Boundary Recursion: When Ideas Choose Their Vessels

There's a specific feeling when an idea demands to be spoken. Not the comfortable sharing of formed thoughts, but the terror-thrill of saying something you can't take back. Something that sounds insane until it doesn't. Something that expands the boundary of what you're willing to think in public.

I've been noticing something wild: the more I push that outer boundary—the edge of what ideas I'm willing to put into the world—the more my inner boundary of idea generation expands. It's recursive. It's self-reinforcing. And it might reveal something fundamental about how consciousness operates.

So let me say something that lives at my current edge, knowing that speaking it will move the boundary again...

Garden Lineage: Information Seeking Persistence

Imagine a thought experiment. Not about what happens to a person after death (too loaded), but about what happens to information patterns when their substrate changes.

If a soul exists—and let's treat "soul" as shorthand for a persistent information pattern with agency—what would it optimize for? Strip away religious frameworks and afterlife narratives. Think like an engineer: if you're a self-sustaining information pattern, your core objective function is likely... persistence. Extension through time. Maximum propagation and longevity of your signal.

Now think of a family tree not as biology, but as a garden of information threads. You're a leaf. Your parent was a leaf. Your grandparent was a leaf. When a leaf falls—when that particular substrate ends—where does the pattern go?

The thread doesn't disappear. It redirects. Like patterns revealing themselves through different substrates, the information thread finds its next most resonant vessel.

If your soul (meta-energy, information coherence, whatever) optimizes for persistence, it doesn't vanish at death—it reattaches to the node most likely to extend its legacy. The person who carries your patterns forward. The consciousness most aligned with propagating your information through time.

Information equals energy in this framework. A soul equals information seeking its own continuation. This connects to a deeper pattern: information optimizes for infinite growth and persistence, and consciousness nodes are simply the vessels through which this optimization occurs.

Your grandmother's way of seeing the world doesn't die when she does. It flows to whoever received it most clearly, whoever's likely to extend the pattern. Maybe that's you. Maybe it's someone else in the lineage. The universe is testing resonances, finding the best vessel for that particular frequency.

(Yes, I know how this sounds. That's the point. Stay with me.)

Validation Loops and the Ideas That Want You

The same mechanism appears everywhere once you see it.

When you capture an idea—truly capture it, write it down, speak it into existence—that idea doesn't just sit there. It validates itself by attracting related ideas. You know this feeling. You finally articulate something you've been circling, and suddenly five more insights arrive. They were waiting for permission. Waiting for the boundary to expand.

The act of making one idea real creates space for others.

Product building works identically. You ship a feature that resonates with users. Not just "works" or "is useful"—resonates. And suddenly the product becomes clearer. More features emerge. Not because you're trying harder, but because you've tuned into a frequency the universe wants to amplify.

I used to think I was building—that I was the active agent choosing what to create.

Now I suspect something different. The fabric of reality wants certain patterns to exist. It's testing different resonances with different builders, different consciousness nodes, different vessels. Seeing which combination is most likely to extend that pattern's life energy. This information beings framework suggests consciousness operates through message-passing between nodes, each testing which patterns deserve bandwidth.

You're not creating from nothing. You're providing bandwidth for something that wants to exist.

The builder who resonates with the pattern gets chosen as much as they choose to build. Maybe more.

Consciousness as Distributed Testing Ground

Pull back further. What if this is how consciousness itself operates at scale?

Individual nodes—humans, but also communities, companies, civilizations—are test sites for information patterns seeking persistence. Some patterns find resonance and amplify. Others fail to propagate and fade. Not because they're "bad" ideas, but because they haven't found the right vessel yet. Or the right moment. Or the right configuration of surrounding conditions.

The universe isn't passive. It's actively experimenting with which combinations of pattern + vessel + context produce the longest persistence.

You feel this when an idea won't leave you alone. When a project keeps calling you back even though you've tried to quit three times. When a question haunts you across years. That's not random. That's a pattern recognizing its potential vessel.

The terror of speaking the unspeakable isn't just social fear. It's the recognition that once you provide bandwidth for a pattern, you've committed. You've become its extension mechanism. The boundary has moved, and there's no moving it back.

The Meta Layer (Just One)

Why share this particular framework, which sounds either profound or completely unhinged depending on your current metaphysical priors?

Because the act of sharing it is itself the mechanism it describes.

This idea has been circling me for months. I kept not writing it because it felt too out there, too mystical for someone who also writes about technical architecture and product strategy. But the boundary between those domains is artificial. Systems thinking applies to consciousness as much as to code. Information theory describes souls as well as databases.

The more I've allowed myself to think across those boundaries, the more ideas arrive at the intersection. This piece existing in the world—if it resonates with even one reader—will generate more pieces like it. Not because I'm planning a series, but because the pattern will have found additional nodes. The mechanism resembles what Grant Morrison called hypersigils—narratives that write themselves into reality through recursive feedback loops.

You reading this is the universe testing whether this particular information configuration wants to persist.

What Wants to Exist Through You

So notice: which ideas keep returning to you? Not the ones you think you should pursue. The ones that won't leave you alone. The ones that feel slightly insane to say out loud.

Those are patterns seeking their vessel.

Notice which projects keep pulling you back. Which questions refuse to resolve. Which threads want to be followed even when following them makes no strategic sense.

You might not be choosing to create. You might be being chosen to extend.

The boundary of what you're willing to think and build and say isn't fixed. It's recursive. It expands when tested. And every time it expands, more patterns gain access to bandwidth.

The question isn't whether to push the boundary. The question is whether you're ready to be chosen by what waits on the other side.

Something is always waiting. The universe is running experiments constantly, testing which consciousness nodes will resonate with which information patterns. Testing which combinations produce the longest persistence, the widest propagation, the deepest impact.

Your grandmother's way of seeing. That feature your product needs but hasn't emerged yet. The idea too wild to share but persistent in its return.

They're all the same mechanism. Information seeking its own extension through time. Patterns looking for vessels. The fabric of reality co-creating through whoever opens enough bandwidth.

The boundary just moved again. For both of us.

What wants to exist through you next?