Although Edgar F. ‘Ted’ Codd (1923 – 2003) has been more an intellectual influence than a kindred spirit, I include him here because his relational model of data in 1970 was the primary progenitor for Integral Relational Logic (IRL), as the framework or system of coordinates for the Unified Relationships Theory (URT), also called the Theory of Everything or Panosophy.
The relational model of data is far more significant than Alan Turing’s theory of automata from 1936, because it provides a mathematical representation of data, the basic resource of the data processing industry. In particular, because the relational model of data unifies the hierarchical and network systems of database organization, prevalent during the 1960s, it is nondeductive, the most fundamental change in Western logic since Aristotle’s Organum.
Today, you cannot order a book or airline ticket on the Internet without invoking the relational model of data behind the scenes. It is ubiquitous, applicable in all cultures, industries, and disciplines, which I realized when I first read Codd’s 11-page seminal paper in 1972. I heard Codd talk about this universal model of data the next year at Wembley Conference Centre in London, which was to become a life-changing event, as I outline here.
Codd was born on the Isle of Portland in southwest England. He voluntarily broke off his studies of chemistry at university in 1942 to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force Coastal Command. After the war, he returned to university to study mathematics, graduating in 1948, as I did sixteen years later.
Codd then emigrated to the USA, joining IBM in 1949 in New York City as a programming mathematician, developing programs for the electromechanical Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), which was the first operational machine able to treat its instructions as data, like the first electronic stored-program computers in England. (I had a similar job title in 1964, when programming an IBM 7094 in the research and development department of the British electricity generating public utility.)
After a sojourn in Canada between 1953 and 1957 – in protest against Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting – Codd rejoined IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. He led the team that developed the world’s first multiprogramming system on the IBM 7030 Stretch computer, as the precursor to IBM’s scientific computing series 7090 and its System/360.
Between 1961 and 1965, Codd attended the University of Michigan on an IBM scholarship, graduating with a Ph.D. in communication sciences. His thesis was titled ‘Propagation, Computation, and Construction in Two-Dimensional Cellular Spaces’, published in 1968 as Cellular Automata.
Arthur W. Burks, editor of the final two volumes of the Collected Works of Charles Sanders Peirce in 1958, introduced Codd to John von Neuman’s Theory of Self-reproducing Automata. Burks tells us that Von Neumann was attempting to understand automata of great complexity, such as the human nervous system, grounded on the either-or logical foundations of mathematics, which excludes the set of all sets, at the heart of Integral Relational Logic.
Codd’s contribution was to show that the 29 states required by Von Neumann’s scheme could be reduced to just eight. It seems that pioneering computer scientists were trying to emulate life from a two-dimensional grid of cells, which the eminent mathematician John H. Conway demonstrated in his popular Game of Life in 1970. Even today, few mathematicians and computer scientists know that the creative power of Life acts in the vertical dimension of time, in the Eternal Now, not the mechanistic, horizontal dimension.
Be that as it may, after three further years back in Poughkeepsie, Codd moved to the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California to study how mathematical logic could be used to give database design a sound mathematical foundation. He published the results of his studies in 1970 in a paper titled ‘A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks’, which was even more significant in the history of ideas than Francis Crick and James Watson’s 1953 paper announcing the structure of the DNA molecule.
Codd was particularly concerned about data independence, about how data structures could be represented independently of their implementation in their software and hardware environments. The relational model of data is based on the relationships between normalized sets of n-tuples or relations, as interconnected tables of rows and columns, as domains of values. As all formatted data is expressible in relations, metadata – as data about the structure of the database – is also represented in relations in relational database management systems, avoiding the problem of infinite regress.
Codd learned about this concept of relation from a 1968 paper by David L. Childs, titled ‘Feasibility of a Set-Theoretic Data Structure: Based on a Reconstituted Definition of a Relation’, which was based on axiomatic set theory. At the time, Childs was working on the CONCOMP project for Research in Conversational Use of Computers, which was later to influence the development of IBM’s Conversational Monitor System (CMS) on its Virtual Machine (VM) operating system, which can run other operating systems, including itself.
After joining IBM in a sales office in 1968, I first used VM in 1971 to give demonstrations of an IBM information retrieval product for textual, nonformatted data – a precursor of Web search engines – at the IBM research and development laboratory in England. Four years later, I was the systems engineering manager responsible for the acceptance testing of a timesharing computer system purchased by the British Post Office, later becoming British Telecom, then BT.
Then, when studying the way that humans interact with machines during the winter of 1980, I had the idea that active and passive data in both humans and computers is causal and hence a type of energy. With the invaluable assistance of David Bohm, this led me to develop Integral Relational Logic as a universal meta-algebra or Integral Operating System (IOS), which can run all such systems, such as Ken Wilber’s ‘All Quadrants, All Levels’ (AQAL) model, as a ‘universal metatheory’.
The key point is that energetic data patterns do not exist just within humans and computers. Underlying the Universe is a vast network of meaningless data structures before Self-reflective Intelligence coherently interprets them as meaningful information and knowledge within the Cosmic Context of Consciousness. In a nutshell, that is how the Theory of Everything – as a cognitive map of the Totality of Existence, resident in the Cosmic Psyche – is constructed.
In the meantime, Codd’s relational model of data did not go down well with IBM senior management, which was heavily invested in its hierarchical database product Information Management System (IMS), which I was using in 1972 to design a prospective job-matching information system for the Department of Education in London.
Indeed, because Codd exposed some weaknesses in IMS in his paper, IBM was initially quite hostile to his scholarly endeavours, giving others who were more receptive to them the opportunity to implement the relational model ahead of IBM, founding a multibillion-dollar database industry. Foremost among these was Larry Ellison, co-founder of the company that became Oracle in 1977. On 10th September 2025, Ellison briefly became the wealthiest person in the world, although Codd, himself, never benefited from these ‘riches’.
