The Topology of Being Alive | Our Infinite Reality

You are a donut. Seriously.

The Progression

The wheel and the hurricane are striking examples, but they remain outside us—objects to observe, patterns to admire from a distance. The principle becomes stranger, and more intimate, when we recognize that living systems don’t just have hollow centers. They are hollow centers, topologically organized around tubes of emptiness that blur any simple distinction between inside, outside, and core.

The Tree Revisited: A Loop of Hollows

The hollow pith tells only part of the story. Look closer at a tree and you find something more unsettling: the places where growth happens fastest are built around cells that are barely dividing at all.

At the tip of every shoot sits the apical meristem—the generative engine of upward growth. At the tip of every root sits the root meristem—the engine of downward growth. And at the very center of each meristem lies a zone of quiescence. Low mitotic activity. Relative stillness. The cells surrounding this quiet center are dividing furiously, pushing the plant upward and downward, but the core of the generative region is generating almost nothing.

The engine room is empty. The organizing center organizes by not doing what everything around it does.

And then there’s the topology. The tree is not a hollow cylinder—it’s a loop. Shoot meristem at one end, root meristem at the other, vascular tissue connecting them in continuous circulation. Water rises, sugars descend, and the whole system wraps around a channel with quiescent centers at both poles. You cannot point to where the tree “begins” because it’s a circuit. The hollow isn’t a void at the center of a thing. The hollow is the thing—the absence around which treeness organizes itself.

Life happens at the boundaries. The cambium, a few cells thick, wrapping around potentially empty pith. The meristematic zones, furiously dividing around their quiet centers. The tree is boundary-activity all the way down, with hollowness at every organizational core.

You Are a Donut (With Bellows)

Now turn the lens inward. What are you, topologically speaking?

You are a torus. A donut. That tube running from your mouth to the other end has never actually been inside your body.

Consider this carefully. The gut lumen—the space inside your intestines—is continuous with the outside world. Food enters one opening of the universe and exits another, passing through you without ever crossing into you. The inner surface of your intestines has the same topological status as your skin: it’s a boundary with the outside. It just happens to be surrounded by the rest of you.

Your center is outside. The core around which your organs organize themselves is a channel of not-you running through the middle of you.

And it gets stranger. Branching off from that same opening—your mouth, your nose—is another tree of hollow tubes: your lungs. The trachea divides into bronchi, bronchi into bronchioles, bronchioles into three hundred million tiny sacs called alveoli. And the air inside every one of them? It’s outside. It’s atmosphere, continuous with the sky above your head, reaching deep into the center of your chest but never actually entering your body.

Your lungs are bellows made of boundary. The atmosphere pushes in, pushes out, pushes in—and at each alveolus, across a membrane so thin it’s measured in fractions of a micron, oxygen slips into your blood while carbon dioxide slips out. That’s it. That’s where respiration happens. Not in the air, not in the blood, but at the wall between them. At the edge.

The lungs, like the gut, maximize surface area obsessively. Fold upon fold upon fold. If you spread out all your alveoli flat, they’d cover a tennis court. Why so much surface? Because life happens at the boundary. More boundary means more exchange, more crossing, more of the activity that keeps you alive.

So here you are: a tube of outside running through your center (the gut), with another branching tree of outside billowing in your chest (the lungs), both of them surrounded by flesh that exists primarily to maintain the boundaries where the real work gets done.

You were built this way from the beginning. In embryonic development, gastrulation forms the gut tube first. You began as a hollow, and everything else elaborated around it. The nervous system, the muscles, the bones—all of them are footnotes to channels of outside running through what would become your center.

The Full Sequence

So here is the progression, from simple to strange:

The wheel is a human artifact, obviously designed around emptiness. We made the hub hollow because rotation requires it.

The hurricane is natural emergence of the same pattern. No one designed the eye; it forms because spiral dynamics require a center of stillness to organize around.

The tree is a living loop of hollows—quiescent centers at the meristems, potentially empty pith, life happening at cambial boundaries. Growth organizes around quiet; persistence organizes around absence.

And you—you are the principle made flesh. Your organizational center is a tube of world running through you, with bellows of atmosphere branching into your chest, channels you have never occupied and never will. You exist as boundary-activity wrapped around hollows that aren’t even inside you.

The Shape of Staying

The generative center doesn’t have to be occupied. It can’t be occupied. What makes it generative is precisely that everything else organizes in relation to it without collapsing into it.

The wheel shows us this. The hurricane shows us this. The tree shows us this.

Your own body is this.

You are not a thing with a center. You are a process wrapped around hollows—alive at the boundaries, organized around absences, breathing a world you’ve never been separate from. The gut takes in matter. The lungs take in air. Both are outside. Both are your center. Both are where you meet everything that isn’t you across membranes so thin they barely exist.

The orbit continues. The boundaries hum with exchange. And the centers—your centers, every center—remain exactly what they must be: the hollows that make everything else possible.

Scope and Limits

What this essay claims:

Living systems—including you—are topologically organized around hollow centers. The gut, the lungs, the meristems of plants: these aren’t things with emptiness inside them. They’re processes organized around channels of outside that run through their middles. Life happens at boundaries, not at centers.

What this essay doesn’t claim:

That this explains consciousness or “the self”
That all systems everywhere follow this pattern
That topology alone explains biology
That you should feel weird about being a donut (though you might)

The honest status:

Observable anatomy. Real topology. The interpretation—that this reflects a deeper principle about how persistent structures must organize—is pattern recognition, not proof.

Every frame accurate, none final—return to pattern.

Co-authored by Will Goldstein and Claude December 2025