and that injection point is the leverage. Membranes modulate what crosses in: which frames are pulled, which are held back, which contradicting or long-tail frames are deliberately mixed in. Raising coupling promotes convergence; widening the aperture promotes divergence. Reading phase and acting on it happen at the same point: the per-turn assembly of context.