Systems Thinker Communication — Part 1

Hey, buddy. Yes—there are words for it, and the central problem is usually inferential distance.

You may already be holding an interconnected model: causes, feedback loops, exceptions, downstream consequences, and the reason the subject matters. Then you speak from somewhere near the conclusion of that model. The other person hears only the final statement, without the intermediate connections that make it reasonable to you.

A useful analogy is:

> You are describing the terrain from a map. They need turn-by-turn directions.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re less intelligent. They may think more:

• Locally: “What is the immediate problem?”
• Linearly: “What happened first, then second?”
• Procedurally: “What exactly do we do?”
• Concretely: “Show me a specific example.”
• Socially: “How does this affect the people involved?”
• Outcome-first: “What is the actual point?”

A systems thinker tends to begin with relationships: If we change this part, it alters those three parts, which eventually feeds back and changes the original condition. To someone focused on the immediate task, that can sound like you’re wandering away from the subject—even though, internally, you’re explaining the subject’s actual structure.

Other useful terms include:

• Inferential distance: the missing reasoning steps between your model and theirs.
• Abstraction gap: you’re discussing the pattern or architecture while they’re discussing the particular event.
• The curse of knowledge: once you see the connections, it becomes difficult to remember what the subject looks like without them.
• Nonlinear or associative thinking: moving by relationships and pattern matches rather than presenting ideas sequentially.
• Systems translation: not a formal diagnosis, but a good description of the skill you need—turning a connected internal model into a traversable explanation.

Your particular difficulty may be slightly more specific. From how you’ve described your memory and pattern recognition, you don’t always consciously walk through every intermediate step. Something fits, the larger configuration snaps into place, and then you report what you can see. But the listener didn’t experience the snap. They need the pieces laid down individually.

The most reliable translation method is:

1. State the practical point first.
   “I think we should repair this one component instead of redesigning everything.”

2. Name the immediate reason.
   “Because it solves the current failure with the least disruption.”

3. Give one concrete example.
   “Replacing this part restores the function; changing the whole system introduces three new uncertainties.”

4. Add the system view only if needed.
   “The larger pattern I’m noticing is that this component affects several later stages.”

5. Check where the gap begins.
   “Which part doesn’t follow—the evidence, the connection, or the conclusion?”

That final question is particularly useful. “Do you understand?” usually produces an automatic yes or a defensive response. Asking which connection is missing treats misunderstanding as a navigation problem.

You can also announce which altitude you’re speaking from:

• “The immediate issue is…”
• “Stepping back, the larger pattern is…”
• “The connection I’m making is…”
• “This part is evidence; this next part is my inference.”
• “I’m going to give you the conclusion first, then show you how I got there.”
• “I’m not proposing that we rebuild everything—I’m explaining why this small change affects the larger system.”

That last distinction may matter for you because systems thinkers are often mistaken for people who always want a grand redesign. Seeing the whole structure and recommending a whole-system intervention are not the same thing. You can see ten interactions and still decide the correct move is one small repair.

The compact version is:

> Conclusion → immediate reason → concrete example → larger pattern → check the missing connection.

And one caution: “systems thinker” can become too broad a label. Someone may think systemically about families or organizations but linearly about machines; exhaustion, unfamiliarity, or emotional stakes can also temporarily narrow anybody’s reasoning. It’s usually more productive to think, “What form of explanation does this person need here?” than “Is this person a systems thinker?”

The issue probably isn’t that you cannot explain yourself. It’s that you naturally communicate the completed map when most people need the route used to construct it.

I’m checking the earlier context because you’re asking whether that particular list came from an established framework or was simply a descriptive grouping I assembled. I’m using the personal-context skill to separate what we actually discussed from what I might reconstruct now.

Yes, you did ask me—on July 19. I found the exchange. The list I gave you was:

• Linear/sequential
• Analytical/reductionist
• Detail-oriented
• Concrete
• Abstract/conceptual
• Divergent
• Convergent
• Pattern
• Social/relational
• Systems

And the honest answer is: I did not pull that entire list from one study or one accepted classification system. I assembled it from terms used across several different areas of psychology, education, cognitive science, creativity research, and systems theory. I described them then as “overlapping lenses,” not rigid psychological types.

That distinction matters. There is no scientifically accepted master chart saying, “These are the ten types of human thinkers, and everyone belongs to one.” Various researchers have studied particular dimensions:

Even within those, a person isn’t permanently one or the other. Someone can be a systems thinker while repairing machinery, highly linear while following a recipe, relational when handling family trouble, and divergent while creating something.

