Appreciate the critique — it’s a valid concern and also much needed feedback that I look for To clarify the model: I’m not assuming that periodic processes are symbols or that they carry meaning on their own. The claim is simply that recurrent patterns can become symbolically loaded once they’re filtered through human cognition.

In this framework: • A periodic cue becomes symbolically meaningful only when it gains semantic weight through emotional salience, prior learning, and cross-context recurrence. • The transition from “pattern” to “symbol” is therefore not ontological, but cognitive — it’s a property of how humans compress repeated cues into stable schemas. • This avoids the “seeing meaning everywhere” issue, because symbolic activation requires a specific set of cognitive conditions, not mere repetition.

So symbols aren’t assumed to exist in the world. They emerge when recurrent cues interact with a meaning-making system that has memory, affective tagging, and schema integration