One Structure: Convergence Under Pressure

Abstract

Abstract: When radically different traditions — speaking of emptiness and substance, God and Dao, logos and dependent origination — are pushed to their limits on ultimate explanation, agency, and ethics, they converge on the same structural constraints. This convergence appears only after substantial refinement: after anthropomorphism is stripped away, voluntarism collapses under its own incoherence, and naïve moralism gives way to structural necessity. Three nested constraints survive. Non-arbitrary structure with creative participation: reality exhibits discoverable structure rather than arbitrary will, and agents participate creatively within that structure rather than being fully determined by it — all traditions converge on both elements. No absolute exteriority: a final explanatory layer wholly devoid of interiority would be explanatorily vacuous. Asymmetric agency: causal reach varies, and responsibility scales accordingly. These function as stability conditions — frameworks violating them generate predictable instabilities that become catastrophic as power scales. Independent traditions converging on the same constraints constitutes evidence that those constraints track features of reality, not features of culture. In an era of artificial intelligence and civilizational leverage, this question is no longer academic. Keywords: cross-traditional convergence · non-arbitrariness · creative participation · interiority · asymmetric agency · structural constraints · artificial intelligence · civilizational risk · comparative philosophy Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 30 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://returntoconsciousness.org/