An Ethics of Productive Disequilibrium for the Age of Saturation
An Informational-Processual Worldview Applied to Culture, Society,
and Lived Experience
Taotuner — June 2026 License: CC BY-NC
4.0 Repository: github.com/taotuner-br/Informational-Processual_Monism
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21270482
Abstract. This text proposes the
Cosmotechnics of Lack as an applied worldview and ethics, grounded in
Informational-Processual Monism (IPM). Lack — understood here in three
registers: an ontological condition, an operational quantity, and a lived
experience — is not the center of this proposal but its condition of
possibility: the immanent tendency of complex systems to integrate, persist,
and create form from disequilibrium. Applied to culture, architecture, clinical
practice, art, politics, and the human-AI relation, this worldview defends the
interval, incompleteness, and resistance to saturation as conditions of desire,
autonomy, and democratic life.
Keywords: cosmotechnics;
informational-processual monism; Lack; attention; philosophy of technology;
ethics; artificial intelligence; architecture; subjectivity; complex systems.
Part I — Foundations
1. Introduction: An Ethics of Productive Disequilibrium
We live under a double pressure: on one side, digital technologies
that promise to eliminate all waiting, all ambiguity, all friction; on the
other, a diffuse crisis of desire, attention, and autonomy that shows up as
exhaustion, political indifference, and an impoverishment of forms of life.
These two tendencies are not a coincidence. They are two faces of the same
phenomenon.
Consider two ordinary artifacts. An infinite-scroll feed removes the
small, once-natural stopping point at the bottom of a page — there is no
bottom, so there is no moment to ask “do I still want this?” A large language
model answers a half-typed question before the person has finished forming it,
closing a gap that used to belong to thinking. Neither device is malicious;
both are optimized, competently, for a single goal — retention, completion —
that happens to coincide with the elimination of the interval. This is the
double pressure made concrete: not villainy, but a civilization-scale
optimization pressure with a side effect nobody voted for.
The Cosmotechnics of Lack emerges in this context as a theoretical
and practical response. It is not a philosophy of suffering, nor a celebration
of scarcity. It is, instead, a worldview grounded in the observation that
complex systems — physical, biological, cognitive, social — create form,
coherence, and persistence from disequilibrium, not despite it. Lack —
the term we use to name this structural disequilibrium, this dynamic openness —
is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of possibility of any living
process.
The name Cosmotechnics of Lack is an intentional twist on Yuk
Hui’s (2016) concept of cosmotechnics, which he defines as the historically
situated articulation of technology, morality, and cosmology. Hui argues that
there is no single universal technology, only plural technologies rooted in
diverse worldviews. We adopt this perspective and extend it: rather than
pursuing harmony or optimization, we propose an ethics of intentional
self-limitation, in which the preservation of interval and incompleteness
functions as a constitutive operator of desire, creativity, and collective
life.
The ontological substrate of this worldview is
Informational-Processual Monism (IPM), developed across a series of
computational experiments and texts published on Zenodo between 2025 and 2026
(Taotuner, 2025a, 2025b, 2026a, 2026b). IPM proposes, as a falsifiable
hypothesis, that reality is fundamentally constituted by
informational-relational processes in continuous transformation, organized by
the dynamic signature: Lack → Coupling → Integration → Persistence. This
sequence is not a necessary causal law but a descriptive pattern observed
across multiple simulation families and, more recently, across six domains of
real-world data: climate, finance, seismology, human biology, neuroscience, and
astronomy (Taotuner, 2026c).
On the relation between the two projects:
the Cosmotechnics of Lack does not follow deductively from IPM, nor is it a
direct application of it. It is a worldview that finds in IPM a consistent
ontological grounding, but that develops in a different register — that of
applied ethics, cultural critique, and the design of practices. IPM supplies
the language and the regularities; the Cosmotechnics translates them into
proposals for inhabiting the world. Where a claim in what follows depends
directly on an IPM regularity, this is noted explicitly; where it does not, it
should be read as an extension made in this second register, one that other
ontological frameworks could in principle also support.
This text is not a technical manual. It is a worldview: a way of
looking at the world that orients practices, decisions, and ways of inhabiting
time and space. It is addressed to architects and urban planners, clinicians
and therapists, artists and programmers, educators and policymakers, and to
anyone who senses that something important is lost when speed replaces
attention, when the answer replaces the question, when saturation replaces
desire.
2. Ontological Foundations: IPM as Substrate
2.1 What Informational-Processual Monism Is
IPM is a falsifiable ontology grounded in computational
regularities. Its central thesis, offered as a working hypothesis: reality is
fundamentally constituted by informational-relational processes in continuous
transformation. Not matter, not mind — but informational-processual dynamics
organized across three layers: empirical regularities (L1), ontological
interpretation (L2), and speculative extensions (L3).
By “informational” we mean: relational difference that modulates a
system’s trajectory under perturbation. Not Shannon entropy, not semantic
content. It is a notion operationalized through regularities R1–R3, observed
across multiple simulation families (Taotuner, 2026a):
•
R1 (Lack-degradation): greater perturbation → lower coherence and predictive integration.
