The Abstractionist’s Papers · Afterword
Contents
A.1 Ways of Seeing
A.2 The Boundary Model
A.3 The Bipolar Model
A.4 The Selection Model
A.5 The Reality Model
A.6 Closing Remarks
A.1 Ways of Seeing
An inventor walks in with something you’ve never seen, a circuit or an algorithm or a process, anything under the sun, and you have to find what makes it work before you can write a single word.
To you, the invention is a dark space, and sometimes the whole field is too. You know nothing about it, and you still have to do the job. Fake understanding and your client will fire you. The patent office will reject vague claims, and competitors will design around them.
Abstractionists model spaces so the models work in any context. We find and build the relationships that give rise to forms.
The work requires tools. I’ve made a number of them, over years of patent work and in building Natural Reality.
These tools now belong to a new discipline.
So you ask what the invention does, how it differs from what came before, which features matter and which are incidental. You hold it in front of you until what’s essential shows itself. Then you write claims that describe it at the right level of abstraction, broad enough to have value and specific enough to defend.
Along the way you learn to see in different ways, which is to say you build models. Good models work anywhere. What explains an invention can also explain a marriage, a market, a mind. It’s what lets you work in the dark.
Four models form the basic toolkit:
- The Boundary Model defines what things are.
- The Bipolar Model shows how things move.
- The Selection Model shows how things evolve.
- The Reality Model shows how things emerge.
Each model adds what the previous one lacks.
A.2 The Boundary Model
The Boundary Model defines what things are. It draws distinctions.
The figure shows two entities, A and B, separated by a boundary. You look at a space, draw a line, and now you have categories.
Is this animal a mammal or a reptile? Is this act legal or illegal? Is this person a friend or a stranger? Is a virus alive? Every question like this invokes the Boundary Model.
The gray zone marks where classification gets hard. A platypus has fur and produces milk, and it lays eggs. Where does it go? The boundary depends on which features you prioritize. Someone who cares most about reproduction draws the line in a different place from someone who cares about fur.
This is a common form of thinking. Most problem-solving has to start here. You define your terms, categorize the situation and sort things into boxes. Dictionaries work this way. Scientific classification works this way. Medical diagnosis works this way.
You’re deciding what things are, and that’s all. The classifications matter, though, because you act on them. Draw a line between friend and enemy, and action follows.
A.3 The Bipolar Model
The Bipolar Model shows how things move. It introduces dynamics through opposition.
The figure shows A and B as a yin-yang. They’re in tension, each containing a seed of the other, neither stable without its opposite. The boundary between them curves and flows. There’s movement now.
Look around and you see polarization everywhere. Supply and demand. Liberal and conservative. Attraction and repulsion. Action and reaction. Hot and cold. Tension and release. Breathing in and out. Wherever two forces appear to oppose each other, the Bipolar Model applies.
This goes further than drawing boundaries. You’re describing a mechanism. A thermostat works as heating and cooling signals oppose each other. A market works as buyers and sellers push in different directions. Your body weight works as energy in and energy out compete.
Most arguments and stuck situations involve people who see only one pole. The person who sees both poles and understands their interaction has a more complete picture.
The model has limits. It shows forces in balance at a moment without showing how that balance evolves.
A.4 The Selection Model
The Selection Model shows how things evolve. It wraps the bipolar dynamic in a cycle.
The figure shows the yin-yang from before, now surrounded by four operations, Interaction, Variability, Selection and Accumulation. Things interact, producing variability. Some variants persist while others decay. You see what survives.
In the natural world, species interact with environments, vary through reproduction, face selection through survival and mating, and accumulate successful traits over generations.
The same cycle operates beyond biology. Languages, technologies, and institutions all evolve. Anything that persists against decay, anything that competes for continuation, follows this.
Things adapt within a space. The model doesn’t ask where the space came from or how its rules might change. For that, you’ll need more.
A.5 The Reality Model
The Reality Model shows how things emerge. It handles layered spaces.
What you observe passes through a space decomposition prism, which splits it into several Natural Spaces, labeled n-1, n, and n+1. Each space runs its own selection cycle. The yellow triangles mark Incoherence (Δ), the jump in impedance from one space to the next.
Chapter 3 used this model for the mind, with a Base Layer handling sensory input and motor output, a General Reality Layer holding general knowledge, and a Self-Reality Layer organizing identity and core beliefs. Each layer follows its own rules.
The Reality Model also explains how new Natural Spaces emerge as Incoherence accumulates, and it sorts what we observe into physical, biological and cognitive layers, which are layers of our interpretation.
Incoherence is where novelty comes from. It’s the fourth kind of change, beyond the constructive, destructive and neutral interactions, a move off the plane of a space. When Incoherence accumulates past a threshold, processes reorganize, and where it harmonizes, the new organization lasts.
A.6 Closing Remarks
The Boundary Model is ancient. We have been classifying since we could speak. The Bipolar Model shows up in every culture that noticed opposition. The Selection Model is over a century and a half old and still being extended.
Natural Reality applies the fourth model and adds one thing.
The discovery that meaning and happening are orthogonal.
It’s the largest abstractionist job I’ve attempted.
Years ago, long before The Papers, I’d tell my friends that the work we do goes beyond law or engineering, even beyond patents. I couldn’t say what it was.
It all came together when I started working on reality, and suddenly decades of patent practice turned into something else entirely.