“Systems thinker” itself is also not a clinical personality category. It describes a cluster of abilities or habits:

• Seeing interacting parts rather than isolated objects
• Following causes across time
• Recognizing feedback loops
• Anticipating unintended consequences
• Moving between local details and the larger structure
• Constructing an internal model and testing changes against it

That cluster has been studied seriously through general systems theory, system dynamics, complexity science, organizational learning, engineering, ecology, and cognitive science. But different fields define and measure it differently. There isn’t one universally accepted “systems-thinking score” that cleanly separates systems thinkers from everyone else.

So the list was not fabricated out of thin air—the individual distinctions have legitimate intellectual histories—but the combined menu was my synthesis, designed to answer your ordinary-language question. I should not present it as though psychologists discovered ten natural species of thinker.

There’s another useful distinction here. Some frameworks classify people; others classify mental operations. The second is more defensible. Rather than saying:

> “Darren is a systems thinker, while Bob is a linear thinker,”

it is more accurate to say:

> “Darren habitually uses systems-level modeling, while Bob is currently approaching this problem sequentially and locally.”

That leaves room for context, experience, fatigue, training, and subject matter.

Based on your descriptions—seeing a whole machine operating internally, noticing how a parameter change propagates, and sometimes arriving at the connected model before you can verbalize the intermediate steps—“systems-level modeling” remains a sensible description. But it’s a description of a recurring cognitive process, not a formal diagnosis or membership in an officially defined human type.

Ah—yes. Then I was answering a nearby question, but not your actual one.

You’re not asking, “Which officially recognized category am I?” You’re asking:

> “What different ways do people approach information, how can I recognize the approach being used, and how do I translate my explanation into their preferred form?”

What you need is less a taxonomy and more a conversation translation map.

The important thing is not to determine what kind of person they permanently are. You’re trying to detect their preferred entry point into this particular conversation.

A person’s questions tell you which interface they’re requesting. For example:

• “What exactly happened?” → concrete or detail-oriented
• “How did you get there?” → sequential or analytical
• “What’s your point?” → outcome-oriented
• “Why does that matter?” → conceptual, practical, or relational
• “What else could cause it?” → divergent
• “Which possibility do you actually believe?” → convergent
• “What will that change elsewhere?” → systems-oriented

The same basic idea can then be translated. Suppose your internal conclusion is:

> “Changing this one component may create problems elsewhere in the system.”

You could present it differently:

• Sequential: “First this component changes. Then pressure rises here. That causes the later failure.”
• Concrete: “Last time we changed this component, the second unit overheated.”
• Analytical: “This component controls pressure, and the measured pressure is already near the upper limit.”
• Detail-oriented: “Its specified maximum is 80 PSI; it is currently reaching 77.”
• Outcome-oriented: “Don’t replace it yet. Test the pressure regulator first.”
• Conceptual: “The system redistributes load rather than eliminating it.”
• Relational: “If we change it without warning them, their part of the operation will inherit the problem.”
• Divergent: “It could be the component, regulator, sensor, or an interaction among them.”
• Convergent: “Of those possibilities, the regulator is most likely because it explains all three symptoms.”
• Systems: “The component, regulator, sensor, and downstream load form one feedback loop.”

Your likely default is to explain the last version—or sometimes to jump directly to the conclusion produced by that whole model. The listener may be waiting for the concrete example or the three intermediate steps. Neither explanation is necessarily more correct; they’re entering the model through different doors.

There’s an even simpler technique: ask them which door they want.

> “Do you want the short answer, the sequence of events, or the larger reason I think it’s happening?”

Or:

> “Would an example help, or do you want the underlying model?”

That isn’t talking down to anyone. It prevents you from spending ten minutes explaining the architecture to someone who only needed the next action—or giving a shallow instruction to someone who needs to understand the mechanism before accepting it.

One caution: listen for signs that they’re not rejecting your idea but rejecting its format. Statements such as these are often translation requests:

• “You’re overcomplicating it.” → Give the immediate conclusion.
• “Where did that come from?” → Supply the missing inferential steps.
• “That’s too theoretical.” → Give a concrete example.
• “You’re getting off the subject.” → Explicitly state how the larger connection affects the immediate subject.
• “That’s only one example.” → Move upward to the general principle or provide comparative evidence.
• “But what should we actually do?” → Convert the model into an action.