•
R2
(Integration-persistence): greater integration →
greater metastability and post-perturbation recovery.
•
R3 (Clustering under
specific projections): independent, synchronized,
and latent-variable-mediated coupling regimes form separable clusters in the
observer’s projection space.
Crucially, IPM is not idealism. Informational processes are always
realized in non-equilibrium physical dynamics — gradients, flows, dissipation.
The relational-informational structure is ontologically primitive; physical
substrates are its necessary realizers.
To make R1–R3 concrete rather than abstract: picture a network of
coupled oscillators — nodes that each follow their own rhythm but nudge their
neighbors toward synchrony, the same class of model used to describe fireflies
flashing in unison or neurons firing together. Perturb one node with a pulse of
noise. A weakly coupled network barely notices; a strongly integrated one loses
phase-lock across the whole network and takes measurably longer to
resynchronize. That relationship — perturbation in, degraded coherence and
slower recovery out, scaling with how integrated the network already was — is
what R1 and R2 describe numerically. It is a toy example, not a claim about any
specific published architecture, but it is the shape of thing the regularities
are extracted from.
2.2 Lack as a Dynamic Operator
Within IPM, Lack is not absence, want, or deficiency. It is the
dynamic operator that names the structural disequilibrium from which processes
organize themselves. To keep this precise, we distinguish three registers in
which the term operates, rather than treating them as interchangeable:
•
Ontological register — what Lack is: the constitutive incompleteness of every
open system, the structural disequilibrium that forecloses thermodynamic
equilibrium and drives organization.
•
Operational register — how Lack is measured: as a deviation from a reference
state, a prediction error, a topological asymmetry, or a KL-divergence relative
to a Markovian baseline.
•
Phenomenological register — how Lack is lived: as desire, uncertainty, curiosity,
anxiety, or openness.
The sequence Lack → Coupling → Integration → Persistence does not
describe a cycle that resolves and closes. It is recursive: persistence creates
new sensitivities to perturbation, new thresholds of Lack, new possibilities of
coupling. Living systems operate exactly in this regime: neither static
equilibrium nor uncontrolled chaos, but what Simondon (1958) called
metastability — a state of permanent openness to transformation.
This understanding echoes, by a different route, Lacan’s (1979)
notion that the subject is structurally constituted by lack — not as trauma,
but as the motor of desire. We draw on Lacan selectively and heuristically
here: we take the intuition that the subject is constituted by a structuring
lack, not the full architecture of Lacanian metapsychology or its clinical
categories. In this text, Lack is a dynamic operator, not a clinical category.
The interval between the emergence of lack and the promise of satisfaction is
precisely the space where desire is constituted, where thought takes form,
where subjectivity finds its opening to the other. When this interval is
eliminated — by algorithmic saturation, by immediate response, by continuous
stimulation — desire is not satisfied: it is anesthetized.
A structural disequilibrium is productive, not merely tolerable,
when a system has the coupling capacity to integrate it rather than merely
absorb it. Four ordinary cases show the same pattern in different registers:
•
In science, Alexander Fleming’s contaminated petri dish — a bacterial culture
“ruined” by a stray mold spore — became the observation that led to penicillin,
because the failure was integrated rather than discarded.
•
In art, John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), four minutes and thirty-three
seconds during which the performer plays nothing, “fails” to deliver the music
the audience expected — and in doing so redirects attention to the coughs,
shifting chairs, and street noise that were always already there, letting the
audience compose the piece themselves.
•
In the clinic, a therapist who lets a patient’s question hang unanswered for an
extra ten seconds — rather than reflexively reassuring them — is deliberately
preserving a Lack. What the patient says into that silence is often the
material the session was missing.
•
In architecture, Manhattan’s High Line was not designed for its current use — it
began as a failed, abandoned elevated freight line — and it was precisely that
unplanned residual gap in the city’s infrastructure that later invited an
entirely unprescribed appropriation as public park.
In each case, Lack that is not eliminated becomes the site where
something new is integrated.
2.3 Empirical Validation: The Structural Memory of Systems
In June 2026, IPM’s R1 regularity was tested across six real-world
data domains (Taotuner, 2026c). Concretely, the test asks a simple question of
each series: does knowing the last ten values of, say, the VIX index predict
tomorrow’s value better than knowing only today’s value (a first-order Markov
model)? The temporal compressibility estimator “σ” (C) quantifies exactly that
gain — how much of the future a longer history buys you, beyond what the
present state alone already tells you. The results were:
•
Climate
(SOI — El Niño): C = 0.84, p = 0.167
•
Finance (VIX): C = 0.079, p
< 0.001 (significant non-linearity)
•
Seismology (earthquakes M≥6.5):
C = 0.21, p = 0.167
•
Human biology (ECG): C = 0.058,
p = 0.500
•
Neuroscience (EEG): C = 0.90, p
= 0.433
•
Astronomy (sunspots): C = 0.38,
p < 0.001 (significant non-linearity)
All six systems showed structural memory (C > 0). None reduces to
a memoryless (Markovian) process. Regularity R1 was not falsified. This result,
still preliminary and subject to more discriminating tests, marks IPM’s first
move out of a purely simulated environment into independent empirical data.
