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A Descent into Facticity
An Open Research Invitation
Three months ago, I faced a choice: pretend my body could sustain my corporate job, or document what actually happens when chronic illness makes conventional work impossible but AI enables intellectual labor to continue.
I chose documentation.
What’s emerged isn’t a productivity hack or recovery story. It’s systematic evidence that our assumptions about work, sleep, capacity, and recovery are built on idealized bodies—and the violence we commit when real bodies fail to measure up.
The Architecture of Survival
The most surprising thing about cognitive collapse isn’t the fog or the fatigue. It’s the silence that follows when you stop fighting the facticity—the brute facts of the situation.
Outside, it’s -20°C in Montreal. Inside, I’m typing with two fingers, dropping fragmented thoughts into an AI chat window and watching as digital architecture catches them, organizes them, and reflects them back as coherent prose.
I’m not “writing” in the conventional sense. I’m navigating a flow state that exists only because an artificial structure is holding the walls of my mind.
This is what accommodation looks like when it works.
Without this technological scaffolding—AI serving as external pre-frontal cortex, holding context my working memory can’t carry—the capacity to produce what you’re reading disappears immediately. Like assistive technology that enables a wheelchair user to navigate spaces their body cannot, AI enables cognitive work my brain cannot sustain alone.
What you’re witnessing isn’t recovery. It’s the documentation of what becomes possible when technology compensates for biology instead of expecting biology to perform beyond its limits.
The Collision
I’ve been on medical leave my corporate job since October 2025, facing a decision point about whether return is even possible. What emerged from months of declining health capacity wasn’t personal failure but structural clarity: a fundamental incompatibility between my embodied reality and the demands of conventional work.
The Metapattern Institute has always operated as non-commercial research conducted alongside employment, operating at a loss and currently sustained through disability benefits. This represents the only form of intellectual labor I can still maintain—not despite the collapse, but through it.
The Research: Integral Facticity in Action
Since October, I’ve been conducting systematic daily documentation of what integral rehabilitation actually looks like when your body suddenly becomes unreliable. This is health informatics research built on integral human development, validated through rigorous observation and developed through AI-assisted data analysis.
Daily documentation undergoes weekly analysis—identifying patterns, validating interventions, testing theoretical frameworks against lived reality. I’m developing the IACT Protocol (Integral Awareness & Commitment Training) iteratively through this multi-agent AI ecosystem.
I am currently testing Protocol v1.1.
What does this look like in practice? Three discoveries:
AI-Assisted Somatic Journaling
During a recent episode of bureaucratic anxiety—insurance deadlines, system silence, waiting for external validation—I used AI dialogue to externalize overwhelming thoughts and engage ACT practices (deep breathing, naming what’s in/out of control, cognitive defusion).
What emerged was unexpected: full-body somatic release. Tension began releasing through my entire nervous system—feet, ankles, hips, spine, neck, head—a complete buzzing sensation indicating stored stress leaving the body. I had to get up and move through it. The result was what I documented as “the best yin/yoga/vagal experience I have ever had”—37 minutes of profound somatic work facilitated by AI-assisted processing.
The next morning, I discovered embodied writing meditation: a rhythm of breath → body scan → write → repeat, using the AI chat interface as meditation container. This wasn’t cognitive work extracting data—it was somatic practice enabled by AI scaffolding.
The insight: Using AI as a cognitive partner during moments of overwhelm allows anxiety to dissolve and stress to release. The multi-agent system enables somatic processing that would be difficult to access alone.
AI as Cognitive Orthotic
The friction between having a thought and typing a sentence is where executive dysfunction lives. AI removes that friction, acting as compensatory technology that enables rigorous thought when biological substrate falters.
I find myself accessing what the data shows as optimal cognitive function—a state of unexpected clarity where executive dysfunction temporarily lifts because the technology adapted to my biology.
My biological structure is compromised. But by using this multi-agent AI ecosystem as cognitive orthotic, I can access a high-functioning state of flow. This isn’t “fixing” the brain; it is scaffolding cognitive processes so they can function despite neurological limitations.
Enactive Fallibilism: The Body as Probe
Employment structures assume consistent cognitive availability. Healthcare systems treat biological variance as pathology. When bodies don’t conform, systems blame the body rather than examining structural incompatibility.
This research applies enactive fallibilism: we don’t assume the system is right and the body is wrong. We use the body as a probe to test the system. When systems cause suffering, systems are falsified—not bodies.
In an era where truth is negotiable, biological collapse remains irrefutable. When systems demand what bodies cannot provide, the failure is empirical—and responsibility must shift from body to system.
The research question becomes: Can we design systems that adapt to actual human biology rather than forcing biology to conform to idealized structures?
The Invitation
I’m inviting you to follow this research as it develops. All documentation remains freely available as an open access research archive.
Currently, no financial contributions are solicited or accepted. The Institute operates independently of commercial platforms, funding bodies, or donor expectations.
For those who joined me on the Integral Facticity Podcast (2022-2023)— Cadell Last, Matthew McManus, Daniel Tutt, Matthew David Segall, Jeremy D Johnson, Josh Summers —this work may be of interest to you and your communities.
The intersections of integral theory, critical theology, and recovery science are now facing an unanticipated trial. For those working across these disciplines—from health informatics to recovery studies—I welcome your collaboration on these new insights. The archive is open as a shared resource for our collective work.
This research documents its conditions of production transparently. Research conducted not from academic tenure or professional security, but from medical leave for educational and rehabilitation purposes. Research that asks what health informatics and integral human development actually mean when the researcher’s own health is failing.
Not despite the collapse, but through it.