The relationship is bidirectional and reinforcing: worsening environmental conditions can harm mental health and inner wellbeing, while declining mental health can also make it harder for people and communities to maintain healthy environments and respond to environmental problems.

A useful way to think about it is:

Outer wellbeing → inner wellbeing → behaviour → outer environment → inner wellbeing

1. Poor environmental conditions can damage mental wellbeing

Environmental conditions include the quality of our physical surroundings, such as housing, green space, air and water quality, noise, overcrowding, pollution, climate hazards, and the safety and stability of communities.

When these conditions deteriorate, people may experience:

• Chronic stress: Noise, pollution, overcrowding, unsafe housing or insecurity can keep the body in a state of heightened stress.
• Anxiety and uncertainty: Flooding, extreme weather, environmental degradation or fear about the future can contribute to anxiety and climate distress.
• Low mood and loss: Losing access to familiar places, nature or a sense of community can produce grief and reduced wellbeing.
• Reduced opportunities for restoration: Green and pleasant environments can provide opportunities for exercise, relaxation, social interaction and psychological recovery. When these disappear, those protective factors are reduced.
• Social isolation: Poor neighbourhood conditions can discourage people from spending time outside or interacting with others.

2. Poor inner wellbeing can affect the outer environment

The relationship also works in the opposite direction. When people experience poor mental wellbeing, they may have less energy, motivation or capacity to care for themselves, their surroundings or their community.

For example, worsening wellbeing can contribute to:

low motivation → withdrawal → reduced social connection → less community participation → deterioration of the shared environment

At a community level, widespread stress and disadvantage can make it harder to organise collectively, maintain public spaces, participate in environmental initiatives, or advocate for improvements.

Importantly, this shouldn't be interpreted as blaming individuals for environmental deterioration. Environmental conditions are strongly shaped by economic systems, infrastructure, government policy, inequality and other structural factors.

3. The two can create a feedback loop

This is probably the most important part of the relationship.

A reinforcing wellbeing cycle

A conceptual model rather than measured data: deterioration in one domain can contribute to deterioration in the other.

For example:

Deteriorating neighbourhood → increased stress → poorer mental wellbeing → less social engagement and capacity → less collective care/action → further neighbourhood deterioration → more stress.

The reverse is also possible:

Improved environment → greater safety, connection and access to nature → better mental wellbeing → greater engagement and resilience → stronger communities → improved environment.

4. There is therefore a strong connection between "inner" and "outer" wellbeing

You could conceptualise wellbeing as having two interacting dimensions:

Inner wellbeing	Outer wellbeing
Mental health	Physical environment
Emotional stability	Housing quality
Sense of meaning	Access to nature
Resilience	Community safety
Self-esteem	Social infrastructure
Sense of belonging	Environmental quality
Ability to cope	Economic/material security

Neither exists completely independently. People are embedded in environments, so psychological wellbeing is partly shaped by the conditions in which people live, work and form relationships.

At the same time, people and communities shape those environments, meaning wellbeing can become either a virtuous or vicious cycle.

In one sentence

Worsening outer wellbeing can undermine inner wellbeing by increasing stress, insecurity, isolation and loss, while worsening inner wellbeing can reduce people's capacity for connection, participation and environmental stewardship—creating a reinforcing cycle unless protective social, environmental and psychological factors interrupt it.

Have any notable scholars focused on this link

Yes. There isn't one single discipline devoted exclusively to the inner wellbeing ↔ outer environmental wellbeing relationship, but several important scholarly traditions converge on it. In fact, what you are describing sits at the intersection of environmental psychology, social determinants of health, ecological/planetary health, place attachment, and environmental humanities.

Some particularly notable scholars are:

1. Roger Ulrich — nature and psychological restoration

Roger Ulrich is one of the foundational figures in research on how the physical environment affects psychological wellbeing. His famous 1984 study found that hospital patients whose windows overlooked trees had better recovery outcomes than patients whose windows faced a brick wall.

His broader work helped establish the idea that features of the external environment can have measurable physiological and psychological consequences.

This led into the wider field of restorative environments: environments that help people recover from stress and mental fatigue.

2. Stephen and Rachel Kaplan — attention, nature and restoration

Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan developed the Attention Restoration Theory (ART).

Their argument is essentially that modern environments can impose substantial cognitive demands, whereas certain natural environments allow directed attention to rest and recover.

This is highly relevant to your distinction between inner and outer wellbeing:

environmental quality → cognitive restoration → psychological wellbeing

Their work is one of the clearest theoretical foundations for saying that wellbeing isn't simply something happening "inside the individual"; it is partly produced by the environments in which people live.