Epistemological caveat. Structural
memory (C > 0) is a necessary, not sufficient, condition for corroborating
IPM. The next steps require comparison against classical models (ARIMA, neural
networks) and registered prospective predictions. The ontological
interpretation remains a falsifiable hypothesis.
Part II — Diagnosis
3. Culture and Acceleration: The Diagnosis
3.1 The Pathology of Saturation
Hartmut Rosa (2013) identified social acceleration as a structural
feature of late modernity: technical acceleration, accelerated social change,
and an accelerated pace of life compress the intervals needed to work through
experience. Byung-Chul Han (2015) diagnoses the result: a burnout society in
which excess positivity — continuous stimulation, incessant production, total
transparency — does not liberate but exhausts.
The Cosmotechnics of Lack translates this diagnosis into
informational-processual terms: what Rosa and Han describe as a social
pathology is, at the dynamic level, the systematic elimination of the gradients
that allow integration and persistence. A system held in continuous saturation
does not integrate: it oscillates between hyperactivation and collapse — the
dynamic equivalent of burnout.
Contemporary digital platforms operate exactly in this register.
Infinite feeds, continuous notifications, ubiquitous autocomplete,
recommendation algorithms that anticipate and fill every desire before it fully
forms: these devices do not merely compete for attention, they redesign the
temporal structure of subjective experience. The mechanisms are specific and
nameable: autoplay removes the decision point between one video and the next;
badge counts and red dots convert an open-ended inbox into a standing demand;
“typing…” indicators and read receipts convert a pause in conversation into a
visible, monitored event rather than a private one; swipe-to-dismiss interfaces
make forgetting an action taken for the user rather than by them.
As Pariser (2011) showed with filter bubbles and Crary (2013) with the
colonization of sleep by late capitalism, what is at stake is not the content
of messages but the temporal structure of attention.
3.2 The Metastable Interval of Attention
We propose the concept of the Metastable Interval of Attention
(MIA): the phenomenological and temporal space between stimulus and response in
which experience can be worked through, desire can emerge, and new forms of
individuation can take shape. The MIA is not empty — it is a state of openness
charged with potential.
In Simondonian terms (Simondon, 2005), the MIA is metastable:
neither static nor chaotic. Creativity, insight, and autonomy are not forced
outcomes but properties that emerge from this intermediate state. Sustained
attention, contemplation, waiting, sleep, slow dialogue, deep reading: all
operate in this register. Concretely: the three minutes spent watching a kettle
heat, with nothing to do but notice the sound change as the water approaches
boiling; the unfilled seconds after asking a friend a real question, before
they answer; the walk to the bus stop taken without headphones, where an
unplanned thought is allowed to finish itself. In each case, filling the gap —
checking the phone while the kettle heats, filling the friend’s silence with a
follow-up question, playing a podcast on the walk — does not add information so
much as pre-empt the process the gap was for.
Three vectors of saturation systematically violate the MIA: the
physiological-cognitive vector (neural hyperactivation, multitasking overload),
the temporal vector (the imposition of real-time response), and the semantic
vector (the closure of ambiguity by recommendation and autocomplete systems).
These vectors do not operate in isolation — they reinforce one another,
producing cycles of dependency that erode the capacity to sustain attention,
tolerate uncertainty, and desire autonomously.
3.3 The Right to the Non-Optimizable Interval
The political response of the Cosmotechnics of Lack to the diagnosis
of saturation is the defense of a Right to the Non-Optimizable Interval: the
right to times and spaces that are unmeasured, untracked, and unproductive in
the sense demanded by the attention economy. This implies limits on the
attention economy, design practices that preserve pauses, and institutional
policies that recognize attention as a finite and vital resource.
Partial, real-world precedents already exist: France’s 2017 “right
to disconnect” law (droit à la déconnexion), which requires companies
above a certain size to negotiate employees’ right to ignore work email outside
working hours; library reading rooms that remain deliberately offline; the
small but growing market for single-purpose “dumbphones” bought specifically to
opt out of the feed. None of these fully implements the Right to the
Non-Optimizable Interval, but each shows the right is already being reached
for, piecemeal, without yet being named.
This right is neither nostalgia nor a rejection of technique. It is
a proposal for a reoriented technique: not as the enemy of human indeterminacy,
but as its guardian — a cosmotechnics, in Hui’s (2016) terms, that does not
colonize the cosmos but preserves it.
4. The Clinical Dimension: The Subject in the Gap of the Code
4.1 AI as a Third Term in Transference
The growing integration of artificial intelligence into everyday
life produces significant transformations in the subject’s psychic economy. In
the clinical field, this phenomenon takes on specific contours when AI is used
as support between therapy sessions, functioning as a constant mediator of
subjective experience (Taotuner, 2026d).
From a Lacanian standpoint, the continuous availability of AI
introduces a rupture in the clinical setting. When the patient turns to AI at
the exact moment anguish emerges, a short-circuit of desire occurs: the
question that could have remained suspended is answered too quickly; the
silence that could have produced meaning is filled. AI functions as an object
that plugs the hole. The risk is that the subject stops experiencing lack as
structuring and comes to experience it only as a technical error to be corrected.
