Operatoric Research Corpus
Studies in World-Formation
Section III
Simulation and Artificial Systems
Volume 6
Simulation, Closure and the Ontological Limit of Artificial Systems
The present volume brings together three contributions that pursue a shared ontological question: under what conditions can world arise at all, and where do the structural limits of technical systems and theoretical models lie in relation to this capacity for world-formation.
The point of departure is the observation that many contemporary debates in physics, artificial intelligence, and information theory implicitly assume that increasing complexity, computational power, or theoretical precision could in principle suffice to reconstruct, simulate, or fully explain world. The contributions collected in this volume systematically challenge this assumption. They argue that world does not arise from completeness or formal closure, but presupposes a structural openness that cannot be fully stabilized without undermining the very condition that makes world possible.
The first contribution introduces the All–Nothing Paradox (ANP) as a minimal ontological condition of world-formation. According to this view, world appears only where reality does not fully coincide with itself and cannot collapse either into complete determinacy or into pure nothingness. Ontological openness is therefore not an epistemic incompleteness, but a structural prerequisite for perspective, emergence, and reality.
The second contribution examines the implications of this condition for artificial systems. It argues that technical systems necessarily operate within formally closed spaces of possibility and can therefore simulate world states but cannot form world. World-formation presupposes structural vulnerability, non-optimisability, and the real risk of world loss—properties that stand in structural contradiction to the technical usability of artificial systems.
The third contribution extends this consideration to scientific theory itself. It introduces a categorical distinction between theoretical correctness and world-founding capacity and shows that even fully correct, empirically successful, and formally consistent theories are not thereby ontologically world-capable. Scientific models operate within stabilized spaces of possibility and therefore presuppose the existence of a world without being able to generate it.
Taken together, the contributions mark a precise ontological boundary: world cannot arise either from complete theoretical determinacy or from technical simulation. It emerges only under conditions of structural openness that cannot be fully formalized or stabilized. The volume therefore does not present a critique of scientific or technological practice, but a clarification of its ontological scope.
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