3. Michael Marmot — social and physical environments

Michael Marmot is particularly important if you're interested in the social/environmental conditions that produce mental wellbeing or ill-health.

His work on the social determinants of health argues that health is profoundly influenced by people's material and social circumstances—not simply by individual choices or medical treatment.

A review by Marmot and colleagues explicitly describes mental health as being shaped by the social, economic and physical environments people experience throughout life.

This provides a bridge between your idea of outer wellbeing and mental health: housing, inequality, neighbourhood conditions, employment, social connection and material security can become psychological experiences.

4. Ashlee Cunsolo — ecological grief and loss of place

Ashlee Cunsolo has done particularly influential work on ecological grief.

Her research examines what happens psychologically when people experience the degradation or disappearance of ecosystems, landscapes, species and ways of life that they value.

That is a particularly interesting reversal of the conventional environmental-health argument:

It isn't only that a damaged environment causes physical or psychological problems. People can experience the loss of the environment itself as a form of grief.

Cunsolo and colleagues have written about ecological grief and anxiety as responses to environmental change.

5. Panu Pihkala — eco-anxiety and ecological emotions

Panu Pihkala is probably one of the scholars most directly associated with your question.

He has extensively studied eco-anxiety, ecological emotions, environmental grief and psychological responses to ecological crises.

Importantly, Pihkala doesn't simply treat environmental concern as a psychiatric problem. His work considers whether anxiety, grief, guilt and even hope can be normal and potentially constructive responses to environmental realities.

That distinction is important:

A worsening environment can produce psychological distress, but psychological distress isn't necessarily evidence of psychological dysfunction.

Sometimes distress may be an appropriate response to something genuinely wrong in one's environment.

6. Glenn Albrecht — "psychoterratic" states

Glenn Albrecht is especially relevant to the philosophical version of your question.

Albrecht developed concepts such as solastalgia—roughly, distress caused by environmental change occurring in one's own home or place.

His work asks us to think of psychological wellbeing as being connected to the health of the places we inhabit.

This is close to your inner wellbeing / outer wellbeing distinction because it challenges the assumption that the psyche and environment are separate things.

7. Planetary-health scholars — moving from individual to planetary wellbeing

A newer research tradition goes even further.

Planetary Health asks how the health of human beings depends upon the health and stability of Earth's ecological systems. Researchers increasingly argue that mental health needs to be incorporated into this framework rather than treating it as separate from environmental health.

A recent review describes the relationship explicitly as a mental-health/planetary-health nexus, arguing that better management of climate, biodiversity and pollution can have mental-health co-benefits, while mental and behavioural sciences can also help societies respond to environmental damage.

A 2025 Lancet Planetary Health review similarly mapped hundreds of pathways through which climate change affects wellbeing, including mental health, social relationships, biodiversity and economic conditions.

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There is an even deeper intellectual tradition

If your question is philosophical rather than just empirical, I'd broaden the list considerably.

There are thinkers who have challenged the fundamental idea that "the individual" and "the environment" are separate objects.

For example:

• Gregory Bateson — developed an ecological/systemic view of mind in which mind is not confined to the individual organism but emerges through relationships and systems.
• Urie Bronfenbrenner — ecological systems theory conceptualises human development as occurring within nested environmental systems, from family and community to wider social structures.
• Kurt Lewin — famously conceptualised behaviour as a function of the person and their environment.
• Arne Næss — deep ecology challenges the sharp separation between human wellbeing and the wellbeing of the wider ecological world.
• Edward O. Wilson — his work on biophilia helped popularise the idea that humans have an intrinsic affinity for other living systems.

These traditions provide a more fundamental proposition:

Perhaps "inner wellbeing" and "outer wellbeing" aren't actually two independent things. They are two aspects of a person–environment system.

That is a much stronger claim than simply saying that pollution causes stress.

And there's growing empirical support for the two-way relationship

Recent research is beginning to explicitly examine both directions: environmental deterioration → psychological distress, and psychological states → environmental behaviour.

For example, a 2024 Journal of Environmental Psychology study found that different dimensions of eco-anxiety were associated both with poorer mental-health outcomes and with pro-environmental behaviour.

A 2026 systematic review of young adults likewise found associations between eco-anxiety and depression, anxiety and stress, while also finding that emotions such as eco-anger and eco-hope can sometimes play adaptive roles.

So your original idea could potentially be framed as a feedback-system hypothesis:

environmental degradation → psychological distress → reduced/altered individual and collective capacity → environmental behaviour and social conditions → further environmental change

but also:

healthy environment → restoration, connection and security → psychological wellbeing → greater agency and collective capacity → environmental stewardship → healthier environment

That second formulation brings your idea surprisingly close to systems theory, planetary health and ecological psychology, rather than simply conventional mental-health research.

