Abstract:
This volume develops a general theory of emergence based on the concepts of difference, Eigenzeit, world-binding, and non-closure. It constitutes the eighteenth volume of the Studies in World-Formation series and serves as a phase of theoretical consolidation within the broader Operatoric Research Corpus. While previous volumes introduced concepts such as Gap, Operator, Eigenzeit, World-Binding, Relational Agency, Value Threshold, Diversity Threshold, Representational Violence, and Ontological Coexistence across a wide range of domains, the present volume seeks to clarify their underlying relations and reconstruct the common structure from which they emerge.
The central thesis is that reality cannot be understood as a collection of already constituted objects, systems, or informational states. Instead, stable worlds emerge through irreversible processes of differentiation that never achieve complete closure. Every stabilization generates a residual difference between constituted world and lost openness. This difference appears as Gap, produces Eigenzeit, and continuously reorganizes the space of further emergence. World is therefore not a pre-given container within which cognition, communication, consciousness, society, or artificial intelligence operate. Rather, these phenomena emerge as local expressions of ongoing processes of world-binding.
Building upon this framework, the volume develops a series of theoretical consequences for contemporary research. In autism research, concepts such as Theory of Mind, Predictive Processing, Monotropism, and the Double Empathy Problem are reinterpreted as partial descriptions of deeper relations between competing forms of world-binding. In consciousness studies, the volume questions whether consciousness itself constitutes a fundamental ontological category or whether experience should instead be understood as a consequence of irreversible world-binding. In artificial intelligence research, it challenges the widespread assumption that increasing complexity, information processing, or simulation necessarily generate world-capacity. The decisive question becomes not whether a system can process information, but whether it can form irreversible Eigenzeit. In social and political theory, power, value, disability, neurodivergence, and exclusion are reconsidered as conflicts over the legitimacy of different forms of world-binding.
The volume further introduces and refines a set of concepts including overlap, glitch, morphogenetic pressure, negative topology, operator formation, and ontological irreversibility. These concepts provide a common vocabulary for describing how different Eigenzeiten stabilize, collide, partially translate, or generate novel forms. Across the five papers collected in this volume, emergence is reconstructed not as the appearance of order from chaos, nor as the realization of hidden structures, but as the continuous reorganization of possibility under conditions of non-neutralizable difference.
The overall argument proposes a shift from theories centered on representation, information, consciousness, communication, or function toward a general theory of world-formation. The volume argues that cognition, communication, consciousness, society, and artificial intelligence do not operate within a pre-given world. They emerge from irreversible processes of world-binding under conditions of persistent non-closure. Rather than asking how systems represent reality, the theory asks under what conditions reality becomes bindable in the first place. Difference is therefore not treated as a deviation from order. It becomes the condition under which order, emergence, experience, and reality itself become possible.
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