Impossible But Lawful: 4 Worldhood as an Achievement, Not a Given

Escher shows us that lawfulness alone is insufficient for worldhood. Perfect local rule-following can produce a system that fails globally. But not all constructed systems fail in this way. Fictional worlds, from Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast to Prospero’s Books, hold as worlds, even when they are unstable, fantastical, or internally contradictory. What distinguishes them from Escher’s impossible spaces is inhabitability.

Inhabitation vs. Lawfulness

Consider the contrast:

• In Escher, every step is lawful; yet there is no path that allows the figures—or us as viewers—to inhabit the space coherently. The impossibility is systemic.

• In Wonderland, gravity, logic, and causality are locally violated, yet the world supports action and narrative. Alice can traverse it; events can unfold; characters can interact meaningfully.

• In Gormenghast, bizarre customs and labyrinthine architecture persist, but they allow characters to move, make decisions, and sustain narrative arcs.

The distinction is crucial: worldhood is not the sum of lawful transitions. It is an achievement—a property that emerges when a system, however irregular, supports inhabitation and engagement.

Features of Inhabitable Worlds

From our previous work, we can identify the structural conditions that distinguish inhabited worlds from uninhabitable ones:

1. Pathways for Navigation

   • Worlds must allow some form of traversal or engagement. Inhabitability depends on the possibility of moving through the system without hitting a structural dead-end.

2. Coherence for Action

   • Internal rules can be strange or inconsistent, but they must support actionable sequences. Characters, agents, or participants must be able to interact meaningfully.

3. Narrative or Functional Continuity

   • Events or processes can unfold in ways that make sense within the world, even if the world’s logic differs from our own.

Escher denies all three: his systems are legible in parts, but no coherent inhabitation is possible. The world cannot be actualised in any mode of engagement. Lawfulness without inhabitability produces beautiful impossibility, not a world.

Worldhood as Relational Achievement

In relational terms:

• Construal = generating lawful relations. Escher excels here: every local relation is fully actualised.

• Worldhood/actualisation = integrating these relations into a system that can be inhabited. Escher fails here.

• Fictional worlds = both construal and inhabitable integration. Wonderland and Gormenghast succeed because their local laws are designed—or constrained—in ways that allow inhabitation.

The key insight: worldhood is an emergent achievement, not a given. Even maximal lawfulness cannot substitute for the capacity to sustain inhabitation.

Implications for System Design and Thought

This principle extends far beyond literature or art. Any system—technical, bureaucratic, social, or epistemic—must meet two conditions to be “world-like”:

1. Local correctness: components obey their rules.

2. Global integrability: the system allows interaction, navigation, and engagement.

Escher demonstrates the danger of overemphasis on local correctness. Fictional worlds remind us that inhabitability—the capacity to live, act, and make sense within a system—is the property that turns a collection of lawful parts into a world.

Conclusion

We have now arrived at a critical pivot in our series: the distinction between structural lawfulness and worldhood. Escher shows us failure; fictional worlds show us success.

Worldhood is not given. It is earned through the careful orchestration of lawfulness and inhabitability.

In the next post, we will explore the consequences of living within systems that cannot achieve global closure. How do we inhabit—or orient ourselves—inside systems that, like Escher’s, are impossible to fully grasp? The answer will take us into ethical, institutional, and existential territory.