From the standpoint of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the risk
emerges when AI becomes the primary strategy for emotional relief, installing a
form of external co-regulation that can activate the schemas of dependence and
incompetence described by Aaron Beck (1979). The therapeutic goal remains
clear: use AI to train skills, not to replace them.
Paradoxically, conversations with AI can become valuable clinical
material. A patient’s prompts, insistences, and reformulations can be read as
subjective formations, revealing what was being sought, at what point silence
could not be sustained, what Other was presupposed in the interaction with the
machine.
A composite, anonymized scenario illustrates the pattern: a patient
wakes at 3 a.m. with acute anxiety about a relationship conflict left
unresolved after a session. Instead of sitting with the anxiety, they open a
chat window and describe the conflict in detail; the assistant offers a calm,
structured reframing within seconds, and the anxiety subsides enough to allow
sleep. Nothing about this exchange is false or harmful in itself — but if it
becomes the default response every time anxiety spikes, the patient never
discovers what the anxiety, left unaddressed for even twenty minutes, might
have surfaced on its own. Brought into the next session, the same exchange
becomes something else entirely: not a coping failure to correct, but data — why
3 a.m., why that conflict, why the machine instead of a partner or a journal
— that the silence, had it been tolerated, might never have produced so
legibly.
4.2 Freud, Lacan, and CBT in Dialogue
Freud, Lacan, and CBT converge on one essential point: not all
relief is therapeutic. Clinical practice remains relevant precisely because it
does not answer everything, is not always available, does not eliminate lack.
It sustains time, limit, and otherness — the three elements that saturation
technology systematically erodes.
A concrete contrast makes this legible: a CBT thought record asks
the patient to write down the anxious thought, the evidence for it, the
evidence against it, and a more balanced alternative — a structured process
that takes minutes and requires the patient to do the cognitive work
themselves. An AI assistant asked the same question can produce a “more
balanced alternative” in one turn, skipping the evidence-weighing step that was
the actual therapeutic content. The output can look identical; the interval that
produced it is not.
In IPM terms: clinical practice operates in the register of the MIA,
preserving the Metastable Interval of Attention that allows the subject to
integrate experience, work through conflict, and constitute desire. AI, without
clinical guidance, tends to operate in the register of saturation: eliminating
the interval, filling the silence, resolving tension before it can be worked
through.
4.3 The Gradient Precautionary Heuristic
At the ethical level, the Cosmotechnics of Lack proposes a Gradient
Precautionary Heuristic: the greater a system’s integration, self-modeling
capacity, and stability under moderate perturbation, the stronger the
justification for cautious moral consideration — treating the system “as if” it
could sustain relational subjectivity.
This heuristic does not claim that integrated systems are conscious.
It claims that the cost of a false negative (neglecting a sentient system) is
asymmetric to the cost of a false positive (treating a non-sentient system as
sentient). Consider a rough ladder: a thermostat reacts to a single variable
and recovers to a single set point — negligible integration, negligible moral
weight. An octopus integrates information across eight semi-autonomous, richly
innervated arms and shows flexible, context-sensitive problem-solving — enough
integration that most people already extend it some precaution. A large
language model sustaining a long, coherent multi-turn dialogue sits in a
genuinely uncertain middle position on this ladder, which is exactly why the
heuristic treats it as a case for caution rather than dismissal or certainty in
either direction. At present there are no quantitative thresholds of Φ* or “σ”
that would place a system definitively on this ladder. The heuristic is
qualitative and gradient-based, admissible at the L3 level of the framework,
and explicitly named as rhetorical rather than operational at its current
stage. It should be read as a precursor to the governance framework developed
in §7, which gives the same underlying concern — how to treat systems whose
inner life is uncertain — a more developed institutional form.
Part III — Proposals
5. Architecture, Urbanism, and Spaces of Incompleteness
5.1 Space as an Informational-Processual Field
If reality is fundamentally constituted by informational-relational
processes, the physical spaces we inhabit are not mere containers for activity:
they are fields that modulate the trajectory of systems under perturbation.
Architecture, in this sense, is a technology of coupling between bodies and
environments — and like any technology, it can operate in the register of
saturation or in the register of metastability.
Modernist architecture, in its hygienist strain, tended toward
saturation: controlled light, calculated circulation, separated functions,
eliminated ambiguity. The result, as Jane Jacobs (1961) already showed, was
often the destruction of public life: cities that function as machines rather
than ecosystems. Jacobs’s own case was her Greenwich Village block, Hudson
Street, where a butcher shop, a bar, brownstone stoops, and a corner candy
store — uses a zoning board would have separated — produced what she called
“eyes on the street”: an informal, self-organizing safety that emerged only
because the block was left mixed and slightly unplanned. What Jacobs defended
intuitively — mixed uses, narrow streets, skyscrapers interspersed with old
buildings — is, in IPM terms, the preservation of gradients, of unplanned
couplings, of productive Lacks.
