Timothy Speed (2025)
Contextual Research Note The Physics of the Poor constitutes the ontological and epistemological core of the author’s long-term research corpus. First developed and published in the mid-2010s, the work introduces the Minimal Non-Object (MNO) framework and the associated submergence–indimergence–emergence cycle, which later function as foundational operators across the author’s analyses of consciousness, work, value, media, and social organization. Within the overall corpus, this book performs a generative rather than applicative role. It establishes a non-object-based ontology in which reality, subjectivity, and structure are not derived from material objects or information complexity, but from an explicitly theorized ontological gap. This move reframes classical debates in physics, consciousness studies, and philosophy by shifting the explanatory focus from entities to relations, thresholds, and structurally productive absence. Subsequent works—including Radical Worker, Speeds Work, and later legal-theoretical and socio-economic papers—apply and extend these operators to domains such as labor, welfare institutions, media systems, and neurodivergent cognition. Methodologically, the book exemplifies the author’s approach to Artistic Research and neurodivergent epistemology. Knowledge production is treated as embodied, recursive, and structurally entangled with lived experience, rather than as detached representation. The text therefore functions simultaneously as theoretical construction, methodological statement, and epistemic intervention, anticipating later critiques of simulation, functionalism, and purely representational models of intelligence and social order. This Author Accepted Manuscript version is provided for scholarly and research purposes. It differs from the commercially published book edition in layout, typesetting, and pagination and should be read as part of a larger, non-linear research corpus rather than as a standalone theory of consciousness or physics. About Book: Whoever possesses objects, products, things — is deemed valuable. Whoever possesses none — is deemed worthless. This was the lived experience of the British-Austrian autistic artist Timothy Speed through many years of poverty. His response was radical: to rewrite physics itself — to base the world not upon things, but upon nothingness. This seemingly small artistic manoeuvre has far-reaching consequences for physics, consciousness research, and the structures of politics, economy, and society. The Physics of the Poor is not an essay, nor a theoretical game — it is a complete, original structural theory of reality. With the MNO (Minimal Non-Object), the Triad of Submergence, and the All–Nothing Paradox, Timothy Speed formulates a fundamental ontology that does not replace the prevailing models of consciousness (IIT, GNW, SOC), but rather integrates and transcends them on a deeper level. He demonstrates that consciousness cannot be explained as a mere consequence of complexity — but as an emergent decision arising within a structural gap. This work offers a new response to the hard problem of consciousness — no longer asking for the origin of qualia, but for the form of emptiness out of which subjectivity itself arises. The gap becomes the source; nothingness becomes the productive principle. In doing so, Speed interweaves theoretical physics, philosophy, phenomenological experience, and social reality into a coherent metastructure. The Physics of the Poor is a work of artistic research — a radical form of thinking from the boundary: philosophical, political, existential. It introduces not only new concepts but a different epistemology — one emerging from autism, from poverty, from the outside. This book is a rupture with academic habit — and perhaps precisely for that reason, what academia needs now.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18175692
Keywords: MNO-Theory, Systems Theory, Physics of Collapse, Social Ontology, Consciousness Studies, Autistic Epistemology, Artistic Research, Orch-OR, Quantum Biology, Collapse Dynamics Ontological, Indeterminacy Emergence, Theory Singularity, Fields Critical, Transitions Self-Organized Criticality Quantum-Classical, Interface Penrose–Hameroff, Consciousness Studies, Embodied Cognition, Enactive Cognition, Autistic Epistemolog,y Neurodivergent Cognition, Artistic Research, Relational Agency
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