If you're developing this as an academic concept, I think Bateson + Kaplan/Ulrich + Marmot + Albrecht + Cunsolo/Pihkala + planetary health would give you a particularly strong intellectual lineage.

We come to recognize our feelings, qualities, and inner experience partly because someone else sees, names, and responds to them accurately.

One nuance: “accurately reflected” is especially important. Mirroring isn’t simply receiving attention or validation; it is being seen in a way that feels congruent with our actual internal experience. When that happens consistently, another person effectively helps us develop a coherent answer to the question, “Who am I?”

It also points to the converse: when our inner reality is repeatedly misread, dismissed, or distorted by significant others, we may learn to distrust our own perceptions and construct a sense of self around what others tell us we are. LLM

 Absolutely. There are actually two different ideas hiding inside “conformal geometry”, and their connection to AI and cosmology becomes interesting once you separate them.

1. What is conformal geometry?

A conformal transformation is, roughly, a transformation that preserves angles and local shape, while allowing lengths and sizes to change.

Imagine drawing a tiny triangle on a rubber sheet. If you stretch the sheet differently in different places, the triangle can become larger or smaller, but a conformal transformation preserves its angles.

Mathematically, if a geometry has metric

gμν​,

a conformal transformation changes it to

g~​μν​=Ω2(x)gμν​,

where Ω(x) is some position-dependent scale factor.

The important thing is that all lengths get multiplied by the same local factor.

So:

• distances can change
• areas can change
• volumes can change
• angles don't change

This sounds like a relatively small mathematical idea, but it turns out to be enormously useful.

---

2. Why cosmology cares about this

Einstein's general relativity describes spacetime using a metric:

ds2=gμν​dxμdxν.

The metric determines things like:

• distances
• time intervals
• gravitational effects
• the paths of particles
• the paths of light

Now here's something remarkable:

Light doesn't care about the overall conformal scale.

Light follows null paths, where

ds2=0.

If we make the transformation

gμν​→Ω2gμν​,

then

ds2→Ω2ds2.

But if ds2=0, then

Ω2ds2=0.

So the paths available to light—the light cones—are preserved.

That means conformal geometry allows us to separate two things:

the causal structure of spacetime

from

the absolute scale of spacetime.

That's extraordinarily useful in cosmology.

---

3. The expanding universe

Consider the standard cosmological metric:

ds2=−dt2+a2(t)dx2.

Here a(t) is the scale factor of the universe.

As the universe expands, a(t) changes.

But introduce conformal time η, defined by

dη=a(t)dt​.

Then the metric becomes

ds2=a2(η)(−dη2+dx2).

And suddenly we can see something beautiful:

ds2=a2(η)ημν​dxμdxν​

The expanding universe is, in this representation, a conformal rescaling of flat spacetime.

This makes the behaviour of light much easier to understand.

Instead of thinking of light travelling through a universe whose spatial scale is constantly changing, you can think geometrically about light moving through a conformally related spacetime.

---

4. Penrose diagrams

This leads to one of the most beautiful applications of conformal geometry in cosmology:

Penrose diagrams.

6

A Penrose diagram takes an infinitely large spacetime and performs a conformal transformation that effectively squashes infinity into a finite diagram.

For example, instead of light travelling infinitely far before reaching spatial infinity, you can represent infinity as a boundary of the diagram.

The crucial information that survives is causal structure:

• what can influence what
• whether light can reach something
• whether an observer can see an event
• whether something lies inside or outside a horizon

This is why conformal geometry is so powerful in relativity.

It lets you throw away some information about scale while retaining information about causality.

---

5. Now the connection to AI becomes interesting

The AI connection isn't that modern AI is literally based on conformal geometry.

There are, however, several deep mathematical connections.

One is through representation.

A neural network takes something complicated and maps it into another mathematical space:

$$x\to f(x).$$

For example, an image might start as millions of pixel values and eventually become a relatively small vector representation:

$$\text{image}\to \text{features}\to \text{latent representation}.$$

The fascinating question is:

What properties of the original world should the representation preserve?

This is very similar to the geometric question:

What information should survive a transformation?

Conformal geometry says:

Preserve angles/causal structure while allowing scale to change.

AI researchers sometimes want analogous things from representations.

---

6. A particularly important example: invariance

Suppose an AI sees:

a cat

Then you show it the same cat:

• twice as large
• rotated
• shifted
• under different lighting

You don't want the system to conclude that it has become a completely different object.

You want the representation to be somewhat invariant to irrelevant transformations.