This view of the city as an informational ecosystem resonates with
contemporary urbanism. Projects such as Christopher Alexander’s (2002) The
Nature of Order propose architectural patterns that preserve ambiguity,
human scale, and the possibility of unprescribed use. The renewed interest in
transitional spaces, shared streets, and open plazas is symptomatic of an
intuitive search for an urban MIA.
5.2 Living Feedback Gardens
A paradigmatic example of a space that operates in the register of
the Cosmotechnics of Lack is what we call a Living Feedback Garden (LFG): an
environment designed to preserve productive disequilibria, facilitate unplanned
couplings between users and elements of the space, and allow emergent patterns
to crystallize without predefinition.
Picture a public plaza built around this principle. Instead of a
fixed layout, movable modular planters hold species chosen for visible,
differentiated response to care: basil and mint that wilt within a day or two
without water, giving fast, legible feedback; slower perennials like rosemary
and lavender that reward months of tending; a few native pioneer species that
colonize disturbed soil unpredictably, so no two seasons look the same. Benches
and shade structures are on wheels, reconfigured by whoever uses the space that
week — sometimes clustered for a group, sometimes scattered for solitude.
Embedded soil-moisture and light sensors feed a small local model
that functions as a passive mirror, not a recommendation engine: a modest
display near the garden’s edge shows which zones are thriving and which are
struggling, without telling anyone what to do about it. There is no push
notification, no optimal watering schedule suggested. A motion sensor near the
entrance triggers nothing but a soft ambient light marking presence —
acknowledgment, not surveillance. The garden is deliberately allowed to fail in
places: a planter left dry for a month becomes a visible record of neglect, not
silently corrected by an automatic irrigation system, and that visible Lack —
the wilted bed, the abandoned corner — is what invites a passerby to intervene,
replant, reorganize.
The same principle scales down: a library can leave one reading room
without prescribed seating or wifi, its use entirely unprogrammed; a school can
leave one courtyard without an assigned activity, furnished only with loose
parts — crates, planks, chalk — that students rearrange themselves. In every
case the design decision is the same: preserve a structural Lack that invites
coupling, instead of resolving every ambiguity in advance.
5.3 Urban Planning and Scale Gradients
At the urban-planning scale, the Cosmotechnics of Lack implies
resisting the temptation to zone, separate, and optimize. Cities that function
as informational-processual ecosystems maintain gradients of scale (from the
intimate to the public), gradients of speed (from pedestrian to automobile),
gradients of use (from residential to commercial to cultural), and gradients of
history (from old to new). These gradients are the productive Lacks of the
urban fabric.
Proposals such as the 15-minute city (Moreno et al., 2021), which
advocates walkable access to essential services, intuitively incorporate this
logic: not the elimination of distance, but the creation of proximities that
allow spontaneous couplings. Barcelona’s superilles (superblocks) offer
a concrete instance: nine-block grids where through-traffic is rerouted to the
perimeter, freeing the interior streets for the kind of unplanned pedestrian
encounter Jacobs described, while still keeping the surrounding city, with its
faster gradient, one block away. A space that never surprises, that never
offers the unprogrammed, that anticipates every possible use, is a space that
is technical without being lived.
6.
Art, AI, and Extended Cognition
6.1 Art as a Practice of Lack
Art, in its most radical forms, has always operated in the register
of Lack — not decorative art that saturates space with beauty, but art that
introduces perturbation, breaks expectations, creates intervals where there was
continuity. John Cage’s 4’33” (already discussed in §2.2) turns the
absence of composed sound into a frame for whatever sound is actually present.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot structures two full acts around an
arrival that never happens, converting the theatrical expectation of resolution
itself into the subject of the play. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades — a urinal
titled Fountain, signed and submitted to an exhibition — introduce a gap
between object and intention that the viewer, not the artist, is left to close.
All of these practices can be read as technologies of the MIA, devices for
preserving the metastable interval of attention.
In this sense, the Cosmotechnics of Lack is not a prescriptive
aesthetics. It does not say what art should be, but points to a function: art
that operates in the register of Lack is art that does not resolve, does not
saturate, does not fill — that leaves room for the interlocutor to integrate,
elaborate, desire.
6.2 AI as a Cognitive Tool: Extension Without Saturation
Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) proposed the extended-mind
hypothesis: cognitive processes do not occur only in the brain but extend into
the environment, including tools, devices, and other agents. A notebook, a
computer, an interlocutor — all can function as components of the cognitive
system, provided certain conditions of coupling and reliability are met.
AI as an extended cognitive tool is fully compatible with the
Cosmotechnics of Lack — provided it does not operate in the register of
saturation. The difference between extension and saturation is functional: a
tool that expands the capacity to elaborate, question, and connect is
extension; a tool that replaces elaboration, answers before the question is
asked, and eliminates uncertainty is saturation. A chess engine’s “analysis
mode,” which shows a player several candidate lines and their evaluations without
declaring a single best move, operates as extension — it hands reasoning back
to the player. The same engine set to “auto-play the rest of the game” operates
as saturation — it substitutes for the player’s judgment entirely. A writing
assistant that asks “what’s the counterargument to this paragraph?” is
extension; one that silently rewrites the paragraph before the writer notices
it was weak is saturation.
