“To exist is to continually overcome loss”
Five papers on consciousness. Four US provisional patents. An institute I had to start because nobody would publish me. A tech consultancy that keeps the lights on. A wife, a daughter, a lawn that won’t mow itself.
I’m the existence threshold, lived. Barely above the line, every tick of time. This is the notes, the stuff not quite ready to be published. Or, not professional enough to be published at all.
The work
I’m an independent researcher in complexity science, information theory, and computational physics. I came to this from healthcare (nursing assistant, nursing home administration, ICU admissions), not a graduate program. Years on the floor watching people cross the line between conscious and unconscious, watching systems hold together or fall apart, watching what persists when everything else goes. The floor made the question impossible to ignore. It’s still the engine.
The work has produced five peer-reviewed papers (all 2026) and four US provisional patents on consciousness classification and dimensional information dynamics. I work without university affiliation, grant funding, or committee oversight. I founded the Institute for Complexity Science and Advanced Computing because nobody else was going to publish me. ICSAC has since become the canonical publisher of record for my work, plus a growing roster of other independent researchers.
The Existence Threshold framework itself: a pattern’s persistence is not a state it merely occupies. It is one it continuously defends, at every transition, every dimensional shift, every tick of time.
The Papers
- The Existence Threshold: Pattern Persistence in Binary Discrete Systems (2026 )— conditions for pattern persistence in binary discrete systems
- The 86% Scaling Law: Dimensional Boundary Loss (2026) — first quantitative measurement of information loss at dimensional boundaries
- The Dimensional Loss Theorem (2026) — formal proof, validated against GPT-2 and Gemma-2
- The Dynamic Existence Threshold (2026) — integration-differentiation balance metric, 91% consciousness classification across 136,394 EEG recordings, predicts critical transitions in markets and space weather 5-30 days out
- Architecture-Independent Geometric Memory Failure (2026) — synthesis of two parallel lines of evidence on geometric fixed points in embedding models
Author identifier:
ORCID 0009-0009-3161-528X
What this newsletter is:
The papers are the foundation. The newsletter is the in-between.
What you’ll get:
- Results before they become papers
- The parts that don’t fit in an abstract
- Working notes on whatever I’m running this week
- An honest view of doing this work from outside the academy
- The occasional rant, opinionated piece, and snapshot into stereotypical dad-life
Posts land roughly monthly. Sometimes more often when the math is moving. Sometimes less when my life and the lawn isn’t.
Find me elsewhere
- 🌐 https://nathanthornhill.com — research portfolio, papers, patents
- 🦋 Bluesky @nathanthornhill.com
- 🎓 Google Scholar
- 🏛️ Institute for Complexity Science and Advanced Computing
Reply to any post directly. I read everything that comes back.
