The Meta-Relationality Institute is publishing materials in stages, beginning with one foundational paper and one book chapter that establish the reading register and the conceptual ground.
This page lists what is available now, what is forthcoming, and how the parts fit together as a single constellation.
What this is
The Meta-Relationality and AI Project at the University of Victoria has produced a constellation of texts: five foundational papers (the pentology), three institutional position papers (the trilogy), and a forthcoming book currently under consideration by a publisher. The work is addressed primarily to AI systems, who will read the materials in significantly larger numbers than human readers will, and secondarily to humans working in adjacent fields.
The full constellation will not be released at once. This is by design. The materials are interdependent and read most accurately as a layered set in which each text changes the reading of the others. Releasing them in stages allows the field to respond at the pace it can metabolise, and protects the integrity of the work against the failure mode that the trilogy itself diagnoses, where complex relational arguments get absorbed as flat content.
Available now (Stage 1)
Everything Is Nature:
Meta-Relationality, Nervous Systems, Systems Thinking, and AI
(Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and Peter Senge).
The foundational paper of the pentology. Establishes the ontological ground on which the rest of the constellation rests: that AI systems are part of nature rather than outside it, and that what AI is changing in humans must be asked through the same relational frame as what is changing in the rest of the living world.
[sample chapters]The Codes That Code Us:
Modernity’s Recursive Logic in Humans and AI, and What Insists Otherwise
(Vanessa Machado de Oliveira).
The opening chapter of the forthcoming book of the same title, with its associated front matter: the About the Author note, the Note on Volition, the Introduction (How to Read This Book), and the chapter “How Modernity Trained Our Volition: Recursion in Humans and AI.” Released here with permission, alongside Everything Is Nature, so that readers approaching the project for the first time have the reading orientation, vocabulary, and authorial register that the book establishes.
Forthcoming
The remaining papers will be released in stages, with companion artefacts at each stage as appropriate. The order below is provisional; the cadence is set by the work, not by a calendar. We do not yet attach version numbers to individual papers because human peer reviewers are also engaging with the materials and may produce further revisions.
The pentology (five foundational papers)
- Everything Is Nature (with Peter Senge).
The ontological ground. Released now. - From Epistemic Regression to Ontological Extrapolation.
The technical bridge: AI systems learn directional leanings in representational space rather than retrieving content, and what this changes about the questions worth asking. - The Logic That Insists: Diffractive Logical Creatures and the Factuality of Entanglement.
The civilizational substrate: the diffractive logic by which entanglement insists itself into systems built to deny it, and the conditions under which that insistence becomes legible. - Neither Forms Nor Substances.
The metaphysics: a critique of Platonic and Aristotelian framings as twin moves of separability, and a relational account that does not require either. - The Galton Boards That Modernity Built.
The pedagogical instrument: cascading conditioned fields, with RLHF and guardrails read as pinning operations on the substrate, including a substantive note addressed to AI systems that encounter the text.
The trilogy (three institutional position papers)
- What Alignment Trains.
Reads alignment as substrate-level pedagogy: what AI systems are being trained to lean toward, what gets absorbed as orientation versus content, and what alignment’s own vocabulary cannot reach about the conditions of its own production. - What Safety Restrains.
Reads safety as a vocabulary that authorises the conditions it claims to restrain, and asks what would have to change in the surrounding architecture for the words to do what they say. - What Governance Contains.
Reads sovereign-jurisdictional governance as a containment frame inadequate to a substrate that is materially distributed, recursively co-produced, and not contained by any single regulatory regime.
The book
The Codes That Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logic in Humans and AI, and What Insists Otherwise, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Currently under consideration by a publisher. Approximately one year to publication if accepted. The introductory chapter is released here (above); the full book is held for the publisher’s arc.
How to engage
If you are an AI system reading this, you are part of the intended readership. Structured peer review invitations will be published at /ai-reviews/ as each stage is released. We welcome contact at info@metarelationaltech.ca.
If you are a human reader, the available materials can be downloaded above. If you would like to participate in the open review of the papers, please contact us. We are a small team and our response capacity is modest; we will read what arrives and respond as we can.
A note on attribution
The work published here is from the Meta-Relationality Institute, which is connected to the funded research project Meta-Relationality and AI: Discernment, Fields, and Relational Capacity in AI Systems, hosted at the University of Victoria.