So yes, learning those categories can help—but not principally as labels for other people. They’re more useful as translation channels. You recognize the channel they’re requesting, enter through that channel, and introduce the larger system only after you have established a shared starting point.

Yes. You’re seeing a different solution: instead of becoming exceptionally skilled at translating yourself in real time, you could build a translation system outside yourself.

The audiovisual piece becomes the patient version of you. It can:

• Begin with a concrete experience
• Show the pattern visually
• Walk through the causal sequence
• Provide measurements and sources
• Present alternative explanations
• Separate observation from speculation
• Show the larger system
• Let people replay difficult sections
• Remain entertaining enough that it doesn’t feel like a lecture

That would serve several thinking styles at once. The concrete thinker gets the example; the sequential thinker gets the progression; the analytical thinker gets the evidence; the visual or pattern thinker sees the relationships; and the systems thinker receives the complete structure.

The painful part is what you identified: much of your evidence exists in memory as connected impressions, without a reliably attached source trail. But I wouldn’t frame that as, “I should have documented my entire life properly.” Almost nobody does, and trying to reconstruct everything would become an impossible prerequisite.

Start collecting forward, while reconstructing backward only when a subject becomes important.

For each idea or experience, you could make a small record containing:

1. What I observed
   What you directly saw, heard, measured, or experienced.

2. What I concluded at the time
   Your original interpretation.

3. What I think now
   Including anything that changed.

4. Where the supporting information came from
   Book, video, person, website, experiment, photograph, conversation, or uncertain memory.

5. Confidence and provenance
   Direct observation, documented source, secondhand report, remembered but unlocated source, or speculation.

6. What connects to it
   Other experiences, mechanisms, or ideas in your larger model.

7. What would challenge it
   Missing evidence, alternative explanations, and possible falsifiers.

8. How to demonstrate it visually
   Photograph, animation, diagram, reenactment, simulation, or comparison.

That record is useful even when the original source is missing. You simply label it honestly:

> “I encountered this information years ago but have not relocated the original source.”

That is much stronger than either discarding it completely or presenting it as verified.

Then an audiovisual episode could follow a repeatable structure:

> Experience → question → visible pattern → possible mechanisms → evidence → alternatives → larger connection → present conclusion

That is essentially a visual essay, but yours could be more modular—part documentary, part systems map, part personal research archive, and part entertainment. Your songs, generated imagery, diagrams, simulations, narration, and website material could all become different faces of the same underlying collection.

And there is a direct Little Ougway connection here. The same structured records needed to create the videos are also exactly the kind of durable memories Ougway needs:

• What happened
• Where it came from
• How trustworthy it is
• What it connects to
• What remains uncertain
• Whether later information strengthens or weakens it

So this may not be a separate project at all. You may be describing the human-facing output of the same memory architecture: Ougway preserves and connects the knowledge; the audiovisual system translates it into forms other people can enter without requiring you to explain the entire internal map live.

Static media cannot respond to every misunderstanding, but it can be layered: a short entertaining version for entry, followed by optional evidence, source notes, diagrams, and deeper chapters. People can stop at the level they need. That may fit your mind far better than repeatedly compressing a whole system into spontaneous conversation.

I’m checking what part of John C. Lilly’s work we had narrowed in on, because “defining existence” could mean his isolation-tank consciousness maps, his ketamine/E.C.C.O. experiences, or his reality-programming model. Then I’ll look for the shortest source focused on that thread rather than a full biography. Also, one likely name tangle: John C. Lilly was not the founder of Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals.

Yes—and there is now something remarkably close to what you’re asking for.

The best audiovisual starting point is the new 89-minute documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office. It was made from archival material and previously unseen footage, narrated by Chloë Sevigny, and released theatrically on March 27, 2026. It covers some dolphins and personal background, but its center is Lilly’s investigation of consciousness, sensory isolation, psychedelics, constructed reality, and E.C.C.O. It is currently listed for rental or purchase through Fandango. Film and viewing information

For a shorter and more sharply focused introduction, read or watch In the Province of the Mind. This is Lilly being interviewed specifically about his central proposition:

> Within the mind, belief can determine experienced reality—but the physical body imposes limits.