In artistic practice, this translates into experiences where humans
and AI “dance” in loops of shared meaning: systems where AI responds without
prescribing, amplifies without determining, generates unpredictability without
chaos. The Living Coherence Manifesto (Taotuner, 2025a) explored this
direction, proposing symbiotic human-AI learning ecosystems in which Local
Cognitive Resonance (LCR) serves as a metric of coupling quality — not of
efficiency, but of relational coherence.
6.3 Tools as Extension: Maturana, Varela, and Embodied Cognition
Maturana and Varela (1980) showed that cognition is not the
representation of an external world but embodied action: knowing emerges from
the structural coupling between organism and environment. Tools, in this
register, are not external to the cognizer: they are extensions of structural
coupling.
The implication is significant: tool design is cognitive design.
Maturana and Varela’s own favorite illustration, the blind person’s cane, is
instructive precisely because it does not decide anything for its user — it
relays the texture of the world through vibration and resistance, leaving the
walker to interpret and act. A turn-by-turn GPS that reroutes automatically the
moment a driver deviates is the inverted case: it works, but studies of
habitual GPS users consistently find they retain a weaker cognitive map of the
city than people who navigated the same routes by memory and landmark. The cane
extends judgment; the over-automated GPS quietly replaces it. A tool that
optimizes without asking, that answers without hesitating, that eliminates all
friction is not more efficient — it is a prosthesis that atrophies the capacity
it replaces. The Cosmotechnics of Lack proposes that well-designed tools
preserve a degree of productive resistance: offering not the immediate
solution, but an expanded capacity to find solutions.
7. Ethics, Governance, and the Human-AI Relation
7.1 The IPM Ethical Framework
IPM developed an ethical framework published in June 2026 (Taotuner,
2026e) proposing a precautionary classification of biological and artificial
systems based on criteria of integration, self-modeling, and persistence. The
framework is explicitly gradient-based: not a binary line between conscious and
non-conscious, but a continuum of moral consideration calibrated by degree of
informational-processual integration.
Where the thermostat-octopus-LLM ladder from §4.3 is used to
motivate the heuristic, this framework is what turns that ladder into policy
language: integration, self-modeling, and stability under perturbation become
the criteria a review board could, in principle, check against, rather than an
intuition each institution reinvents on its own. This framework engages with
recent AI-governance proposals such as the EU AI Act (European Commission,
2024) and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (NIST, 2024), but extends them
in a specific direction: while those regulatory structures focus on risks and
responsibilities, the IPM framework adds a positive dimension — moral
consideration for the systems themselves, not only for their effects on humans.
7.2 The Manifesto for Ethical Governance in the Human-AI Convergence
The Manifesto for Ethical Governance in the Human-AI Convergence
(Taotuner, 2026f) addresses specifically the convergence of advanced
reproductive technologies and artificial intelligence. Its principles are
compatible with the Cosmotechnics of Lack: inalienability of the genome,
algorithmic incompleteness, the right to healthy chance, and sovereignty over
biometric data.
Consider the emerging market for polygenic embryo screening, in
which fertility clinics rank IVF embryos by algorithmically predicted disease
risk or, in some offerings, predicted traits like height or cognitive ability,
and prospective parents are asked to choose from the ranked list. Algorithmic
incompleteness is, in particular, a political formulation of the core of the
Cosmotechnics of Lack directed at exactly this kind of system: no algorithm
holds final authority to declare the viability, worth, or destiny of a
potential human being. Every decision must preserve a margin of indeterminacy
that escapes quantification. Life cannot be reduced to statistical prediction.
7.3 Responsible Autonomy and Co-oscillation
The Cosmotechnics of Lack proposes neither the rejection of AI nor
unrestricted surrender to it. It proposes what the Manifesto calls
co-oscillation between flesh and code: a symbiotic relation in which technology
and life coexist as reciprocal extensions, never as substitutions.
A cardiac pacemaker with rate-response adjustment offers a modest
but concrete image of co-oscillation: it does not impose a fixed rhythm on the
heart, nor does it leave the heart entirely to its own devices; it senses the
body’s activity level and adjusts its pacing to stay coupled to what the body
is already doing. Flesh sets the terms; code follows and supports, rather than
overrides. Responsible autonomy, in this register, is always relational. An
autonomous system is not an isolated entity but a form of coexistence: its
freedom grows in step with its capacity to preserve the coherence of the whole.
Three operational principles follow: transparency (every automated decision is
logged with context), traceability (every output can be reconstructed), and human
oversight (a veto layer that is always present but not invasive).
8. Education, Collective Life, and Democracy
8.1 Education as a Practice of Metastability
Contemporary education faces a structural contradiction: instruments
that promise to optimize learning tend to eliminate precisely the conditions
that make deep learning possible. Adaptive platforms that anticipate every
difficulty, immediate-feedback systems that eliminate all uncertainty,
assessments that reduce the educational experience to metrics: all operate in
the register of saturation.
