The Impossible To Measure

The universe does not begin in a single temporal dimension. It begins precisely where conventional temporal categories dissolve. The origin, as it is conceived today within contemporary cosmology, is not a sequential event — it is a collapse of the categories that make any temporal manifestation possible. The so-called Big Bang is not an explosion, nor a creation, nor even an event in a classical sense: it is the limit where all measure becomes inapplicable. It is there, in this excess still without form, that the first philosophical task is established: not to explain, but to listen to the impossible that sustains the real.

For decades, physics has advanced toward the origin. Cosmic background radiation, the expansion of galaxies, the energetic density of the initial universe — everything seems to point to an extreme state of compression and temperature. But upon investigating the point where our capacity to measure temporality unravels — everything dissolves: space loses structure, temporality transforms, linear causality evaporates. Physics halts the gesture of approximation. But it is precisely at this limit that the philosophical gesture begins — not to explain the unrepeatable, but to reinscribe it as an operative fracture. There, the very notion of point, ordering, and continuity dissolves. The real, in this state, transcends measurability.

It is precisely this collapse of measurement that founds the philosophical problem of the origin. Because measuring is not just counting: it is inscribing, it is stabilizing a difference on a symbolic scale. Measuring is imposing accountability on a world that has not yet offered itself as a number. It is domesticating excess in the fiction of the landmark, fixing what has not yet wished to be fixed, translating what has not yet been organized. All measurement requires a reference point, a body, a repeatable duration. But at the beginning of the universe, none of these conditions were present. There was only immeasurable density, energy without form, a real that could not yet be named because no language had yet been inscribed.

This absence of reference is not an absence of reality. What was there was not emptiness, because emptiness already presupposes a regime of absence, and here there was neither presence nor absence: only power without form. It was not mythological chaos nor "nothing," but material instability still without inscription. And it is in this formless field that the inaugural gesture of philosophy emerges. Not as a description of a before, but as a symbolic inscription of what cannot yet be symbolized. The origin cannot be represented — not because it is a mystery, but because it precedes any grammar of form. There is no observer, no rhythm, no scale. The universe did not have a punctual beginning: it began when the very notion of a discrete event in time dissolved.

The biggest mistake lies in conceiving the Big Bang as an event inserted into a succession, as if a predefined temporal progression existed. But what physics shows — and philosophy reinscribes — is that the beginning was not a point, but an absolute ontological disjunction: there was no measure because there was no difference yet stabilized. What we call "origin" is merely the late name for a field of forces that cannot be reduced to a narrative, nor a formula, nor an image. As some models of quantum gravity suggest, at this initial threshold, space-time dissolves into non-metric fluctuation: there is no longer geometry, only tension.

This field was neither absence nor rest. It was excess without form, matter in perturbation still without inscription, without defined temporality, without location. Not chaos, in the sense of disorder, but instability without a symbolic reference point. What was there could not be seen, nor measured, nor conceived through a linear temporality. And yet, it was real.

The philosophy of emergent complexity proposes to think exactly this point: not as the end of language, but as its operative zero-point. Not as an absence of intelligibility, but as intelligence without an anchor — without code, without a mirror, without a system. The origin cannot be known, but it can be reinscribed as that which interrupts the transparency of the world. Not to deny it — but to recognize that the world is not given: it is insurgent.

Every attempt to measure the origin is already, inevitably, a symbolic projection. But this projection should not be avoided: it must be recognized as a creative operation. The philosophical task is not to refute science, but to take its gesture to the limit — and at that limit, to listen to what has not yet been transformed into form. What cannot be measured is not the void of ignorance, but the still unstabilized intensity of emergence.

The origin of the universe is not "yet to be discovered." It is yet to be reinscribed. And this reinscription does not require more data, nor better telescopes, nor more complex formulas. It requires a philosophy capable of thinking the real as that which inscribes itself even without a prior symbolic condition. A philosophy that accepts that the origin did not have a conventional beginning, that temporality manifested itself distinctly, that the world we know today is only the residual effect of an emergence that could not yet be narrated.

“The impossible to measure is the ground where the real
has not yet consented to form — but already demands inscription.”

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——