PhronesisCompulsive connection-creating (CCC) is the habitual manufacture of meaningful links, patterns, and correspondences between phenomena beyond what the evidence supports. We analyze CCC as a wrong attractor W in the dynamical-systems vocabulary of the Phronesis Issues framework, operating against the ground state S^0: calibrated discerning noticing. The paper develops two structural concepts.
The Pattern-Imposition Architecture (PIA) is the cognitive-affective mechanism that generates systematic over-connection as a meaning-manufacturing strategy for managing contingency and disorder; its operating principle is that every gap in meaning is experienced as a gap in safety, so connection is produced not perceived. The Reality-As-Is Foreclosure Basin is the attractor neighborhood around W in which direct, unmediated perception of phenomena is progressively blocked by layers of interpretive overlay, until the person inhabits a private cosmos of correspondences rather than shared empirical reality.
We develop nine propositions tracing the full arc: from the primacy of contingency-anxiety (P1) through the anxiety-relief function of the found pattern (P2), signal-to-noise collapse (P3), identity lock-in as meaning-maker (P4), isolation in the private cosmos (P5), the diagnostic distinction between genuine pattern recognition and compulsive imposition (P6), the conditions for return (P7), the mechanics of recalibration through bare-perception practice (P8), and the stability of S^0 in meaning that is found rather than installed (P9).
The paper closes with a therapeutic and epistemic framework for the return trajectory.