For more than four decades, I have been investigating the, or at least a, fundamental logic of existence, seeking a unifying property capable of accounting for identity, differentiation, transformation and persistence without presupposing the things it must explain. The investigation has crossed philosophy, mathematics, physics, language, information, communication and complex systems. Each discipline offers distinguishable structures and methods of explanation, yet none stands independently of the reality it describes. The difficulty was not simply to discover what these domains have in common, but to understand how their distinctions arise and persist without assuming an independent foundation. Every proposed unifying identity reproduced the original problem: its existence depended upon relations beyond itself.
The answer emerged through the reciprocal relationship between what is present and what is absent. Neither can be independently specified; each acquires its distinction through the other. Their reciprocally co-evolutionary differentiation constitutes a logical orbit, an irreducible relational frame in which identity is sustained through difference rather than independent completeness. Absence does not precede presence, nor does their relationship resolve into a synthesis that eliminates their distinction. The relation is constitutive, its asymmetry generative, and its persistence necessarily temporal. The same logic extends to whole and constituent, identity and transformation, information and meaning. Probabilistic harmonic dynamics, spectral structure and topology articulate distinguishable aspects of these relations, not explanations imposed from outside them. The struggle has been to recognise that the unifying property I sought could never be isolated from existence: its absence was its presence, expressed through the relational dynamics of existence itself.
The relationship between presence and absence is equally expressed between mind and world, self and other, system and environment. These are not equivalent identities but different configurations of the same logic of reciprocal differentiation, applicable across possible forms of coupling, distinction and grouping. The investigation and its discovery are themselves reciprocally related, each transforming the meaning of the other. Their relationship enters further relations, recursively reproducing the same logical condition across successive levels of differentiation. This is fractal recursivity, without a final level or independently complete whole. Probability offers a way of apprehending aspects of an existence whose possibilities exceed any finite description. We encounter a vast, unrelentingly unintelligible void, yet its uncertainty is inseparable from the possibilities through which we investigate, imagine and act. Possibility draws us forward, even when we are lost, confused or fighting one another without particularly good reason.
A caveat
The most difficult part of pursuing independent thought has not been the intellectual work itself, but the response of other people. Unfamiliar ideas seem remarkably effective at inviting dismissal, mockery and ridicule, particularly from scholars whose professional lives are ostensibly devoted to investigating them. There is a peculiar irony in discovering that independent thought is often least welcome where it is most enthusiastically advertised.
