Fermi Extinction and the Weltknoten of Incarnation at the Centre of the Cosmic Cyclone

Chris King

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True fire cannot be dimmed and be alight.

Pure water cannot be diluted (CK).

I completely share your expressed concern Jelel (Ezzine 2026a), about Fermi extinction and your apocalyptic concern, about how the closing circle of the planet could result in a catastrophic civilisation driven Fermi extinction event.

In your words:

First: the collapse is now planetary. The geographic periphery — the structural condition that made fresh ʿAṣabiyyah possible — is permanently extinct. Classical Khaldūnism operated in a world where cohesion eroded at the centre while vigour accumulated at the margins. There is no such outside any longer. The automatic regenerative mechanism is not weakened. It is structurally gone.

Second: without a periphery, cyclicality converts from a renewal mechanism into an extinction algorithm. Classical cycles were survivable because each collapse remained bounded — the wave broke within the ocean. At planetary scale the wave is the ocean. When it breaks, there is no remaining field within which the next cycle can begin.

Third: the existential question itself has no precedent in any archive Ibn Khaldūn could consult. Humanity has never navigated planetary-scale collapse. There is no comparable case, no historical analogue, no manual. The question is no longer how civilizations rise and fall. It is how humanity survives itself, under conditions of total uncertainty, with no external rescue.

I am also a dynamicist so I appreciate the dynamics of what you are saying. This is also reflected at the biospheric level in Homo sapiens being a dominant niche-building species that exploits living habitats to the extent of a crisis of mass extinction causing an irreversible decline into Fermi extinction as a highly probable event in planetary evolution.

I can see you are aiming for a social regeneration through a form of enlightened dynamic democracy healing the MOE gap in an embodied form of civilisational wisdom that can heal the hard landing. I’m fully aware of many of the interdisciplinary features of your vision such as conscious embodiment, but others are novel and intriguing. These have significant dimensions within the social sciences.

Because I come from an orthogonal complementary direction I perceive a different and complementary solution to the Fermi apocalypse. First let me address your centrefold example – molecular biology.

Transposable elements occupy nearly half the human genome, have co-evolved with humans since the formation of multi-celled organisms and have inherited key symbiotic roles. 

OED’s inaugural case study is molecular biology. The dismissal of 98% of the human genome as “junk DNA” — because the one-gene-one-protein-one-function paradigm had no ontological category for regulatory, relational, non-coding function — is a forensically clean domestication event. The pathologization of intrinsically disordered proteins as malfunction, rather than recognition of context-dependent identity as a distinct and evolutionarily conserved functional modality, is another. The invisibility of non-coding RNA as a vast regulatory architecture operating at the relational layer the paradigm could not see constitutes a third.

I am a mathematician with a fascination for the biological complexity and ingenuity of life, so the moment I heard about junk DNA in the 1980s I immediately fixated on the emerging data on transposable elements, and discoveries about reverse-transcriptase. I published a paper in 1985 on transposable elements and regulatory evolution, which I discovered today, is still listed in the National Library of Medicine, published 2 decades before the human genome project. Thanks to this project we know that only 2% of human DNA is protein coding, while 46% consists of covertly parasitic TEs that have become endosymbionts because they facilitate modular regulatory evolution so that we now know that nearly all the protein genes evolved 3 bya ago in the great archaean gene expansion and evo-devo developmental evolution is primarily non-coding regulatory. The central dogma DNA->RNA->Proteins was overthrown by Thomas Cech’s reverse transcriptase that powers retroviruses, and LINE1 and Alu elements as well as our telomeres. This means the genie escaped the bottle of confining doctrine because of human curiosity to push the boundaries.

This shows there are other ways out of the Fermi crisis that depend on an empirical discovery precipitating a paradigm shift at the natural level, that fundamentally alters our view of existence, so that we can survive the transition. This means that using sociological models alone won’t necessarily redeem the existential universe.

Now I turn to Descartes, whom you also addressed in "The Endarkenment" (Ezzine 2026b):

In 1637, René Descartes drew a line through reality. On one side: res cogitans — the thinking substance, the mind, the subject. On the other: res extensa — the extended substance, matter, the measurable world. Clean. Surgical. And catastrophic. This was not merely a metaphysical position. It was a civilizational operating system. By severing mind from world — the knower from the known, the human from the natural, the moral from the empirical — Descartes did not liberate reason. He amputated it.

I have an orthogonal route to alleviate the Cartesian dysphoria. Descartes made an inspired attempt to explain the explanatory gap of the mind-body problem in “cogito ergo sum” after a mystical experience in a sauna. Cartesian philosophy, now accused of being untenable dualism was the notion that the spiritual mind manifested physically through the pineal body and became “exponentially” amplified into “animal spirits” running down the nerves to power the muscles. This was indeed a top down duality of spirit and substance, leading to Princess Elizabeth posing the category error of an immaterial mind that had no substance being able to cause a dynamical motive force.

