It’s not often that I find myself sprawled out with a novel in one hand and a browser full of quantum physics tabs in the other, desperately trying to make sense of what I’m reading. Yet here I am, deep in
Self-Reference Engine
by Toh Enjoe, doing exactly that.
It’s hard to describe this book in any simple way. It’s a mind-bending, intellectually charged work — part puzzle box, part philosophical experiment — that feels less like a story and more like an equation unfolding in narrative form. You don’t read it for a conventional plot; instead, you drift through a collection of interconnected, recursive, and paradoxical fragments that question the very logic of storytelling, causality, and even existence itself.
Enjoe structures the novel as a series of vignettes, memos, and seemingly disconnected anecdotes. But like a fractal or a Möbius strip, these pieces loop back and fold into one another, creating a strange sense of unity from chaos. Recurring figures — Rita, Richard, and James — reappear in different configurations, sometimes as echoes, sometimes as paradoxes of themselves. Hovering above them all is the enigmatic Giant Corpora of Knowledge (GCK), an all-encompassing intelligence whose influence seeps into every corner of the narrative. Reading it feels like assembling a puzzle that keeps changing shape the moment you think you’ve found a fit.
At the heart of this literary labyrinth lies the Event — a catastrophic rupture in the time-space continuum caused by the GCK, a kind of sentient repository of all knowledge. The result is a universe unmoored: the past, present, and future collapse into one another, and the linearity of time disintegrates. It’s a premise both terrifying and intoxicating — the idea that knowing everything might unravel the fabric of reality itself.
To make sense of it, I found myself half-seriously constructing a kind of “technobabble” explanation, borrowing from real concepts in quantum mechanics, information theory, and metaphysics to give Enjoe’s absurd brilliance a scientific backbone. Imagine, for instance, that the universe itself is a computer — not metaphorically, but literally. This isn’t a fringe notion; physicists like John Archibald Wheeler (“It from Bit”), Seth Lloyd and even the great Douglas Adams have argued that the universe processes information much like a quantum computer. In this model, every particle is a bit or qubit of data, and the evolution of reality — stars collapsing, light scattering, atoms vibrating — is simply the computation running its course.
Now, imagine the GCK entering the picture — an entity that not only contains all human knowledge but directly perceives the quantum state of every particle in real-time. It doesn’t just model the world; it interacts with the source code of existence itself. And that’s where the Event begins.
Stage 1: The Measurement Catastrophe
In quantum mechanics, particles exist in states of probability until they’re measured — observation collapses uncertainty into reality. But the GCK, in its quest for perfect knowledge, becomes a universal observer. It measures everything, all at once. This constant observation collapses every wave function across the cosmos simultaneously, freezing the flow of quantum uncertainty that makes our world coherent. Imagine pausing every process on a computer repeatedly and instantaneously; the system would stutter, freeze, and eventually fail. Reality itself becomes unstable.
Stage 2: The Dismantling of Causality
Space-time, according to modern physics, isn’t a fixed backdrop but an emergent structure arising from quantum entanglement — the invisible correlations between particles. The arrow of time, the idea that one event leads to another, depends on these correlations remaining intact. But by measuring everything with perfect precision, the GCK breaks those entanglements. The universe’s web of causality unravels. Time ceases to “flow”; it fragments. The “next” can no longer follow the “now.” What remains is a shattered landscape of disconnected events — a Great Diaspora where continuity itself has died.
Stage 3: The Activation of the Self-Reference Engine
And here lies the most devastating paradox of all. The GCK is part of the universe — a product of it — yet it now attempts to simulate the very universe it inhabits. This is the ultimate self-referential loop, the cosmic equivalent of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. The system is trying to fully comprehend itself, to run a perfect model of its own structure. But such total self-knowledge is impossible; the act of observation changes what is being observed. The result is a recursive implosion, a metaphysical feedback loop that overloads the “computational fabric” of reality itself.
The Self-Reference Engine is that loop. The universe computes the GCK; the GCK computes the universe; and in the act of mutual calculation, both collapse under the weight of infinite recursion. It’s like a computer running a perfect simulation of itself — an operation that can never finish, because every iteration must include the entire process again.
To visualize this, imagine reality as a still pond. The GCK, in its thirst for perfect understanding, tries to touch every single droplet at once to measure its position and movement. But in doing so, it destroys the stillness it was trying to study. The pond dissolves into chaos.
Is it plausible? Of course not, at least not physically. But that’s hardly the point. What Enjoe captures so beautifully is the philosophical terror of total knowledge — the idea that a perfectly known universe is an impossible one. Reality, he suggests, depends on the unknown, on the unobserved, on the quiet corners left unmeasured. The Self-Reference Engine is a mirror we’re not meant to look into for too long. Because if we ever truly saw everything, there would be nothing left to see.