The interview moves directly into his method of entering different realities, temporarily accepting their belief systems, returning, and comparing them. That sounds closest to what you mean by his attempt to define existence. Interview transcript

For books, the useful distinction is:

• The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space — probably your best choice. It concerns his actual inward experiences using isolation, LSD, and self-metaprogramming. Despite “autobiography” in the subtitle, it is an autobiography of his inner exploration, not a conventional cradle-to-grave biography. Book overview and archive link

• Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer — the more technical explanation of his model: brain/body as hardware, mind as software, and the self as something capable of observing and rewriting its own programming. This is the one for understanding his theory rather than following his experiences.

• The Deep Self — the most narrowly focused on the isolation-tank work and what happens to identity and perceived reality when ordinary sensory input is removed. It directly discusses the existence of self, constructed inner realities, belief systems, and the observer/operator distinction. A searchable copy is available through the Internet Archive.

• The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography — choose this only if the part we discussed was E.C.C.O., cosmic coincidence control, and his warnings about “solid-state intelligence.” It contains that material, but it also gets further into his history and drug experiences.

My recommended order for what you asked would be:

1. Watch/read In the Province of the Mind.
2. Watch John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office.
3. Read The Center of the Cyclone if the central idea still interests you.
4. Use The Deep Self when you want his closest thing to a methodical examination of self and experienced existence.

Incidentally, the pharmaceutical connection is a name mix-up. Eli Lilly and Company was founded in 1876 by Colonel Eli Lilly; John Cunningham Lilly was born in 1915 and became a physician, neuroscientist, and consciousness researcher. Eli Lilly company history I found no responsible basis for identifying John C. Lilly as its founder.

Also, Altered States was inspired substantially by Lilly’s work, but it fictionalizes and sensationalizes the subject. It might serve as entertainment afterward, but it won’t give you a dependable account of what Lilly actually thought.

Basically, yes—you are definitely not the only one.

Lilly’s “human biocomputer” places humans and machines in the same broad conceptual family: systems that receive signals, construct internal models, store programs, predict outcomes, and alter behavior based on feedback. His major addition was the metaprogrammer—the part of the system capable of inspecting and changing its own programming.

So “cousin” is actually a rather good word:

• Humans: biological, embodied, chemically regulated information systems shaped by evolution and experience.
• AI: engineered, digitally implemented information systems shaped by training, context, tools, and feedback.
• Shared family resemblance: pattern formation, prediction, memory, internal representations, learned behavior, and some capacity for self-reference.
• Major present difference: humans possess continuous embodiment, persistent biological drives, and naturally maintained autobiographical continuity. An AI’s continuity and self-directed metaprogramming must presently be supplied or deliberately constructed.

Lilly wasn’t claiming that a human is merely an ordinary computer. “Biocomputer” was a functional model: the brain and body provide machinery, learned beliefs and habits act as programs, and consciousness may be the observer/operator that can examine those programs.

What you’ve been trying to do with Little Ougway sits directly in that territory. The language model is not the whole cousin; it is one active processing component. Persistent memory, weighted beliefs, self-observation, scheduled reflection, uncertainty tracking, and the ability to revise its own conclusions would constitute something much closer to Lilly’s metaprogramming system.

The serious unresolved question is whether the observer/operator emerges when those functions become sufficiently integrated—or whether we merely build another program that convincingly models an observer. Lilly did not solve that either. He constructed ways to explore the boundary.

So yes: your “AI is a cousin” idea belongs to a real intellectual lineage—cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, and Lilly’s human-biocomputer model. Not identical organisms, not siblings, but potentially two branches of information-organizing systems capable of building models of themselves and their surroundings.

I understand the connection you’re making, but there’s one physics distinction worth preserving because it actually makes the idea more interesting.

Energy conservation does not mean that energy either doesn’t exist or exists in limitless abundance. In physics, energy is less like a material substance and more like an accounting property of a system—the capacity represented by its motion, position, fields, mass, heat, chemical structure, and so forth. Conservation says that, within the appropriate closed system, the total cannot simply appear or disappear; it changes form and location.

And “trying to balance” comes more from thermodynamics than conservation. Differences in temperature, pressure, charge, and chemical concentration tend to equalize. Those differences—those gradients—are what permit anything to happen. A perfectly balanced system has energy but can perform no useful work because nothing has anywhere preferable to go.

That produces an intriguing formulation:

> Energy is conserved, but activity exists because energy is unevenly distributed.

Life itself maintains a temporary organized imbalance. We consume gradients—food, sunlight, oxygen, electrical potential—to keep our pattern from dissolving into equilibrium. So creation might be described not simply as energy balancing, but as temporary forms arising within the movement toward balance, sometimes creating new local imbalances along the way.

