r/alitabattleangel

His entire mad science arc of escalation, duplication, and flan-centric insanity in Last Order orbits around the question of how to solve macro-scale Karmatron Dynamics, when he's already mastered the quantum scale to reconcile things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
But the thing is, when he was in the Ouroboros Simulation, he acquired the intuitive understanding that the thing that makes things interrelate on the macro scale is the very emotional bond of empathy, flying in the face of the need he felt for complete scientific detachment after discovering the secret of Zalem. Then he immediately loses that realization by being decapitated after exiting the dream-sim; with those memories having never been backed up on the secondary biochip in his abdomen.
He spends years and decades before and after the simulation escalating his research because he assumes the missing piece is just a more sophisticated theory and understanding of base scientific principles. That if he can just understand his proven theory of Karmatron Dynamics on a large enough scale, he'll have a unified model for human consciousness, causality, and the structures of society itself that emerges from people interacting with one another. The thing he fails to understand, is that relationships aren't just emergent side effects of being alive, they're part of what define stable identities and societies in the first place. If one wants to understand macro-scale systems of living beings, you can't just treat subjective experience as noise to be flattened.
From living in the simulated Scrapyard with a suppressed Gally and a simulation of Ido and Ido's late pet cat, he comes to realize that maybe being a person instead of 'just' a scientist isn't all that bad, and that maybe society is worth participating in instead of merely observing. This is epitomized by the one panel in the entire series where he removes his glasses and in so doing can be seen as just another person instead of an observer.
Then that realization is lost because of a perfectly mundane consequence of the series' technology: the memories never make it to the abdominal backup biochip before his head is destroyed. It's very darkly funny. He's trapped in a hell of his own making (et tu, karma?), forever looking for a mathematical equation to solve a problem that can only be answered by being a person. It's the tragedy of a man who keeps trying to derive, from first principles, a theorem whose proof requires living the thing he's trying to explain.