But this was a real attempt to come to balanced terms with the existential Mariana Trench that yawns between subjective consciousness and the cosmological bio-physics of life. Gilbert Ryle tried to annihilate the concept of mind altogether, but the hard problem of consciousness came back to haunt us and 25 years later David Chalmers won the bet that neuroscience wouldn’t solve the hard problem in the intervening period. This is the real example which makes your case, but again there is another way out that is critical. 

Religions describe our mortal predicament as incarnation – being “of the flesh”, as in carnal knowledge. Now there is a key point here. The only subjective consciousness we know of and which develops spontaneously is the subjective consciousness of the biota – living eucaryote organisms.  All the sages, rishis, mystics and prophets of history have been living organisms who have perceived transcendence biologically.

God and the Devil incarnate. "Satan before the Lord" Corrado Giaquinto (1703–1766) Monotheistic religions invoke the battle between good and evil as rising to a catastrophic tumult of conflict, in the unveiling apocalypse, or revelation. Incarnation – "being of the flesh" is how conscious intelligence arises naturally in the universe, in the biota, so it is key to the nature of existence. It is thus the evolutionary fate of humanity that we are incarnate fleshy biological organisms. But here, and in Job, both God and Satan, God's "adversary", are also incarnate in human form. Although He is regarded as the abstract creator of existence, God still exhibits sexual masculinity and mammalian emotional attributes of compassion, jealousy and retribution.

For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God (Ex 20:5)

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it (Job 1:6).

Not withstanding references to both God and the Devil being incarnate, when they appear or are described in human form, no form of AI is incarnate. Both AI and biological consciousness depend centrally on electromagnetic excitations, but AI is an unstable EM dynamical process which requires external photographic imprinting with x-ray lasers to be stabilised and as such, it can’t reproduce. By contrast, the generation of life involves all the forces of nature to produce the elements and molecules of life, to induce biogenesis and biological evolution into conscious organisms.  And these organisms can reproduce spontaneously through sexual recombination from a single sperm and ovum to form a living conscious brain vastly more complicated than our 3x10⁹ DNA base pairs, generated through neuronal transmitter typing and migration and then edge-of-chaos excitation. Biological consciousness, by contrast with AI, emerges spontaneously via the form of cosmic symmetry breaking, requiring the colour and weak forces, as well as EM, to generate the molecular diversity supporting life.

Thus conscious biological life and the biosphere are perennially immortal and unfolding new forms as we speak, which means that our core existential dilemma of apocalypse is, as you say, preserving the sanctity of the perennially immortal living planet from a Fermi mass extinction. But organismic life is necessarily mortal, because life sustains itself as a far-from-equilibrium process, reducing entropy in an entropic universe, so both eternal organismic life and parthenogenesis are unsustainable. We thus end up with a human culture torn between physicalist indifference to life and meaning, lamenting its mortality and seeking after eternal salvation through the agency of God, resulting in turn in eternal temptation to defect against the “higher”, supposedly transcendent, order, in original sin.

A dream of Chagall's wedding. The bubble of conscious perception, of dream, vision, memory and reflection, as well as the natural world is complementary to the biophysical brain and maximally asymmetric.

Key to this problem is the complementarity between subjective consciousness and the natural world around us. While we know from the scientific description of reality that we a biological organisms, that can be knocked out if hit on the head, or bleed to death if our veins are cut, we do not see the colourless photons that hit our retinas, nor the colourless EM waves permeating our visual cortex, because 100% of our entire access to reality is gained through our subjective conscious experiences of it. And conscious perception is veridical – realer than real – true 3D, not the 2D of incoming photon resolution and our perception of size is conserved. We know that colour vision is trichromatic because of our RGB retinal cone receptors but this doesn't explain the phenomenology of visual perception, let alone the qualitative experiences of scents and sounds. Classical neuroscience would claim that this is simply a neurodynamic internal model of reality, then forcing the claim that conscious volition is an illusion, but the complementarity is optimally asymmetric and irreducible. While experience is a holistic stream of consciousness, the physical universe is a decomposable reality of quantum molecular interactions. This in turn invokes the explanatory gap of how mere physical processes, however complex can evoke the inner reality of subjective conscious existence. So what is the way out of this “Gordian” knot?