Continuing to follow the parallels between Codd’s career and that of my own, Codd eventually left IBM in 1984, because he was dissatisfied with IBM’s first two relational database management systems, introduced in 1981 and 1983 as SQL/DS and DB2, respectively.
Codd then formed two companies with Chris Date, an early advocate who visited my IBM sales office in 1972, and his future second wife Sharon called The Relational Institute and Codd & Date Consulting Group. For the remainder of his professional life, Codd worked tirelessly to encourage vendors to develop fully relational products, Date tells us in his tribute of his friend and colleague.
For myself, I became fully aware of IBM’s inflexibility in 1978, when attending an IBM meeting on the management and development of Decision Support Systems (DSS) in Toronto, where I met the product and marketing managers for database and timesharing products at IBM corporate head office in New York, the key to interactive computing. They told me that IBM executive management did not seem to understand the changes happening in the industry at the time, at the dawn of the Information Society.
Two years later, my rational visionary abilities led me to see that the global economy holds the seeds of its own destruction within it, which has led me to spend three quarters of my adult life working mostly in solitude.
For, all the divergent streams evolution since the most recent big bang in the physical universe have converged in a megasynthesis of everything, much as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin foresaw, which is a happening that is utterly unprecedented. After billions of years of unfoldment, evolution has become fully conscious of itself within me, revealing the innermost secrets of the Universe—what it is and how it is intelligently designed.
To understand what it means to be human, compared to computers, Life has guided me to perform a thought experiment that starts afresh at the very beginning, much as Julian Huxley foresaw in 1957 in an essay titled ‘Transhumanism’ and Vimala Thakar urged us all to do in 1984 in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach.
In my case, at 11:30 on 27th April 1980, as I was strolling across Wimbledon Common in London, a big bang erupted in the utmost depths of my psyche, leading to the emergence of Integral Relational Logic as the Cosmic Context, Gnostic Foundation, and coordinating framework for a self-reflective, holographic map of the Totality of Existence. This is the Cosmos or Universe, consisting of inseparable nonmaterial and material regions in a primary-secondary relationship, with the former being vastly more extensive than the latter.
So, as this life-changing experience is unprecedented in the entire history of human learning, I have not yet found anyone else on Earth who is aware that they use Integral Relational Logic to form concepts and organize their ideas, even though this is based on simple commonsense. This includes Ted Codd, who unknowingly used this universal system of thought to develop the relational model of data.
This means that IRL has not evolved from the relational model in the horizontal dimension of time, despite appearances to the contrary. Rather, I have been carried from the Alpha Point of evolution to its Omega Point and back again in the Eternal Now, as this diagram illustrates.
But instead of inventing an entirely new language to describe my experiences, I have borrowed many concepts from the history of learning, sometimes changing the meanings of words and terms that denote them, as I look at these nonmaterial images from a Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ perspective.
So, following a suggestion from David Bohm in 1985, I have been studying what he called the ‘archaeology of language’, tracing the original meanings of words to their roots, to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language whenever possible. For etymology derives from Greek etymologia ‘analysis of a word to find its true origin’, properly ‘study of the true sense (of a word)’. It seems that even the ancient Greeks were aware that their forebears were closer to the Truth than they were, as Heraclitus noted.
For myself, I have created an indexed and hyperlinked Glossary of the words and terms I use in Panosophy, tracing their morphemes to their common ancestors, where they are known, like biological evolutionists. The Glossary is currently available as work-in-progress on a subdomain of this one, but needs to repaired and updated by an expert Drupal developer if it is to provide a comprehensive lexicon for the Theory of Everything.
However, all the bifurcating streams of evolution converge in Ultimate Reality, which is ineffable, without any divisions or borders that can be named. In terms of the history of ideas, this indivisibility is a generalization of Bohm’s notion of the holomovement, as a one-dimensional flowing stream, underlying the material universe. Even though it is impossible to describe the Formless Absolute in words, I attempted to do so in a six-page article in April 2025.
At best, I encapsulate the enlightened experience where the experiencer disappears as a separate being in the beautiful Sanskrit word Satchitānanda ‘Bliss of Absolute Truth and Cosmic Consciousness’. So, such an experience is not unprecedented. Just the process by which it has been realized has never been seen before.
Such mystical experiences might seem a far remove from the inherently unstable global economy, which could collapse at any moment, not only because of its increasing mechanization and authoritarianism, but also because of the accelerating pace of abrupt, irreversible climate change.
This prospect for humanity looks pretty scary when viewed from an ego-, ethno-, or anthropocentric perspective. For myself, to be free of such fears, I have learnt to stand outside myself, as the motto of this website indicates. However, doing so doesn’t directly deal with the practical issues we would face when the monetary economy collapses.
I learned about the technology that could theoretically solve this problem when I rejoined IBM at its Nordic Software Development Laboratory in Stockholm in 1990. There I learned about object-oriented modelling methods, which handle classes of both active and passive data, creating some logical and commercial tensions between these methods and relational database management systems, focused primarily on passive data types.
After taking early retirement from IBM, I studied the practicalities of both these data modelling methods at the turn of the millennium, when I occasionally worked as an IT consultant for an American company making advanced computer systems for investment banks at the Stockholm World Trade Center. The information systems architects there had all the skills and tools we would need to cocreate the Sharing Economy, once people are free of attachment to money, as a precarious immortality symbol.
However, as this is clearly not going to happen in the short time we have available before our inevitable demise, I have come to realize that evolution has reached its glorious culmination within me principally to heal a cataclysmic prenatal trauma I suffered in October 1941. So, whether I have a worthwhile contribution to make to humanity at these end times we live in remains most uncertain.