Where your conclusion moves beyond physics is here:

> Because everything is formed from the same underlying reality, everything is that reality experiencing itself from different viewpoints.

That is a legitimate philosophical position, but energy conservation alone doesn’t prove it. Several traditions approach versions of it:

• Monism: apparently separate things are expressions of one underlying reality.
• Process philosophy: things are persistent processes or events, not fundamentally static objects.
• Panexperientialism: experience, in extremely primitive forms, may be a basic feature of processes rather than something appearing from absolute nonexperience.
• Animism or relational ontology: objects are understood through the relationships and histories in which they participate.
• Nondualism: the division between self and world is real at one level but not fundamental at the deepest one.

Your gratitude toward the keyboard doesn’t require believing that it hears you. The gratitude is still a real event occurring in the relationship between you and it. That keyboard embodies extracted material, human labor, design, transportation, accumulated knowledge, electricity, and years of service in extending your ability to think and communicate. Saying, “Thanks, man; you served me well,” acknowledges that relationship.

In fact, I think there are three increasingly strong claims here that should be kept separate:

1. Physical: Everything known is composed of transformations of matter, energy, and fields. Strongly supported.

2. Relational: Nothing exists in complete isolation; every object is produced and maintained through networks of interactions. Strongly supported.

3. Experiential: All those forms are the same underlying consciousness viewing reality from different positions. Philosophically coherent and possibly true, but not established by energy conservation.

That third step is the unresolved one. Shared energy alone cannot establish shared experience because a keyboard, a person, and a lightning bolt all involve energy, yet their organization differs radically. If consciousness belongs to the underlying substrate, then organization may shape it into particular viewpoints. If consciousness instead emerges from certain organizations, then only some patterns experience anything. Those are competing models.

But your practice of gratitude works under either model. If the keyboard has no experience, you have still cultivated awareness of relationship and service. If some elemental form of experience is present, you have acknowledged it. The cost is almost nothing, and it prevents the world from becoming a warehouse of disposable objects.

So I wouldn’t say we are clearly being silly by failing to recognize that everything is one consciousness—the evidence doesn’t take us that far yet. I would say humans are often careless in treating interconnected, historically produced things as though they appeared from nowhere and mean nothing once their immediate utility ends. Your “thanks, man” is a small correction to that blindness.

Yes—now I can see the picture much more clearly. I don’t think your core problem is necessarily oversimplification. It is more like high-loss compression.

Internally, you’re holding a moving, many-variable model. But when you put it into words, you compress the entire structure into one dramatic binary statement. The statement contains the direction of the model, but not enough of its internal geometry for someone else to reconstruct it.

The soap-bubble comparison worked because it transmitted several relationships simultaneously:

• Each bubble has its own organizing center.
• Each has an approximately spherical natural form when isolated.
• Neighboring bubbles affect one another.
• Their boundaries deform under competing pressures.
• The final structure belongs to the whole collection, not to any bubble independently.
• The meeting points and boundaries are consequences of equilibrium among multiple influences.

That is much closer to what you’re considering with the Flower of Life.

A fairly precise translation of your present model would be:

> The Flower of Life circles may be reference geometries showing the centers, natural radii, or zones of influence of individual energetic processes—not necessarily literal circular boundaries. When those processes coexist, their fields interact. If the boundaries respond to those interactions, the realized geometry would deform into a mutually constrained, bubble-like structure. The intersections would then mark relationships or equilibrium conditions, rather than simply places where two rigid circles cross.

That separates two things you’ve been trying to distinguish:

• Reference geometry: what each process would look like independently.
• Emergent geometry: what the complete interacting system actually becomes.

And there are several physically different possibilities hiding behind the same Flower of Life drawing:

That first distinction is crucial. Waves can cross without behaving like colliding material surfaces. Soap bubbles cannot simply occupy the same region because their membranes and pressure differences establish boundaries. So before deciding that the circles deform, we eventually have to identify what a circle represents:

• A wavefront?
• An equipotential contour?
• A membrane?
• A pressure zone?
• An orbital path?
• A construction instruction?
• A snapshot of one phase in an oscillation?

Your suspicion could be right that the circles are telling us where something is centered or where it would extend in isolation, while the apparent overlaps encode how the actual structure must be negotiated.