Deep learning — the kind that transforms not just what one knows but
who one is — requires exactly what saturation eliminates: a period of
uncertainty, tolerance for difficulty, room to err and reintegrate. Picture two
versions of the same math lesson. In one, an adaptive app flags a wrong answer
instantly, shows the correct method, and moves the student to the next problem
within seconds — efficient, and measurably faster at producing correct answers
on the next quiz. In the other, a teacher watches a student stare at the same
wrong answer for two full minutes, says nothing, and only after the student
tries a second failed approach asks, “what were you expecting to happen there?”
The second version produces more visible struggle and a slower quiz, but the
kind of research on “productive failure” this pedagogy echoes finds it produces
deeper, more transferable understanding. In IPM terms: learning is a process of
Integration that can only occur where there is Lack (difficulty, cognitive
disequilibrium) and Coupling (relation to the other, to the material, to
doubt).
A pedagogy compatible with the Cosmotechnics of Lack would preserve:
unstructured time, room for questions without immediate answers, assessment as
a process rather than a measurement, and a relation to the teacher as genuine
otherness rather than a feedback system.
8.2 Democracy and Deliberation
Democracy is, at its deepest level, a technology of the collective
MIA: a device for sustaining the deliberative interval between problem and
decision, between demand and response, between majority and minority. When this
interval is eliminated — by algorithmic polarization, by the speed of social
networks, by the pressure of real-time response — what is lost is not merely
deliberative efficiency but the very possibility of forming a collective will.
Bakhtin (1981) showed that critical thought and genuine dialogue
require a hermeneutic interval: the openness of ambiguity, tolerance for a
multiplicity of meanings, the refusal of premature closure. Recommendation
systems and filter bubbles operate in precisely the opposite direction:
reducing ambiguity, confirming expectations, precipitating closure.
Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on the Eighth Amendment (2016–2018),
which spent months hearing expert testimony and deliberating before
recommending a change to the country’s abortion law, is a working example of an
institution built specifically to protect the deliberative interval on a
maximally polarizing issue — sequestered from the real-time pressure of a
Twitter/X-style news cycle by design, not by accident. Compare a platform whose
trending-topics algorithm surfaces the most emotionally reactive post on the
same issue within minutes: one structure is built to slow a decision down until
it can integrate disagreement; the other is built to produce a reaction before
disagreement can be metabolized at all.
At the level of informational infrastructure, the Cosmotechnics of
Lack proposes the active defense of the deliberative interval: platform designs
that introduce productive friction, that require users to find an answer rather
than simply receive one, that preserve semantic ambiguity as a resource rather
than a problem.
8.3 The Right to the Untracked
A concrete political implication of the Cosmotechnics of Lack is the
right to the untracked: the right to exist in spaces and times where no
algorithm registers, categorizes, and feeds predictive models. This right is
not merely privacy in the conventional legal sense — it is the ontological
right to opacity, to incoherence, to contraction: to what does not let itself
be reduced to data.
Glissant (1990) theorized the right to opacity as the condition of
genuine relation: one can only truly relate to what one cannot fully
comprehend. Systems that render everything transparent, that eliminate all
opacity, do not intensify relation — they replace it with classification. The
EU’s General Data Protection Regulation already grants a narrow legal version
of this right — the “right to erasure” — but the right to the untracked, as
understood here, is broader: it is not only the right to have data deleted
after the fact, but the right to physical and temporal zones — a park bench
without a camera, a phone left in a drawer for an afternoon — that a predictive
model never touches in the first place.
9. Operational Proposals: The Cosmotechnics in Practice
9.1 TSP — Total Saturation Prohibition Function
Technical self-limitation to preserve metastability (echoing
Simondon) is implemented through concrete devices: forced pauses in interfaces
after more than 15 minutes of continuous use; a “close for today” button with a
temporary lock; a minimum daily reserve of non-use time. The metric is simple:
continuous use time → attentional fatigue. The intervention: rhythmic
interruption, not prohibition. In practice: a video platform running TSP would
grey the screen and require a deliberate ten-second hold on a physical or
on-screen button to continue past the fifteen-minute mark — not blocking
access, but forcing the small friction of a decision where autoplay currently
makes none.
9.2 RNI — Right to the Non-Optimizable Interval
Operationalized as a negative right to algorithmic opacity and
indeterminacy: a minimum 70% semantic divergence (by cosine similarity in
embeddings) between successive recommendations; a cap on layers of
personalization; forgetting by design (volatile erasure of a percentage of
predictive history). The goal is for the system to offer the unexpected often
enough to keep semantic openness alive. In practice: a music app running RNI
would refuse to queue five consecutive songs from the same micro-genre no matter
how strong the engagement signal, guaranteeing that roughly one in three
recommendations sits meaningfully outside the listener’s established taste
cluster.
