From Gap to World - Pre-Ontology, Indimergence and the End of Representational Physics (Studies in World-Formation, Vol. 1)

This volume assembles four conceptual papers that articulate the foundations of an operator-based ontology of world-formation. The texts develop a framework in which reality is not primarily understood through objects, entities, or representational access, but through structural responses to conditions of non-integrability. The starting point is the concept of the gap as a primary condition of reality. Rather than representing a deficit of knowledge or an incomplete ontology, the gap denotes the structural impossibility of complete self-identity within reality itself. From this perspective, operators are not entities or causal agents but response structures through which reality stabilizes itself under conditions of non-closure. Building on this foundation, the second paper diagnoses a broader conceptual transition within contemporary physics. Phenomena such as dark energy, the measurement problem, and global cosmological structures increasingly resist explanation in object-centered ontologies. The proposed response-based framework interprets these phenomena as structural reactions to limits of integration rather than as missing entities. The third and fourth papers extend this framework to the ontological status of the observer. Instead of presupposing the observer as a subject, cognitive system, or measurement point, observation is analyzed as a structural achievement of world-formation. The observer emerges where reality stabilizes itself locally under conditions of openness. In this sense, perception does not represent a pre-given world but participates in the stabilization of world itself. The final text formulates this claim categorially by interpreting the observer as a topological inversion of world—a spatial operation through which perspective, coherence, and local intelligibility become possible. Taken together, the four papers outline a pre-ontological framework in which: reality is structured by gaps rather than substances, operators appear as responses to non-integrability, physical phenomena signal limits of object-centered ontology, and observers arise as structural foldings of world rather than as agents within it. The volume does not present a closed theory but establishes a conceptual position from which problems in physics, epistemology, and consciousness research can be reinterpreted without introducing additional ontological entities.