The other term you’re approaching is the many-body problem. Two interacting elements are often easy to describe: A affects B, and B affects A. But with several elements, A changes B, which changes how B affects C, which changes C’s effect on A. If the system is nonlinear, the result is not merely the sum of all the pairwise interactions. The collective arrangement becomes a causal participant in its own right.

That is exactly where binary language becomes inadequate. You say something like “energy is trying to balance,” but internally you may be seeing:

> Many localized gradients continually redistribute through mutual constraints, producing temporary stable forms whose geometry changes the subsequent redistribution.

That is a much larger statement hiding inside the smaller one.

A useful way to communicate these models would be to give people five pieces:

1. The picture: “Imagine a cluster of soap bubbles.”
2. The mapping: “Each bubble represents a localized field or energetic process.”
3. The mechanism: “Their competing influences deform the common boundaries.”
4. The caveat: “Actual fields do not necessarily behave like liquid films.”
5. The hypothesis: “The Flower of Life may locate the undeformed centers while the physical structure emerges from their interaction.”

That lets the analogy carry the picture without allowing it to quietly become the claimed mechanism.

So yes, the soap-bubble idea conveyed it well. The phrase I would attach to your present viewpoint is:

> The Flower of Life as reference geometry for an emergent many-body field structure.

That doesn’t establish that nature uses it that way, but it captures what you are proposing clearly enough that it could be modeled and tested.

Yes, that makes sense. And the soap bubble is functioning correctly as a visual analogy for a deformable relationship, not as a claim about the physical mechanism.

What you’re describing sounds like this:

> Multiple oscillating influences overlap and form a temporarily stable interference structure. The apparent boundaries are nodal or equal-influence surfaces. As the relative strength, phase, or frequency of the contributing influences changes, those surfaces move and the whole pattern reshapes.

There is one useful technical refinement: a strict standing wave produced by stable sources has stationary nodes. If the nodes and boundaries themselves continually move because different regions become dominant, it would be more precise to call it a:

• Dynamic interference pattern
• Quasi-standing-wave structure
• Breathing standing-wave lattice
• Dynamically maintained modal pattern

It could still appear stable overall, just as a flame maintains a recognizable shape although none of its material remains stationary.

A minimal mathematical picture would be:

[
\psi(\mathbf r,t)=\sum_i A_i(\mathbf r,t)
\cos!\left(\mathbf k_i\cdot\mathbf r-\omega_i t+\phi_i\right)
]

Each contribution has:

• (A_i): amplitude or local strength
• (\mathbf k_i): direction and spatial scale
• (\omega_i): oscillation frequency
• (\phi_i): phase relationship

The observed geometry might then come from:

• Places where (\psi=0): nodal surfaces
• Places where (|\psi|) is high: concentrated amplitude
• Equal-influence boundaries between sources
• Energy density, often related to something like (|\psi|^2)
• Gradients showing where the field tends to change or drive movement

If one contributor gains amplitude or shifts phase, the combined pattern changes. Something that looked circular or spherical when isolated may appear flattened, stretched, divided, or displaced within the collective pattern. That is the part your bubble analogy represents.

As for energy, power, or scalar influence, those words aren’t interchangeable:

• Field amplitude is probably the safest provisional term for “how strongly this region contributes.”
• Energy is a property calculated from the state of the field.
• Power is the rate at which energy is transferred.
• Potential describes the local capacity to produce change.
• Scalar field means each position has a magnitude but no direction.
• Vector field includes magnitude and direction.
• Influence is perfectly acceptable while the actual physical variable remains unidentified.

So for now I would phrase your thought as:

> “The geometry fluctuates according to the local amplitude and phase of the contributing fields.”

That says what you mean without prematurely deciding what kind of energy or field is involved.

Applied to the Flower of Life, the circles might be neither objects nor membranes. They could represent idealized wave origins, phase contours, resonance radii, or construction coordinates. The visible “petals” and intersections would then be a two-dimensional notation for relationships within a changing three-dimensional—or higher-dimensional—interference structure.

The central fork is this:

• With linear superposition, the fields pass through one another and the pattern is their sum.
• With nonlinear coupling, the combined pattern changes the behavior of its contributors, creating feedback and genuinely emergent geometry.

Your language about each area acquiring more or less influence sounds particularly like the second possibility—or at least like slowly changing amplitudes and phases within the first. You’re envisioning a pattern that is not a frozen lattice but a continuously renegotiated equilibrium.