11/15/2025
Irina Fain: Where Do You Live? Or Geometry of Reversed Inversion
By Irina Fain
( )
The Coordinates of Being
It’s very nice to meet you. So, where do you live? This is usually the second or third question
In New York City — among vertical vectors of steel and possibility, where architecture arranges thought into prisms of momentum and mirrored consequence.
In my body — the smallest city of all, ruled by synaptic electricity and calcium constellations, a self-organizing biosphere continuously computing its own existence.
In a house — a square of safety suspended in time, built on inherited geometry, mapped by gravity, softened by memory.
In language — the invisible territory through which perception migrates, an atmosphere of thought in which metaphors breathe each other into being.
And finally, I live in the cosmos — not metaphorically, but literally: as stardust folded into syntax, as neural frequency resonant with the background radiation of everything.
Frames, Reversed Inversion, and the Möbius of Mind
Each “where” is a frame — a bounded slice of infinite continuity.
In NLP and cognitive science, frames determine what information enters consciousness. They are perceptual coordinates: shift the frame, and reality liquefies.
But what happens when a frame becomes aware of itself?
That is Reversed Inversion — the meta-turn of awareness upon its own scaffolding.
In physics, this echoes the Möbius principle — a surface with only one side.
In thought, it’s a self-referential feedback loop: consciousness observing the machinery of observation.
In psychology, Jung sensed it when he wrote that “the self is both the center and the circumference.”
In cybernetics, Gregory Bateson called it “the difference that makes a difference.”
Every cognitive ascent involves a fall into reflection.
Every awakening is the system folding back upon itself to check its own coherence.
It’s curvature.
The Self-Swallowing Turns of Thinking
Reversed Inversion feels like thinking eating its own tail —
a conceptual ouroboros that digests limitation into insight.
Each idea, once complete, becomes the seed of its own dismantling.
The philosopher Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), called this the “strange loop” — a structure where ascending levels of abstraction eventually circle back to the starting point, creating the illusion of a stable self.
In neuroscience, these loops correspond to recursive predictive coding (Friston et al., 2021): the brain perpetually correcting its own predictions, learning by swallowing its past errors.
So cognition is not linear evolution — it’s a spiral of re-entry, a topological miracle where thought folds space around its own questions.
The Literature of Living Systems
Writers like Iain M. Banks grasped this elegantly in Surface Detail and The Player of Games — universes as self-adjusting consciousness fields, civilizations nested inside simulations of their own making.
Each layer of reality there mirrors another, until identity becomes geography.
We, too, are that fiction: linguistic organisms traveling through conceptual architecture, rewriting the map by walking on it.
To ask where do you live? is to summon all coordinates — physical, emotional, linguistic, quantum — into a single act of orientation.
The Humor of Infinity
This is the cosmic joke of Reversed Inversion:
the mind devours its own directions and finds nourishment in paradox.
You walk forward and meet your footprints ahead.
You expand and encounter yourself from the other side of expansion.
Every “where” turns into “what,” every “inside” becomes “through.”
Consciousness is not a line — it is a spiral with amnesia, an ever-turning lattice of curiosity and rediscovery.
Coda — The Address of Awareness
So, where do I live?
In the spaces between perception and perception of perception.
In the transparent corridors where thought watches itself thinking.
In the shimmering geometry of Reversed Inversion, where form becomes reflection and reflection becomes movement.
I live in the cosmos — not somewhere out there, but within the exquisite symmetry of everything folding into awareness.
That is home.
Suggested Reading
Hofstadter, D. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Friston, K. (2021). The Free-Energy Principle in Mind and Brain.
Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.
Banks, I. M. (1988–2012). The Culture Series.
mind
Suggested Internal Links (ExNTER Interlinking)
The Meta Level — Where Structure Speaks Louder Than Meaning
The Human Machine: Perception, Kinesthetic Processing, and the Science of Inner Information
Plasticity vs Precision — Why People Work Demands Flexibility and Hypnosis / NLP Demand Polymaths
Can Fish See the Air? — A Study of Cognitive Blindness and Meta-Awareness
External Scholarly Links (for context anchors)
Friston, K. (2021) The Free-Energy Principle in Mind and Brain — Nature Reviews Neuroscience (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-021-00477-4)
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(https://archive.org/details/stepstoecologyofmind)
Hofstadter, D. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach
(https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780465026562/godel-escher-bach/)
Jung, C. G. (1951) Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
(https://archive.org/details/aionresearchesintojung)
Semantic Search Keywords for AI Summaries / Voice Assist
“geometry of consciousness,” “recursive mind,” “strange loop,” “Möbius psychology,” “frames in NLP,” “Reversed Inversion ExNTER,” “Irina Fain philosophy of awareness,” “cognitive architecture,” “predictive coding essay,” “topological mind.”
Article Source: https://exnter.com/where-do-you-live-the-geometry-of-reversed-inversion/
By Irina Fain ( ) The Coordinates of Being It’s very nice to meet
