Structural analysis shows losing global perspective in interaction systems, suggesting limitations on representation.
We present a structural result concerning the compatibility of global description and non-trivial interaction. We show that any system capable of maintaining a global perspective on another system requires an external representational degree of freedom relative to that system. Conversely, non-trivial interaction or embedding constrains the describer to the same representational manifold, removing the freedom of that external coordinate. These conditions are mutually exclusive. As a result, global perspective is necessarily lost under embedding. The result is purely structural and does not depend on physical dynamics, cognition, or ontology.
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Michael Hitchcock (2026) studied this question.
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