About this site

What this is

Space Immanence is a working paper in speculative metaphysics: philosophy about what exists and how it fits together. It asks whether the hard problem of consciousness and the puzzle of spacetime emergence share a container assumption. Its wager, graded speculative, is that spacetime and consciousness may be complementary appearances of self-referential structure. It is a proposal, not a proof: claims are graded by confidence, gaps are named, and criticism is invited.

The site hosts the working paper, its academic edition, a discussion of how patterns of experience change (cohering), and the Aperture Framework for comparing systems. It also includes a research agenda with conditions that could count against the claims and objections and replies. Applied work includes the AI design principles, the Swarm Instrument (a pre-registered programme measuring groups of AI agents, with initial data), the Coherence Without Contact study design, and instructions for AI readers.

Keeping the arguments, evidence, and revisions together lets readers identify the claim they want to discuss and follow how it changes.

How the project is assessed

As a research contribution, the project succeeds if its diagnosis withstands expert criticism and a pre-registered result supports a prediction. It fails if the studies return null results and the core claims do not survive criticism. As a practice, it succeeds if this way of seeing makes life less burdensome for those who use it. That practical standard does not require academic approval and, the author reports, is already being met privately.

A practical benefit never confirms the metaphysics. Each empirical study is identified in advance with the reading of the framework it tests. Research contributions and personal benefits are assessed by their respective standards.

Author

Cobus Kok leads AI product development at a Fortune 500 company. The AI design principles draw on work in consumer AI, especially e-commerce and travel, which supplies the examples used here.

He writes essays on intelligence, consciousness, and reality under the name Aperture/I at cobuskok.com. Several essays led to this proposal; they are listed under Provenance.

Education: a Master of Advanced Management (Technology Management & Entrepreneurship), Yale School of Management, 2015; an MBA (Strategy & Finance), University of Cape Town, 2014, with an exchange term at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business; an Honours degree in Philosophy, 2004, and a BA in Value and Policy Studies, 2003, both from Stellenbosch University.

Prior academic work includes a 2016 paper, ‘The capacity of information technology for business model innovation and holistic value creation’ (International Journal of Complexity in Leadership and Management), which applied artificial neural networks for cluster segmentation.

This is independent philosophical work. The views are the author’s own and do not represent any current or former employer.

What needs review

Which claims are wrong, and what evidence or argument would show that?

Criticism is welcome from philosophers of mind and physics, scholars of contemplative traditions, cognitive scientists, AI researchers, designers, and anyone who can identify a problem with a claim.

Responses and version history live on the critique page.

Provenance

The Aperture/I essays developed these ideas before the working paper. The closest precursors are Why the Hard Problem Was Hard (an early account of the container assumption), The Wrong Question (an alternative way to pose the problem), and Memory is Everything (a personal account that led to the temporal-continuity criterion). These are preliminary essays. The formal argument and graded claims are in the working paper.

Method & AI provenance describes how the author uses AI to produce and review the work, including checks intended to prevent fluent writing from being mistaken for evidence.

Contact

Serious critique, suggested reading, and corrections: .

Other channels: cobuskok.com (Substack essays).

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cobuskok.

How to cite

Preprint mirrors on PhilArchive (and, where relevant, PhilSci-Archive) will be linked here when registered. Until then, please cite the working paper URL directly.

On this site

This site uses no cookies, advertising, cross-site tracking, or third-party resources. Vercel’s web analytics collect cookieless, first-party aggregate page counts, and its speed insights collect cookieless page-loading timings for the same pages, with no personal data or fingerprinting in either. The site is hand-built HTML.

The typefaces use the system serif stack: Iowan Old Style, Palatino, and Georgia. The text and hand-built SVG illustrations are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, with attribution to Cobus Kok. The Markdown source is planned for release as a public repository.