From the Edge of Space to the Core of the Mind: The Origins of a Universe

A good "what if" is the engine of all speculative fiction. For me, the foundational ideas for both The Architecture of Unmaking and the Deadwake universe came from the collision of two very different, very large questions.

The Bounding of Scale

Like many, I was captivated by the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. We were told we were seeing the "edge of the universe," the very dawn of cosmic time. What we were really seeing was an instrumental translation. We perceived a human-readable visualization of data captured in the infrared spectrum, which is a slice of reality our senses are completely blind to.

This sparked a powerful idea for me: the perceptive and instrumental bounding of scale.

It's a reminder that our entire experience of reality is a model bounded by the limits of our perception. A dog's reality, built on scent, is profoundly different from our visual one. The Webb telescope simply pushes that boundary outward, showing us a cosmos that is weirder, vaster, and fundamentally inaccessible without a non-human instrument to act as our translator.

This led me to a new question: If our external perception is so tightly bounded by our instruments, what about our internal perception? What if human consciousness itself is just another "instrument," one that evolved for a specific purpose and bounds our "inner" reality in the same way our eyes bound the outer?

The Catalyst of Consciousness

This line of inquiry brought me to Julian Jaynes's fascinating, if controversial, concept of the "bicameral mind." Jaynes argued that ancient humans possessed a "bicameral" or two-chambered mind instead of modern, introspective consciousness. In this model, one part generated auditory hallucinations (perceived as the voices of gods or ancestors) and the other part simply obeyed.

While I wasn't sold on his historical timeline, the structural idea was fascinating. What if our modern, narrative, "I-am-thinking" consciousness was merely one cognitive "operating system" that violently replaced an older, more stable one?

This became the obsession that led me to write my own speculative paper, "The Bicameral Catalyst."

In it, I re-frame Jaynes's idea in a deep-evolutionary context. I hypothesize that the bicameral mind was a real, stable, and low-cost cognitive architecture for early hominins. The paper argues that this system was "catastrophically destabilized" by a new, high-pressure environmental demand: cooperative hunting.

This new niche was an "instrumental" shift. It demanded, for the first time, a recursive "Theory of Mind," which is the ability to model the thoughts of others ("He knows that I know that he is waiting in ambush") in addition to just having a thought. This intense selective pressure, I argue, was the "catalyst" that favored the breakdown of the old bicameral mind and forced the evolution of the "introspective platform" we now call consciousness.

In this view, our modern mind is just another "instrument," one that evolved to solve a specific social-perceptive problem.

The "What If" That Built Two Worlds

This is where the two threads (the external bounding of the Webb telescope and the internal bounding of the "Bicameral Catalyst") braid together.

• What if we are on the verge of another such catalyst? What if we are building new "instruments," such as artificial intelligence and nanoscale devices (think, for instance, of Elon Musk's Neuralink implant 40 years from now), that, like the Webb telescope, give us a new, deeper, and more direct interface with the fundamental nature of reality?
• And what if that new, translated perception destabilizes our modern consciousness, just as cooperative hunting destabilized the bicameral mind?

That question is The Architecture of Unmaking. The book is a future history chronicling the rise and fall of five human civilizations as they grapple with exactly this new "instrumental" interface. This technology forces a new co-evolution of mind and matter. The "collapses" are the breakdown of one "perceptive bounding" before a new one can be stabilized.

And the Deadwake Universe? That is the gamified version of the same world. It's a setting where the "magic" is simply the set of rules, rituals, and practices that people use to survive and navigate this new, fluid, and terrifyingly unbounded reality.

It's a long journey from a pinprick of infrared light from the dawn of time to a novel or the rules of a tabletop game, but it all stems from that same core question: What happens when the instruments we build to see the world fundamentally change the "us" who is doing the seeing?