Pivoting Towards Eternity

For more than forty years, I have been studying a particular frame of thought: an effectively infinite-dimensional phase space in which relationships are primary, identities are provisional, and the distinction between the material and the abstract is not the great ontological divide we have been taught to imagine. There is a continuum, without rupture, from physical phenomena through living systems, consciousness, language and memory into the abstract structures through which the universe relates to itself. This is not mysticism dressed up as mathematics, nor another attempt to squeeze existence into the mechanical rationalism inherited from Newton and the Industrial Revolution. It requires a shift in perception, a different understanding of what constitutes an explanation. An infinite-dimensional system cannot be exhausted by a finite catalogue of its configurations, and a description made within that system cannot pretend to stand outside it. The observer, the observation and the language of explanation participate in what is being explained. This is not a rejection of logic. It is a recognition that logic, too, has conditions of existence.

Underlying this is a particular geometry and topology, a relational structure that persists through transformations without requiring the persistence of the things being transformed. I have called aspects of this the logical orbit and the orbit frame. Mathematical ideas such as cobordism, non-orientable surfaces, invariance under transformation and phase relationships provide ways of approaching its structure, although none should be mistaken for the whole of it. What remains when the words change, when organisms die, when civilisations rise and disappear? Not an immutable object, not some secret substance hiding behind appearances. What persists is relational: the possibility of recurrence, differentiation and coherence through transformation. In a peculiar sense, nothing remains the same, yet continuity is possible. The apparent contradiction is not a defect to be eliminated. It is where the interesting work begins. The same difficulty appears in complex systems, biological self-organisation, evolution, language and machine intelligence, wherever a system participates in producing the conditions of its own existence. Even meaning is not something deposited inside a word or an object. It arises through relationships that acquire continuity. The universe does not require a dictionary to understand itself.

For years I struggled to communicate this. Not because it is intrinsically incomprehensible, but because most of our explanatory machinery is designed to divide things into manageable pieces, assign them names, establish boundaries and pretend the resulting inventory constitutes understanding. I went to university hoping to find people who could help develop the mathematics, clarify the topology and test the implications. Engineers, cyberneticians, philosophers: surely somewhere among these disciplines there would be sufficient curiosity to investigate a structure that crosses their boundaries. Instead, I encountered much the same institutional machinery I had known throughout my working life. Careers, committees, disciplinary territories, administrative rituals and the magnificent oompa-pa machines of productivity. Universities are extraordinarily accomplished at reproducing universities. Whether they are equally accomplished at understanding anything beyond the conditions of their own reproduction is another matter. I had something significant to offer, but could not find the assistance needed to develop it. The institution seemed considerably more interested in maintaining its intellectual boundaries than investigating what might lie across them.

This is hardly peculiar to universities. Governments, corporations and institutions generally exhibit the same inertia. Gather enough intelligent people inside a sufficiently elaborate administrative structure and something remarkable happens: collective intelligence becomes subordinate to organisational survival. People play the political game because the game is played. Its rules acquire authority through repetition, its rewards become evidence of merit, and its participants gradually mistake institutional success for intellectual achievement. There are legitimate reasons for collective action, political coordination and institutional continuity. Workers defending themselves against exploitation, communities preserving their freedoms, societies maintaining the conditions of civilisation: these things matter because their consequences matter to living beings. But the petty manoeuvring of organisational politics, the careerist theatre, the condescension and territorial absurdities? Fuck off. Life is short. The universe is not waiting for another committee to approve its existence. Institutional knowledge has enormous inertia, and the people entrusted with advancing it can spend entire careers defending the arrangements that prevent it from moving.

Philosophy offers some relief, although much of its history resembles an extraordinarily elaborate record of mistakes, corrections and subsequent mistakes made with greater sophistication. This is not necessarily a criticism. Knowledge evolves precisely because its descriptions are incomplete. What interests me is the process through which understanding transforms, and what survives those transformations. We misunderstand evolution when we reduce it to a mechanical contest between competing objects. We misunderstand language when we treat words as containers for meaning. We misunderstand consciousness when we presume it must be located somewhere inside a mechanism. And we misunderstand freedom when we attempt to define it as a fixed property of an otherwise bounded system. These are different expressions of the same underlying difficulty: trying to understand relational processes through descriptions that assume the independence and completeness of their constituent parts. The resulting contradictions are not always evidence that the world is confused. Sometimes they reveal the limitations of the frame through which we insist upon seeing it. There is an enormous difference between explaining a system and explaining away everything that makes it interesting.

My own circumstances have made this considerably more difficult. Following two strokes, I have had to rely upon generative technologies to assist with composition and communication. Some of the vocabulary in my recent work has consequently been shaped by these technologies, and some of it may change. That does not particularly concern me. The words are not the discovery. The question is what remains invariant as the descriptions change. I have spent decades approaching this structure through mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, language and direct experience, without claiming to be a mathematician or physicist. I have repeatedly found its underlying relationships reflected in developments across these fields. What I have lacked is not conviction, but the technical collaboration needed to articulate the system with the precision it deserves. I once thought that was what universities were for. Apparently I had confused the prospectus with the product.

So I am leaving the institutional argument behind. I no longer care whether the universities are interested, whether the right people approve, or whether another academic career is successfully assembled from the wreckage of somebody else’s curiosity. I intend to describe this system, progressively and as clearly as I can, including its geometry, its logic, its contradictions and its implications for the living and material world. It has applications wherever relationships acquire structure, wherever identities persist through change, wherever systems reproduce themselves, and wherever descriptions become entangled with what they describe. I have no intention of spending the remainder of my life asking permission to discuss it. Perhaps somebody will find it useful. Perhaps nobody will. I would prefer to leave behind an intelligible account of what I have spent forty years trying to understand, rather than another account of why the institutions charged with understanding things were too busy to listen.

And beyond all this sits eternity, which has the rather unpleasant habit of making our accomplishments look ridiculous. Money, status, power, reputation, technological spectacle, flying cars and the rest of the magnificent bullshit: none of it possesses any privileged standing against infinity. Even the greatest intellectual achievements are provisional arrangements within a world that has no obligation to preserve them. Yet this does not make experience meaningless. It makes meaning something other than permanence, possession or recognition. A life is not an achievement awaiting certification. It is a finite participation in relationships whose possibilities exceed any particular description of them. I have spent much of mine trying to understand that distinction. I have done what I can, and I will continue while I am able. What happens afterwards is not mine to manage. The work can stand or fall without me. Eternity has no admissions committee.