My name is Ulys Sorok. My life's mission is to make humanity galactic.

I trained in self-replicating systems under Dr. Alex Ellery at CESER, the CEntre for SElf-Replication Research, in the lineage of von Neumann and Rosen.

I am assembling a small research group to wrestle with "Closure Theory"; this is a falsifiable account of the conditions under which complex systems can sustain themselves, internalize their dependencies, and reproduce more of their own productive capacities.

On Closure Theory

Across thermodynamics, biology, information science, and economics, I see recurring patterns of the same question: How does a complex system remain viable?

It must be established, truthfully, that these fields are not interchangeable. Thermodynamic free energy, economic surplus, and Shannon capacity are not the same thing. As metaphors, they produce more poetry than knowledge.

I seek to make a harder, more difficult, and more falsifiable claim. Do these domains share a common structural logic of survival? The goal of "Closure Theory" is to ask where these structures hold, where they break, and what is lost in translation between the relevant substrates.

If this structure is real, the loss should be measurable! If it is measurable, it should predict where real systems, well, will fail.

Furthermore, at the scales that matter, this problem is never merely technical, and human beings, if considered part of the closure boundary, require consideration of game theory and modeling as load-bearing determinants of whether a system lives.

The Work Ahead

The goal is to not boil the galaxy or theorize everything.

The work must:

1. Identify the objects that best captures closure across different substrates;
2. Formalize the translation between these systems;
3. Quantify exactly what information is lost when moving between them/these translations;
4. Confirm whether that loss predicts failure modes in real-world systems under stress.

We can see brute-force approximations of this in the extreme vertical integration of companies like China's BYD or Musk's Tesla or SpaceX. I am careful not to romanticize this. Vertical integration is often just local optimization incented by severe competitive pressure.

However, it produces a vital empirical signal: systems that manage to achieve high degrees of supply chain closure survive environmental shocks that destroy their competitors. They become harder to kill.

Who Are You?

I am especially interested in collaborators from category theory (objection towards Rosen or Lawvere), statistical physics (autocatalytic systems, specifically), production-network economics (Leontief-lineage dependency analyses; shock propagation through supply graphs; I find this particularly, present-day-empirical-interesting), and closed-loop systems engineering (MELiSSA, CELSS, or equivalent).

TL;DR

How does a complex system survive? The answers across physics, biology, and economics share a quantifiable mathematical structure. I am assembling a team to formally define this architecture, map where the translation breaks across substrates, and ground it in engineering reality.

If this interests you, we should talk.