This is really good. Wow. Your framework covers a lot of what I've been going over in therapy, actually.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the limitations of perception and interpretation (and thereby of communication and "contact" as you call it). I find myself mourning the fact that there are asymptotic bounds to familiarity and intimacy- a consequence of the informational scarcity created by embodiment, as you describe it. Existential loneliness is a well-established cliché, so I know I'm not unique in this feeling. Do you think this loneliness arises from Ontological PSC? And from the ensuing intellectual obsession with the limitations of communication without being able to experience connection in the moment?
Thank you!! And I actually think what you’re describing is one of the deepest consequences of embodiment itself. The asymptotic limit isn’t a flaw in love or contact. It’s part of what makes recognition meaningful in the first place. If two apertures could fully collapse into one another instantly, there would be no discovery, no gradual revelation, no “meeting.” Sequence depends on partial opacity. You never fully possess another person’s interiority, which is why genuine recognition feels sacred when it occurs at all.
And yes, I do think existential loneliness partially emerges from PSC. Not loneliness in the ordinary sense, but the fracture created when awareness identifies completely with the isolated aperture and forgets the field beneath it. Then the mind becomes obsessed with the impossibility of perfect communication because it is trying to solve separation entirely at the informational level. But some forms of connection are not reducible to total information transfer. Presence, attunement, shared becoming, grief, love, silence. These are forms of recognition that exceed explanation. The tragedy of PSC is that it convinces people that because total transmission is impossible, real contact is impossible. I don’t think that’s true. I think intimacy may actually emerge from approaching the asymptote together without fully collapsing it.
This is a remarkably well put together framework. the parallels between it and “my framework” are striking although arrived at in a different register it seems we land in much of the same territory. Your PSC maps closely to what I’ve explored as the “primary cut”— the moment thought divides experience into subject and object, creating the sense of a separate “I” where there is none. your description of the authority transfer granting the modeled external perception more authority than direct experience is something I’ve written about extensively, some of which you can find in one of my recent pieces “Authority and its roots”. It goes into how we hand over our sovereign sense of inner knowing to doctrine, culture and inherited identities.
“Awareness is the field. Eternal. undifferentiated.” Precisely. Not “my awareness” or “your awareness” as such. I could go on with the parallels. Especially your frame of death topology as I also hold that what dies was never the essential. Identity, performance narrative. These all dissolves, but the actual knows no death.
This is really good. Wow. Your framework covers a lot of what I've been going over in therapy, actually.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the limitations of perception and interpretation (and thereby of communication and "contact" as you call it). I find myself mourning the fact that there are asymptotic bounds to familiarity and intimacy- a consequence of the informational scarcity created by embodiment, as you describe it. Existential loneliness is a well-established cliché, so I know I'm not unique in this feeling. Do you think this loneliness arises from Ontological PSC? And from the ensuing intellectual obsession with the limitations of communication without being able to experience connection in the moment?
Thank you!! And I actually think what you’re describing is one of the deepest consequences of embodiment itself. The asymptotic limit isn’t a flaw in love or contact. It’s part of what makes recognition meaningful in the first place. If two apertures could fully collapse into one another instantly, there would be no discovery, no gradual revelation, no “meeting.” Sequence depends on partial opacity. You never fully possess another person’s interiority, which is why genuine recognition feels sacred when it occurs at all.
And yes, I do think existential loneliness partially emerges from PSC. Not loneliness in the ordinary sense, but the fracture created when awareness identifies completely with the isolated aperture and forgets the field beneath it. Then the mind becomes obsessed with the impossibility of perfect communication because it is trying to solve separation entirely at the informational level. But some forms of connection are not reducible to total information transfer. Presence, attunement, shared becoming, grief, love, silence. These are forms of recognition that exceed explanation. The tragedy of PSC is that it convinces people that because total transmission is impossible, real contact is impossible. I don’t think that’s true. I think intimacy may actually emerge from approaching the asymptote together without fully collapsing it.
intimacy may actually emerge from approaching the asymptote together
Goddamn! What a quote! What a visual! Also, silence as a form of recognition is really interesting. This is a lot to think about.
This is a remarkably well put together framework. the parallels between it and “my framework” are striking although arrived at in a different register it seems we land in much of the same territory. Your PSC maps closely to what I’ve explored as the “primary cut”— the moment thought divides experience into subject and object, creating the sense of a separate “I” where there is none. your description of the authority transfer granting the modeled external perception more authority than direct experience is something I’ve written about extensively, some of which you can find in one of my recent pieces “Authority and its roots”. It goes into how we hand over our sovereign sense of inner knowing to doctrine, culture and inherited identities.
“Awareness is the field. Eternal. undifferentiated.” Precisely. Not “my awareness” or “your awareness” as such. I could go on with the parallels. Especially your frame of death topology as I also hold that what dies was never the essential. Identity, performance narrative. These all dissolves, but the actual knows no death.