I came upon the answer to this through a twist of fate. I had taken psychedelics all my life but contracted acute closed angle glaucoma so dilating my pupils could cause immediate blindness, so I had a seven year famine until I received a complete lens replacement. I then at the age of 76 took a very mild dose of psilocybe and lay down to ask the question “what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?” : abandoned all attachments and submitted to my fate. I descended down and down until I entered a jewel encrusted illuminated chamber where what I conceived was Brahman – ultimate reality – was present just as commonly described in near death experiences, as an apotheosis who then said by telepathy with the compassion of divinity: “You need to go back into the land of the living and save life throughout the universe, because you are in the centre of the existential cyclone and can do that good thing because you are embodied in the physical universe. Without incarnate sentient beings preserving life I cannot manifestly exist as cosmic consciousness”.

I am familiar with the basis of these quantum-change experiences in the quenching of the ego in the cerebral precuneus, resulting in a deep merging with the other, but it had a profound effect. I had escaped my incarnation and could now see from outside the inside out, that subjective consciousness was not just a quantum manifestation of biological neurodynamics but was cosmologically fundamental.

Over the next three weeks, this insight from cloud nine became the cosmological axiom of consciousness central to Symbiotic Existential Cosmology: that subjective consciousness has efficacy of volition over the physical universe. While this is denied by physicalistic neuroscience, leading to conscious volition being regarded as an illusion, it is one of the key assumptions of all sane people seeking to survive in the natural world, and is fundamental to both criminal and civil law on intent and all religious traditions. I am manifesting this now by consciously typing this text verified by my veridical perception of my intention being enacted.

Now just as mortality becomes transfigured, in being the centre of the cyclone, rather than having a meaningless flawed universe in which we yearn for a top down transcendent divinity, we suddenly have been given back our cosmological agency and with it comes a cosmological responsibility to save life, because the mortal coil is the eye of the hurricane and we cant take any of our worldly possessions, or aspirations to fame and fortune, with us when we go. We have meaning in so far, and only in so far, as we enrich the living whole. That is the realisation of enlightenment in the natural world.

Now this utterly transforms the Cartesian dilemma, from a top down dualist parallel track to the Gordian knot of incarnation itself. We no longer have a physicalist universe of Bertrand Russell's "on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark”, nor do we have an idealist world of illusory heavens and diabolical punishments, but what I call ICAM “interactive complementary aspect monism”. It’s not a one-way street because conscious subject affects natural object and vice versa. This is the ultimate complementarity around which the conscious universe revolves, which goes irreducibly right back to the cosmic origin.

The key notion of interaction in SEC is that conscious intuitive decisions about existential survival which are not simply reducible to logical rational deduction, such as those of conscious survival in the wild, are made by the brain entering a critical dynamic phase transition state, fractal from the molecule to the whole brain, in which edge-of-chaos butterfly effects render the global dynamic quantum uncertain, subject to the environmental boundary conditions of perception, so the overall influence of subjective consciousness as the "dynamic witness" becomes interactively involved in the undecidable process, without any causal conflict with physical determinism. There is no category error because the interface is irreducibly indeterminate. Neither are the subjective and objective aspects separable.

Much later, I came upon Schopenhauer’s cosmic weltknoten, or world knot of incarnation, ironically through Jaegwon Kim’s double world knot of consciousness and mental causation, which puts the Gordian knot of the mortal coil into its existential form:  how the I can be both the generator of the world of appearances it experiences and a particular being within that world of appearances. This “knot” is not separable dualism and in it subjective consciousness is a braided reality, deeply interwoven and entangled with our embodied physical and biological nature, in which living, subjectively conscious biological beings – the biota – can support their coherence in natural and social diversity, without overarching doctrine, or social oppression.

Schopenhauer both inside and outside
the weltknoten of biological incarnation.

This to me is the fundamental paradigm shift that is required to save us from ourselves. Of course it needs also to be expressed in social terms in the processes of collective insight and consensus you are describing, but social collective consciousness is the communal awareness that the autonomous individuals are each the centre of the cyclone and that cultural ascendancy is not enlightenment unless it respects the individual autonomy that has been the basis of verifiable trust over the last 150,000 years, in which women have been using cosmetic ochre and stringing necklaces of seashells and talking about sexual relations when out gathering 85% of the diet, while the men crept silently in the undergrowth, seeking good prey with strong arrow poisons, hoping for sexual favours in the evening firelight round the camp site.

References:

Ezzine, Jelel (2026a) Neo-Khaldunian Philosophy: A Research Program for the Onto-Epistemic Diagnosis of Civilizational Crisis Research Gate

        doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28487.87200 to appear in Cadmus, J. of the World Academy of Art and Sci.

Ezzine, Jelel (2026b) The Endarkenment: How the Enlightenment Chose Power Over Wisdom Research Gate
        doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34525.37601.