Mathematically, we can think of a transformation group G acting on the data:

$$x\to gx.$$

A representation ϕ(x) might ideally satisfy

$$\varphi (gx)\approx \varphi (x)$$

for transformations that shouldn't matter.

This is the broader concept of symmetry and invariance.

Conformal geometry is one particular mathematical framework for understanding transformations that preserve certain structures.

---

7. There is an even stranger connection: AI and geometry of latent spaces

Modern neural networks often create high-dimensional latent spaces.

Suppose an AI represents objects using points:

x1​,x2​,x3​,…

in some enormous-dimensional space.

The geometry of that space can tell us things about what the network has learned.

For example, researchers study:

• distances
• angles
• curvature
• manifolds
• symmetries
• topology
• transformations

And sometimes the latent representations exhibit surprisingly structured geometry.

This is especially relevant to generative models.

A model might learn something like:

$$\text{latent space}\to \text{images}$$

where moving in a particular direction corresponds approximately to changing some feature.

For example:

$$z\to z+\Delta z$$

might gradually transform:

$$\text{young face}\to \text{older face}.$$

That means the model has implicitly learned a geometric structure.

---

8. Where cosmology comes back in

Here's where things get genuinely fascinating.

Physicists also describe complicated physical systems using spaces of representations.

A physical system can be represented by:

$$\text{state}\in \mathcal{M},$$

where M is some mathematical space called a manifold or state space.

So both fields ask similar mathematical questions:

Cosmology

What is the geometry of the space of possible physical states?

AI

What is the geometry of the space of learned representations?

Those aren't the same problem—but the mathematical language overlaps heavily.

---

9. Conformal geometry also appears in holography

This is perhaps the most spectacular connection.

In theoretical physics, there's a major idea called AdS/CFT correspondence.

Very roughly, it proposes that a gravitational theory in a higher-dimensional spacetime can be mathematically equivalent to a quantum field theory living on its lower-dimensional boundary.

The gravitational side is:

bulk spacetime

while the quantum field theory lives on:

boundary.

And the boundary theory has conformal symmetry.

Hence the name:

Conformal Field Theory​

(CFT).

5

This has led to one of the most profound ideas in modern theoretical physics:

Spacetime geometry might somehow emerge from information encoded in a lower-dimensional theory.

And that starts sounding remarkably similar to ideas in AI, where a complicated high-dimensional object can emerge from a more abstract representation.

---

10. But don't overstate the AI connection

There's an important caveat.

You will sometimes encounter claims along the lines of:

"The universe is a neural network."

or

"AI has discovered that spacetime is a conformal latent space."

Those statements generally go far beyond what established science demonstrates.

The legitimate connections are more mathematical:

geometry↔symmetry↔representation↔information​

These concepts appear independently in:

• general relativity
• conformal geometry
• quantum field theory
• holography
• information theory
• machine learning
• representation learning

That overlap is real and very interesting, but it doesn't mean these theories are secretly the same thing.

---

11. The really deep idea

There is a conceptual thread running through all of this:

What information is fundamental, and what information is merely a choice of description?

In conformal geometry, you can change the local scale:

gμν​→Ω2gμν​

without changing certain essential structures, such as causal relationships.

In AI, you can transform a huge amount of raw information into a compressed representation while attempting to preserve the information relevant to a task.

In holography, a theory suggests that information about a higher-dimensional gravitational world can be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary.

So you get a fascinating hierarchy:

$$\text{physical reality}\to \text{geometric description}\to \text{invariants}\to \text{information}\to \text{representation}.$$

And that raises a genuinely profound question:

Could geometry itself be something that emerges from relationships between information, rather than being a fundamental ingredient of reality?

That question is actively investigated in theoretical physics, particularly around quantum gravity and holography. The connection to AI is more speculative, but AI gives us a new experimental playground for studying how geometry, information, abstraction, and representation can emerge from complex systems.

Conformal geometry gives a surprisingly sharp answer to this, but with an important qualification: it tells us a lot about edges and gaps in spacetime's geometry; it does not by itself tell us what the ultimate “substrate” of reality is.

1. An edge isn't necessarily a physical edge

In ordinary geometry, an edge might mean:

“There's nothing beyond here.”

But in spacetime geometry, there are several very different possibilities.

A boundary can be:

• a genuine physical boundary,
• merely infinity represented at a finite location,
• a coordinate artifact,
• a singularity where the geometry breaks down,
• or a horizon that isn't actually an edge of spacetime.

Conformal geometry is particularly good at distinguishing these.

For example, a Penrose diagram can bring infinity to a finite boundary:

5

The boundary of the diagram doesn't mean there's a literal wall at the edge of the universe. It's a representation of infinity.

