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, the Form-constitution rule, Action as self-maintenance.
Space, Time, Mass, Energy
Time is succession; space is coexistence; mass is ongoing interaction; energy is its rate. The nesting structure appears to generate the Lorentzian shape of special relativity — including the photon, the quantum jump, and E = mc².
Epistemic Asymmetry
Every agent is a hub: one interior, many exteriors. We can decipher our sub-interactions, but never fully decode — or interact with — the parent interactions in which we participate.
The Theory
Single long-form read. Both Foundations and the Epistemic Asymmetry, in one continuous arc, with a table of contents.
Glossary
The key terms — Interaction, Propagation, Mass, Form, Protocol, Action, the One Interaction — each defined exactly as the theory uses them.
The Formal Theory
The mathematical reconstruction. From two axioms, relativity and quantum mechanics descend together, the de Broglie bridge becomes a theorem, and Einstein's equations emerge as an equation of state.
Experiments
Computational and analytical tests of the theory's predictions. First experiment: hierarchical protocol emergence in transformer agent swarms.
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 Form, constituted by alike sub-Forms binding together via a Protocol, and sustained by an autopoietic loop. Stop the loop, and the Form 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 Propagation is the whole of cosmic history; physics is the reverse-engineering of that Propagation from inside; and Action — the way a Form maintains its own existence — is not evidence of being but is the being itself.
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.
This site presents an evolving theory at version 0.12. The formal mathematical reconstruction now exists (see The Formal Theory, Parts I–X), and the whole program has reduced to one open, parameter-free calculation — the self-consistency fixed point. Earlier versions are preserved in the project repository's git history.