From Mass to Form
A theory of interaction as the single substance of reality.
Reality is not made of things that occasionally interact. It is made of interactions. Things — agents, Forms, selves — are the stable patterns that emerge inside the interaction substrate. From the atomic event of mark-and-awareness to the One Interaction that contains everything we can observe, the theory unfolds a single ontology with no other primitives.
The shape of the theory
Foundations
The single-primitive ontology, the interaction script, the rooted-tree structure with Mass at the leaves and the One Interaction at the root, Forms as self-maintaining agents.
Epistemic Asymmetry
Every agent is a hub: one interior, many exteriors. We can decipher our sub-interactions, but never fully decode the parent interactions in which we participate.
The Theory
Single long-form read. Both foundations and the epistemic addition, in one continuous arc, with a table of contents.
Glossary
The key terms — Interaction, Mass, Form, Protocol, Action, the One Interaction — each defined exactly as the theory uses them.
Why a new theory?
Most philosophies of nature start with objects and explain interactions as something objects do. Interaction Theory inverts this: only interactions are real. Anything that looks like a stable object — a particle, a cell, a mind, a society — is a pattern of pole-positions in a network of interactions, sustained by an autopoietic loop. Stop maintaining the loop, and the pattern dissolves back into the interaction-potential.
The theory makes a small number of strong commitments: there is no universal spacetime (each interaction has its own local spacetime, nested in its parent's); awareness is primitive and constitutive (an interaction does not exist until its receiving pole becomes aware); the universe itself is a single interaction whose internal protocol is the whole of cosmic history; and the science of physics is the reverse-engineering of that protocol from inside.
These commitments place Interaction Theory in conversation with Whitehead's process philosophy, Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, Sorkin's causal sets, Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis, and Wheeler's "it from bit." It draws on those lineages without belonging to any one of them. It is its own theory.
Read on. Start with the full theory, or jump straight to Foundations (v0.1).
This site presents an evolving theory at version 0.2. Future versions will add the formal mathematical skeleton, the dynamic equation for the decay/emergence balance, and the still-open questions listed in §11 of the Foundations.