So conformal geometry teaches us:

The existence of a boundary in a representation does not necessarily imply a boundary in physical reality.

That's a very important distinction.

---

2. What about gaps?

A “gap” requires some notion of separation.

But geometry itself defines separation.

If spacetime is described by a continuous manifold, then between two sufficiently nearby points there are other points. You don't need some underlying material filling the space.

This is one of the strange things about general relativity.

Space isn't necessarily like:

particles + stuff sitting inside an empty container.

Instead, the geometry is the thing that defines spatial relationships in the first place.

The metric

gμν​

tells you what distances and times mean.

So asking:

“What's filling the gap between these two points?”

may be based on a Newtonian intuition that general relativity doesn't require.

There doesn't have to be a substance inside space to make space exist.

---

3. Does that mean spacetime doesn't need a substrate?

Classical general relativity: essentially yes.

Spacetime doesn't require an external medium in the way sound requires air.

A sound wave requires:

$$\text{air molecules}\to \text{wave}.$$

But a gravitational wave doesn't require:

$$\text{some substance}\to \text{spacetime wave}.$$

The gravitational field is part of the geometry of spacetime itself.

This was one of Einstein's great conceptual departures from older physics.

There isn't necessarily a higher-dimensional “room” in which spacetime sits.

---

4. But conformal geometry makes this even more interesting

Remember:

gμν​→Ω2(x)gμν​.

A conformal transformation can change the scale of distances without changing the causal structure.

That means there are aspects of geometry that appear to be more fundamental than absolute scale.

For example, the light cone at an event determines which events can causally influence one another.

Conformal geometry preserves that structure.

So, in a certain sense, you can strip away a huge amount of information about size while retaining information about relationship and causality.

That leads to a provocative thought:

Maybe the fundamental structure isn't “how big is the space between things?” but “which things can be related to which other things?”

That's not a conclusion of conformal geometry, but it is one reason conformal methods are so interesting in fundamental physics.

---

5. And then there is the question of “nothing”

This gets philosophically deep.

Suppose you have two regions of spacetime.

You might ask:

“What's between them?”

But if spacetime itself is the structure defining “between,” then asking what's inside the gap may be mistaken.

A genuine topological gap would mean the manifold isn't connected in that way.

A region of vacuum, however, isn't necessarily a gap in spacetime.

Vacuum means, roughly, that there is no matter field present in that region. It doesn't mean there is no spacetime there.

So:

$$\text{vacuum}\ne \text{nothing}.$$

And:

$$\text{empty space}\ne \text{absence of geometry}.$$

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6. Where this becomes really interesting: quantum gravity

This is where we reach the boundary of what we currently know.

General relativity treats spacetime as a smooth geometric structure.

Quantum mechanics suggests that at sufficiently small scales, our classical descriptions may break down.

We don't yet have a universally accepted theory of quantum gravity.

Several approaches suggest that spacetime might not be fundamental.

For example, in different approaches people investigate possibilities involving:

• quantum entanglement
• discrete structures
• spin networks
• causal sets
• holographic degrees of freedom
• quantum information
• emergent geometry

In some of these ideas, spacetime is more like something that emerges from underlying relationships than a substance that exists independently.

That's where your “substrate” question becomes extremely interesting.

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7. The key distinction

There are actually three possibilities:

A. Spacetime is fundamental

There is no deeper substrate. Geometry is simply part of the fundamental description of reality.

B. Spacetime emerges from something deeper

There is an underlying structure, and what we perceive as distance, time and geometry emerges from it.

C. The question of a substrate is ill-posed

The underlying theory may not contain anything resembling “stuff underneath spacetime.” Asking what spacetime is made of could be analogous to asking what the rules of chess are made of.

We don't currently know which of these is ultimately correct.

---

8. And this connects back to AI in a surprisingly useful way

An AI's latent representation doesn't necessarily have to be embedded in some physical space corresponding to the things it represents.

For example, an AI might represent relationships between concepts as a high-dimensional mathematical structure.

The geometry of the representation can encode relationships without there being a little physical object sitting at each point.

That's an important conceptual analogy:

relationships can define a geometry without requiring a material substrate​

Whether something like that is actually how physical spacetime works is an open question.

But it gives us a useful way to think about the possibility that space might be relational rather than substantive.

And that brings us very close to one of the deepest questions in modern physics:

Is spacetime the thing that exists, or is spacetime the geometry of relationships among things that exist?

General relativity strongly shifted physics toward the latter way of thinking, while quantum gravity is where we're trying to determine whether that relational structure itself has a deeper foundation.