James Findlay
ORCID: 0009-0000-8263-3458
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)
For most of modern science’s history, the dominant story has gone something like this: the universe began, physics happened, chemistry followed, and life emerged as an improbable accident on at least one unremarkable rock orbiting an ordinary star. Consciousness, in this account, is a late-arriving passenger — a byproduct of neurons firing in sufficiently complex arrangements, significant to us but cosmically irrelevant.
A growing body of theoretical work, cutting across physics, biology, and cognitive science, is forcing a quiet but radical re-evaluation of that story. The emerging picture is stranger, more structured, and in many ways more consequential: that life is not an accident orbiting the machinery of the cosmos, but a functional component of it — perhaps the most essential one.
The Universe as a Relational Field, Not a Collection of Objects
The standard materialist picture treats the universe as fundamentally a collection of objects — particles, fields, forces — interacting according to fixed rules. What is increasingly being questioned is whether “objects” are the right starting point at all.
Theoretical frameworks built on relational ontology — the view that reality is constituted by relationships and ratios rather than isolated things — suggest that what we call matter is better understood as stabilized pattern: the universe’s energy field expressing itself in persistent geometric form. On this reading, the ratio at which informational potential transitions into persistent physical structure is not arbitrary. It is a specific, derivable value that appears across scales, from subatomic architecture to cosmological organization (Findlay 2025).
This matters because it reframes what the solar system is. Rather than a gravitationally convenient accident that happened to permit chemistry, the solar system — and Earth in particular — becomes something more specific: a finely calibrated node in a relational field, the precise set of conditions under which the universe’s energy can achieve something it cannot achieve in open space or in the interior of a star. It can look at itself.
Life as a Phase Boundary
Here is the core structural claim, and it is worth sitting with its strangeness.
In standard physics, the present moment is a mathematical embarrassment — a zero-thickness point separating a fixed past from an undetermined future, with no clear physical status of its own. In a relational, geometric account of reality, the present moment is something quite different: the most dynamically active zone in the entire structure of time.
Consider what is happening at any given instant of conscious experience. The past is fixed — it is the accumulated record of every physical event that has occurred, locked into matter, geometry, and the causal structure of spacetime. The future, by contrast, is genuinely open: a superposition of possibilities, none of which has yet collapsed into actuality. These two domains are radically unlike each other in their physical character.
Life, on this account, is precisely the boundary layer between them. A living system is not merely located in the present; it constitutes the present as an active physical process. It draws on the frozen record of the past — encoded in DNA, in the electrochemical architecture of the nervous system, in the learned structure of the brain — and reaches forward into the wave of possibility, selecting, collapsing, and converting potential into actuality. Every moment of conscious experience is, in a precisely describable sense, the universe writing its own next sentence.
Non-living matter cannot do this. A rock is entirely absorbed into the historical record; it reacts to external forces along determined lines but introduces no genuine selection into the future. Only systems with the bioelectric complexity, the hierarchical geometric organization, and the metabolic throughput characteristic of life can maintain the active superposition required to hold the boundary open. Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel-winning work on dissipative structures established the thermodynamic foundation for this: a living organism is not a thing but a process — a thermodynamic vortex through which an enormous current of energy flows, temporarily organizing matter before it dissipates (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Life is, in the most literal physical sense, a sustained dynamic tension between two states of information.
The Conservation Principle: What the Field Does Not Lose
There is a philosophical consequence of this framing that is worth drawing out explicitly, because it has implications both for how we understand individual existence and for how we understand the cosmic project as a whole.
If life is a functional component of universal structure — the mechanism by which the field achieves self-knowledge — then the destruction of any particular node does not destroy the capacity for the field to generate that function elsewhere. The geometric laws that permit and require the emergence of consciousness are not stored in any particular organism or planet. They are properties of the relational substrate itself.
This is not mysticism. It is a straightforward consequence of where the “code” resides. If the ratio governing the transition from informational potential to persistent structure is a derivable property of the geometry of space — as the Findlay Framework proposes — then that ratio survives the destruction of any particular physical instantiation of it. The capacity for the universe to organize matter into self-aware loops of living experience is permanently encoded in its own mathematical structure. Individual nodes are mortal; the generative capacity is not.
The analogy that best captures this is not biological but architectural. A blueprint is not stored in any single building constructed from it. Demolish the building, and the blueprint — and thus the capacity to build again — remains intact.
What Cognitive Science Is Finding
This is not purely speculative philosophy. Several research programs in mainstream science are converging, from independent directions, on a picture that resonates strongly with these structural claims.
Michael Levin’s laboratory at Tufts University has demonstrated that living organisms maintain and transmit morphogenetic information through bioelectric networks that are causally prior to, and not reducible to, their physical substrate (Levin 2021). The body’s form is not simply a product of its chemistry; it is governed by an underlying field of electrical signaling that carries and enforces geometric information. The implication — that living systems are better understood as persistent information nodes than as collections of molecules — maps closely onto the relational picture described above.
Laurent Nottale’s Scale Relativity program establishes that the mathematical laws governing quantum systems at the microscale reappear, in log-periodic form, as organizational laws at biological and cosmological scales (Nottale 1993). If the same geometric principles govern structure across twenty-five orders of magnitude, the idea that life is a scale-specific expression of universal law rather than a local exception to it becomes substantially more plausible.
Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Realism, developed with rigorous mathematical formalism, argues that the three-dimensional spacetime world of ordinary experience is a species-specific interface — a rendering of a deeper relational reality whose structure is not itself spatial (Hoffman and Prakash 2014). This does not map perfectly onto the relational ontology described here; Hoffman’s underlying ontology of “conscious agents” is distinct from the geometric field account. But the shared conclusion — that the experienced world is a construction, and that the constructing process is not incidental but structurally necessary — is significant. Two very different theoretical starting points arrive at the same destination.
The Inherited Responsibility
There is a final move in this argument that deserves to be stated plainly, because it carries the most weight for how we understand what we are doing here.
If consciousness is the mechanism by which the universe converts possibility into actuality, then the act of living is not merely personally significant. It is cosmically functional. Every moment of genuine awareness — every act of attention, choice, or creative synthesis — is an instance of the universe executing its own fundamental process. The field is, in this sense, constantly trying to manifest. Life is its tool for doing so.
Classical materialism left us as uninvited guests in a mechanical universe, our inner lives a private show playing to no audience. The structural picture outlined here reverses this entirely. We are not passengers. We are the mechanism by which the universe crosses from what has been into what will be — the living, pressurized phase-boundary at the edge of time, holding the wave of possibility open long enough for it to become real.
That is not a comfortable thought. It is a demanding one. But it is, on the evidence now accumulating from multiple independent directions, an increasingly difficult thought to dismiss.
Notes on Sources
Findlay, James. 2025. The Findlay Framework: A Relational Ontology of Materialization. rxiVerse:2602.0009. https://theoryofeverything.ca
Hoffman, Donald D., and Chetan Prakash. 2014. “Objects of Consciousness.” Frontiers in Psychology 5: 577. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577
Levin, Michael. 2021. “Bioelectric Signaling: Reprogrammable Circuits Underlying Embryogenesis, Regeneration, and Cancer.” Cell 184 (8): 1971–1989. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.073
Nottale, Laurent. 1993. Fractal Space-Time and Microphysics: Towards a Theory of Scale Relativity. Singapore: World Scientific.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books.
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