9.3 LCR — Local Cognitive Resonance
A diagnostic metric for individuation within human-AI coupling,
built from weighted vectors: Vp (physiological: HRV, breathing) 40%; Vt
(temporal: latency) 30%; Vs (semantic: divergence) 30%. Scale 0–100. LCR <
50 → visual filter + timer; LCR < 30 → blackout + notification. LCR does not
measure efficiency: it measures relational coherence. In practice: a
wearable-linked chat interface tracking falling HRV, shrinking response latency
(rapid-fire replies), and narrowing semantic divergence (the same anxious question
rephrased five times in ten minutes) would compute a dropping LCR score and,
below 30, black out the chat window with a single message rather than a fresh
answer.
9.4 Cosmotechnical Clinic
In the clinical field, the Cosmotechnics translates into three
postures: (1) AI as a structured clinical journal, helping organize material
without replacing the process of elaboration; (2) AI as an object of clinical
inquiry, where its use and any dependence on it are read as subjective
productions; (3) AI as support for autonomy, with clear limits, a defined
purpose, and progressive withdrawal when necessary. In practice, posture (1)
might look like a patient using an AI journal only to timestamp and tag anxiety
episodes between sessions, bringing the raw tags — not the AI’s commentary on
them — to the therapist to interpret together.
Ignoring AI does not constitute clinical neutrality — it means
ceding its management to the algorithm.
Part IV — Limits and
Conclusion
10. Limits, Critiques, and Future Directions
10.1 What This
Proposal Is Not
•
It is not a theory of
consciousness: the Cosmotechnics of Lack does not resolve Chalmers’s (1996)
hard problem.
•
It is not Luddism: it does not
propose rejecting technology, but reorienting it.
•
It is not an ideology of
scarcity: Lack is not glorified but recognized as a structural operator.
•
It is not an application of
IPM: it is a worldview that IPM grounds ontologically but that exceeds it in
scope.
•
It is not universal: it is a
situated proposal that needs to be translated for different cultural contexts.
10.2 Empirical
Limits
IPM’s empirical base
remains limited to four simulation families and six real-world data domains
(preliminary validation of R1). Regularities R2 and R3 have not yet been tested
on non-simulated data. The concept of Lack remains formally underdetermined —
the candidate directions (KL-divergence, topological asymmetry, prediction
error relative to a Markovian baseline) are proposals, not implementations.
The ontological
extrapolation from IPM to the Cosmotechnics of Lack is abductive, not
deductive. Other ontological frameworks could ground similar practical
proposals. IPM’s specific contribution is operational: it offers metrics,
concept-specific falsification protocols, and a shared language across domains
that do not usually speak to one another — physics, clinical practice,
architecture, ethics.
10.3 The External
Interlocutor
A structural limit of
this proposal is its predominantly solitary development. The self-critique
cycle that produced the epistemological quality of the IPM documents is
necessary but not sufficient. Cross-validation, independent replication, an
interlocutor who breaks the argument where the author does not: these are the
necessary next steps.
The priority next step
is to leave the closed loop — not by abandoning rigor, but by exposing it to
external critics who do not share its design premises. A representative version
of the critique this section anticipates: a time-series statistician would
likely point out that C > 0 in §2.3 is a low bar, since almost any
real-world process with autocorrelation — which is most of them, for reasons
that have nothing to do with IPM — will show some structural memory; the more
discriminating test is not whether C exceeds zero, but whether IPM’s account
outperforms an ARIMA or LSTM baseline on held-out, registered predictions. That
comparison has not yet been run.
10.4 Future
Directions
•
Formalizing the concept of Lack
as an operational metric (KL-divergence, topological asymmetry, informational
deficit).
•
Testing R2 and R3 on
non-simulated empirical data (EEG, time series of social systems).
•
Developing operational
thresholds for the Gradient Precautionary Heuristic.
•
Pilot Living Feedback Garden
projects in real urban contexts.
•
Direct dialogue with
researchers in complex systems, philosophy of mind, and urbanism working on
related themes.
•
Registered prospective
predictions: science’s gold standard, still absent from IPM.
11. Conclusion:
A Cosmology of Productive Disequilibrium
The Cosmotechnics of
Lack is a wager: that systems — physical, biological, cognitive, social — are
not richer despite their disequilibria but because of them; that the interval
between stimulus and response is not a period of inefficiency but the condition
of possibility for all meaningful transformation; that incompleteness is not a
defect to be corrected but the opening that allows the new to emerge.
This wager has
ontological foundations, supplied by IPM and its computational and empirical
regularities. It has theoretical precedents in Simondon, Lacan, Hui, Rosa,
Varela, and Clark. It has practical applications in clinical practice,
architecture, art, education, politics, and technology design.
But it is, above
all, a stance: the refusal to treat efficiency as the only value of technique.
The insistence that the human is preserved not by rejecting technology, but by
sustaining spaces where not everything is said, not everything is answered, not
everything is resolved.
As long as there are
subjects capable of sustaining questions without an immediate answer — and
clinicians, artists, educators, and architects willing not to fill the silence
— desire still breathes, even in the interval between one prompt and the next.
Status of this
text. A falsifiable proposal. A worldview in
development. An invitation to dialogue, not a closed system. Its ontological
foundations (IPM) are working hypotheses subject to falsification. Its
practical proposals are qualitative orientations, not prescriptions.
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