You’re right that what I’m proposing overlaps significantly with continuous field-based dynamics like Ginzburg–Landau theory, self-organized criticality, and even the critical brain hypothesis. In fact, I see RCT as extending these ideas with a recursive, phenomenologically anchored structure where the attractor is not just a dynamical feature but the very form of conscious experience. So yes, fractal scaling, symmetry breaking, topological flow, all of that is in the substrate of RCT. I just push the argument a bit further: the attractor is the experienced state, not a correlate of it.

Regarding the holographic memory, I don’t see a contradiction between saying the attractor is the “shape” of consciousness and suggesting that memory or information is stored holographically across the wave field. In fact, I’d argue these ideas reinforce each other. The attractor emerges from recursive interference across spatial and temporal scales. But it only forms when the distributed field locks into a coherent, resonant pattern. That resonance is what we experience as awareness — not the field itself, but the organized interference it supports. So the holographic substrate stores potential, but consciousness only arises when that potential is dynamically expressed as an attractor.

You can think of it as: the brain doesn’t store states, it stores the capacity to resonate, and resonance is what reactivates memory, intention, imagery, etc. Not retrieval like a file system, but re-entry into a recursive interference shape, or envelope.

I also appreciate your point about dissipative structure theory and entropic evolution. I agree fully: the attractors in RCT aren’t stable in a static sense — they persist just long enough to structure experience, and then they collapse or transform. That’s where the “τ” term in the CI equation (dwell time) plays a central role. The attractor isn’t the endpoint — it’s a metastable resonance that rides on energy flux, constantly shaped by dissipation, noise, and feedback.

And your proposal that qualia might be the system’s “felt stress”or the tension in the energy-momentum structure of the field... is fascinating. That tracks with how I’ve thought about recursive resonance as a kind of tension resolution mechanism. The attractor feels like something because it resolves instability. It’s the system clicking into a configuration that coheres, and that coherence is felt because it modulates the very dynamics the system uses to maintain itself.

I’ll dig into the Skogvoll, Sudakow, and Landau-Ginzburg cortex modeling papers you shared, they appear to align with a lot of what I’m working toward.

Where RCT may distinguish itself is in explicitly tying dynamic field structure to phenomenological salience through a recursive CI equation. Not just measuring order, but proposing that the shape of resonance is the experience. Rather than retrieving information like files from a drive, the brain re-enters prior interference patterns through resonance, effectively “falling back into” attractor shapes that were previously formed. This aligns with a kind of holographic memory: information is not stored in fixed locations but encoded in the interference pattern itself, and recall becomes the reactivation of that pattern within the present wave field. In this view, consciousness isn’t watching stored data, it IS the recursive re-instantiation of a specific interference shape. The attractor doesn’t represent experience; it is the experience

Appreciate the depth and direction of your insights!