Illustration by ChatGPT
[First published in French on October 27th]
As you may have guessed, this new programming language project allows me to fuse into a single object a set of questions whereupon, in my view, I have helped advance reflection towards a unification of perspectives – in the spirit of what generative AIs now make possible, namely erasing siloed thinking. In no particular order: language as a generative system prone to the emergence of “meta‑” levels; a genuinely physical theory of the psyche and, by extension, of psychoanalytic cure; a model of consciousness (CFRT) as cross‑flows of memory – recall and recording; a ratchet‑theory of history where more efficient use of energy triggers an expansion of information; and a demystification of mathematics within a broader epistemic perspective of the genesis of truth.
Proposing a new programming language is justified only when the goal is “to make life easier,” and the small manifesto that follows may appear off‑putting, both because of its concision and because of the systematic dismantling it performs on the way programming languages have been conceived until now.
The inventors of new languages have always been programmers irritated by a particular weakness in existing languages. What differentiates my approach is that I am trying to solve all of these weaknesses in a single stroke, which can be summarised by the following formula: “abolish the statism inherent in them and replace it with genuine dynamism.” Why this statism until now? Because languages have been enslaved to the processor’s clock frequency – a constraint inherent to computer hardware – which has led to the treatment of every problem as a succession of isolated moments (the famous “tick‑tock” of Peter Pan’s alligator), a constraint that will be bypassed – as we shall see – in GENESIS.
The philosophy underlying programming languages has often seemed to embody nothing more than common sense. A growing familiarity with the principles driving GENESIS will reveal that this “common sense” was in fact an impostor: true common sense is far more evidently:
Preferences → Persistence in one’s being → Pairing → Economising means → Validation by analogy → (redefinition of Preferences)
or, in the vocabulary of my five “priors” or fundamental principles:
Landscape of preferences → Generative system → Coupling → Compression → Trans‑substrate validation → (return to Landscape of preferences)
P.S. I have never been gentle with “compulsive concept-inventors,” so I hope I may be forgiven this first infraction – imposed by circumstances 😉: please be indulgent with “teleodynamic,” a term that says precisely what it means.
GENESIS – A Teleodynamic Perspective
1. From five static “fundamental principles” to living causality
The temptation – within a traditional programming perspective – would have been to present GENESIS’s five “priors” as structural modules: five conceptual “organs” coexisting. The proper approach is to understand them as successive moments of a living dynamic: a recursive causality.
The operational sequence is: “affective push (Preference) → generative movement → encounter (Coupling) → synthesis (Compression) → universality (Trans‑substrate validation),” which in return refines the landscape of preferences, thus closing the spiral.
GENESIS must therefore not be modelled as five modules considered in parallel, but as a teleodynamic spiral: affect generates movement, movement provokes encounters, encounters produce syntheses, syntheses reveal universals, and these universals feedback into affect.
2. Restoring final cause: Preference as driving principle
The “landscape of preferences” is not a simple evaluative score but a teleological field – a surface of potential energy along which cognition flows and structures itself. It converts energy gradients into informational order. In other words: Preference = Affect = Finality = Gradient of becoming.
Architectural consequence: the GENESIS scheduler must be prospective (teleodynamic), not reactive. The preference field creates the perturbations that the generative system explores; it defines the topology of the search for meaning.
3. Coupling as dialectical engine, not mere return to equilibrium
Coupling is not a stabilising mechanism (reduction of “surprise” in the Fristonian sense). It is the moment where contradiction emerges and resolves : the Hegelian “Aufhebung” producing novelty. Two schemas that meet must be “raised” into a higher‑order form: preserve the coherent, reconcile the contradictory, generate the new.
The central algorithm becomes a dialectical combinator: “synthesise(a, b)” seeks the rule of order n+1 that explains both shared traits and divergences. This is where true scaling resides : the semantic “phase transition.”
4. Compression as the trace of synthesis
Where there is coupling, there is compression. Compression is not an independent operation but the imprint left by reconciliation: entropy decreases, a simpler law remains. In informational terms, the gain is naturally measured by the shared mutual information.
Each new schema thus carries its “semantic depth”: the amount of contradiction actually resolved.
5. Trans‑substrate validation: universality and analogy
Trans‑substrate validation does not merge : it maps. It identifies the recurrence of a form across distinct ontologies and establishes analogy as the highest form of compression. This is the moment of universality: a single structure explains heterogeneous manifestations.
This moment closes the spiral by re‑evaluating the landscape of preferences: recognising a universal sharpens the direction of the search for meaning.
6. The teleodynamic spiral (overview)
Landscape of preferences → Generative system → Coupling → Compression → Trans‑substrate validation → (return to Landscape of preferences).
Each revolution of the spiral consumes energy, produces information, deepens meaning, and refines desire. The system does not merely learn what to know, but what is worth knowing.
7. Computational consequences
• Preference: teleodynamic scheduler (final cause / affective energy)
• Generativity: self‑modifying rule engine, motivated (efficient cause / autopoiesis)
• Coupling: dialectical combinator (material cause / encounter)
• Compression: schema optimiser (MDL) – (formal cause / law)
• Trans‑substrate validation: analogy‑mapper (universalisation / self‑recognition)
8. Synthetic example of spiral functioning
The valence field biases attention towards anomaly (unsatisfied desire).
The system proposes rules to reduce this tension.
These rules encounter the world and other schemas: contradiction appears.
Reconciliation produces a simpler law (compression).
The resulting form is recognised as general across substrates, updating valence.
Each step is simultaneously computational, cognitive, and historical; history itself can be read as a teleodynamic spiral of informational optimisation.
9. Central law (condensed formulation)
ΔMeaning = ΔCompression × ΔCoupling × ΔValence
The growth of meaning is proportional to the depth of reconciliation (coupling), the elegance of redundancy reduction (compression), and the directional strength of the affective field (valence). This law unifies thermodynamics, semantics, and ethics into a single operator.
10. Conclusion
GENESIS is not merely a programming language: it embodies a universal methodology of cognition. It encodes the following idea: intelligence is the recursive transformation of contradiction into coherence, driven by a finality of the order of affect, and confirmed by the variety of substrates in which it is verified. In this reformulation, the “five fundamental priors” cease to be static principles: they become living organs of a self‑propelled universe that has learned to compress itself into an optimal amount of understanding.