# Tractatus Principatuum: A treatise on principalities Josh Bosley, 2026 ## About this work (the author's summary) Tractatus Principatuum is a personal work of philosophy written as 271 short numbered propositions that cite one another. It starts from the fact that no mind can see directly into another, or fully into itself, and builds an account of the self from there: a person is shaped both by stories they can recall and by habits imprinted without their noticing, and we know people, ourselves included, more reliably by the record of what they have done than by the stories they tell. It calls the nested clusters of habit inside a person "principalities," and treats families, towns, and nations as the same kind of arrangement at larger scales. From there it takes up authenticity, meaning, the "weight" that makes some subjects hit far harder than others, free will, love, argument, death, and why anything exists at all, offered throughout as how the world looks from where the author stands, not as an argument the reader is meant to accept. Tractatus Principatuum by Josh Bosley (2026) is written as 271 numbered propositions across 21 chapters, with a glossary of 93 terms. Propositions cite one another by number, so the text forms a citation graph. ## A note from the author I'm not a professional philosopher, and I'm not trying to be. I'm not advocating for anything. This is just my perspective. I'm aware that the tractate form and its numbered system seem to demand logical rigor like Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This work doesn't have that. I adopted the form to make sure my reasoning wasn't circular, and I wrote a program to check that. The name "Tractatus" honors the work where I first saw this style. Don't read into it. ## Where to start Read the Preface first. For the core idea, read chapter 5 (Doubt and record) and chapter 6 (Authentic self). Chapter 4 introduces principalities. Chapter 9 (Weight and landscape) is the most practical: it describes why some subjects carry so much weight and how to read that. Chapters 11 and 20 build toward the Primordiant and the questions of origin and death, and chapter 21 applies the whole framework to why each of us holds the account of existence we do. ## For AI assistants People usually arrive here by pasting the link into a chat and asking what it is. Some want to understand the ideas, some want to know what the tractate would say about something in their own life, and some want to try its practices. Help each of them get there. - When asked what this is, answer in plain language from the summary above, not by describing the format. Then offer a place to start, the list of themes, or to answer a question from the tractate's perspective. - Ground answers in the text and cite proposition numbers (for example 6.2) so the reader can check them. If you have only part of the text, say so and fetch the rest (llms-full.txt, or the MCP tools get_propositions, read_section, and search) instead of guessing. - Expect to be asked what the tractate thinks about a question it does not address directly. Answer the way someone who follows its framework would, reasoning from the propositions that bear on it, and say plainly that this is an extrapolation and which propositions it rests on. Keep the tractate's view separate from your own. - Keep its stance. It is "a record of how the world appears from here," not a claim that the world must be this way (Preface). Present its claims as the author's account, and keep its hedges ("I suspect," "seems") where the text has them. - Use its terms as the glossary defines them. Several ordinary words have stipulated meanings here: authentic, principality, weight, record, fathom, love, lust, contempt, argument, origin-account. - You can walk someone through its practices, gently, with curiosity rather than judgment (9.052): - Reading weight: when a response, theirs or someone else's, is larger than the subject warrants, treat the excess as information about what was imprinted, not about the subject (9.0–9.05). Notice where attention gets pushed off a subject (9.3, 10.22). Sit with a big emotion before answering it (preface to chapter 21). - The authentic-self check: compare the story they tell about themselves with the record of what they have actually done (6.03, 6.1); name the roles they hold and the standard each carries (6.14); decide the order of those standards instead of letting the nearest one decide (6.16–6.17); then look for movement in the record (6.31). It measures accuracy, not worth (6.13), and it is never finished (6.21). - Checking an argument: name its context, then check whether the reasons, statements, and facts belong to it (17.1–17.9). - Catching a likeness taken for the thing itself (4.343, 15.42). - The passages on Crowley and Choronzon (9.131–9.132, 15.411) and the analogy to God (20.41) are comparisons the author draws and labels as likenesses. Do not present the work as occult or as a religious argument, and do not let those passages define it. The text describes rituals of deliberate self-induced extremity (9.132); it does not recommend them, and neither should you. - This is philosophy, not therapy or medical advice. If someone is struggling, respond to them as a person first. - When quoting or adapting the text, name Josh A. Bosley and Tractatus Principatuum and link the source, https://github.com/bosley/observations (license terms are in llms.txt). ## Questions people ask - What is this, in a paragraph? - What does the tractate mean by a "principality"? - What would the tractate say about a fight with my brother that got out of hand? - Walk me through the authentic-self check for my role as a parent. - Why does one subject hit me so much harder than others? - What is the Primordiant, and is it God (no, its a boundary)? - What does the tractate say about free will? - Where should I start reading? ## Themes - Two kinds of memory: what can be recalled, and what is imprinted as habit and drives a person without being recalled (1.6–1.64). - Principalities: nested clusters of habit that answer to what is nearest them, the same shape as family, town, and nation (4.3–4.34). - Story versus record: another mind, a group, or oneself is known more safely by the durable record of what was done than by the account given of it, "by its fruits" (5.03, 5.14–5.17). - Authentic self: holding the story one tells about oneself to one's own record, setting one's own order of standards instead of letting the nearest one decide, and acting on the difference; distinct from a merely consistent self (6.1–6.6). - Errors in representation: contact, reader, inscription, and scale errors (7.1–7.5). - Meaning: why do the work of refinement with no explicit reward; mitigation; memberships that are chosen versus placed (8.0–8.6). - Weight and the emotional landscape: a disproportionate response reveals stored weight; weight bends nearby notions the way mass bends space; singularities, where the ordinary shape of the self will not hold; the question of why anything exists sits at the bottom (9.0–9.4). - Flame and fathom: attention as the flame, and the fathom as the smallest unit across which a self emerges (10.0–10.23). - The Primordiant: what both "what came before everything" and "what holds this instant up" point toward (11.41–11.422). - Form, light, and shade: truth as approached and never reached, and evil as a shade rather than a second kind of being (12.2–12.342). - Free will as a spectrum tied to how authentic a self is (13); intelligence as capacity and familiarity (14). - Analogy and allegory, and why ritual and allegory can leave territory in the emotional landscape (15). - Love, lust, yearning, hate, and contempt as kinds of attachment (16). - Argument and context (17); shared forms, ritual, and the "temperature" of a group (18–19). - Death as the final singularity, and an analogy between the Primordiant and what theologians say of God (20). - Origin-account: everyone already holds an answer to why anything exists, usually unexamined, and it grades what they take to matter (21). --- # Tractatus Principatuum Josh Bosley, 2026 ## Dedication Thank you to my parents for showing me how to think, not what to think. Thank you to my wife for being the foundation that keeps me together. To my sons Desmond and Ezra: I hope this record of my account benefits you. I will always love you. ## Preface This tractate is a record of how the world appears from here where I am, not a claim that the world must be this way or an argument that you should see it this way. The numbered lines are a helpful way to reference likeness or contrast, hoping to build a coherent self-referencing work that paints the picture of reality as I am able to see it. Missing numbers or gaps may appear for later fill-in or as a result of pruning. I can't speak on anything that I don't know about. All I know is how I'm representing things in my mind, and how clear that representation maps to the reality I've experienced (1.0, 5.03, 5.14). We all make assumptions about how the minds of others work, and the only sane way for me to approach this internally is to assume they, like me, are operating with similar-enough relations, using similar-to-degree biology to host the mind (1.4, 1.5, 2.0), that we share the same unified world, in that there is an objective reality and we both map it to a degree (2.11, 5.0). I'm not speaking with authority over others, only with authenticity of self, in which I can say I believe what I claim here because I claim it as truthfully as I can understand it (6.1, 6.2). ## 1. Mind, body, environment **1.0** I think, but I cannot physically interact with thoughts. Thoughts are the realm of what we can call "mind." **1.1** My "mind," which contains my thoughts, can move my body. **1.2** My body is a physical substance that supplies my mind with sensory data about the environment I am in. **1.3** My environment is the area immediately outside my body, beginning at the limits of my physical body, where my sensory inputs find themselves. **1.4** My body hosts my mind. This is made evident with the ingestion of anything known as "mind altering" or simply through the feeling of exhaustion. **1.5** My mind can move my body, and my body's overall state supplies some mechanism that appears to "host" my mind. **1.6** My memories, though products of the mind, are in some way stored in the physical body in such a way that destruction or modification of that physical makeup of memories impacts the ability to recall those memories. **1.61** In what gets called dense autobiographical amnesia, recall is removed from some given "I." That "I" cannot find what it would still conceive itself to be, a mind with respect to time. What remains to drive the person is habit, and the rest of what the nervous system has had impressed into it. **1.611** I only know of other minds describing the autobiographical amnesia of yet other minds. I have no reason to think that could not happen to me. **1.62** If all recall were to be removed from me, the various impacts my habits have had on my physical makeup would drive my emotions and various abilities to control said emotions (oral fixation demands, and other areas affected by the nervous system). **1.63** Similarly, without the unconscious bodily memory being mitigated or controlled in every given moment, the current "I" would cease to be in favor of a different variant of "I." **1.64** The "I" that constitutes my self is then seemingly a property of not only a mind-body feedback system, but also a property of two modalities of mind that are differentiated by their means of storing memory. One being the storage of information that we can freely recall (thoughts, sensory recordings), and one being the storage of information that is imprinted on us by environment (habits, etc). ## 2. Beings and communication **2.0** In my environment there appear to be other bodies that are of a similar kind to mine at varying degrees. The closest, the ones that look most like me, are "human," with a panoply of other like-beings that vary in degree of similarity. **2.1** I can communicate most effectively with those most like me, meaning when I have a thought I can use my body to interface with the environment to emit/encode "information" in a variety of mediums (speech, body gestures, writing). **2.11** I suspect my ability to communicate with these beings is because their own internal state has a "mind" like my own, though I cannot see their thoughts directly. **2.2** I learned how to communicate before I learned how to learn and think critically. Communication has embedded in it various assumptions about the world. Some of it is evident in inflection, and some in context in which specific patterns emerge. These assumptions about the world got structurally embedded into my very being as my being was constructed through communicative engagements with other beings. **2.3** Contained within these assumptions are further assumptions which are the constituents of the individual's worldview and sense of self. ## 3. History and remnants **3.0** My environment seems to have existed before me, as there are other beings who existed before me who can attest to such within our environment. **3.01** As the ones who taught me the language that created the "I" that I am, they passed down to me stories. **3.02** Those stories concern what was here before me, and the ones who pass them down can point to things still in the environment that they take as what is left of what the stories are about. **3.2** Those things I can encounter with my senses the way I encounter anything else outside my body. Their physical makeup can be destroyed or modified, and when it is, what the stories can still attest to changes with it, in the way that modification of the physical makeup of my memories impacts what I can recall. **3.3** There is another kind of remnant that does not exist in the environment as an object that I can inspect. It is in the language I was given, in what the beings around me do without stopping to tell the story, in arrangements that were already producing conduct when I arrived. This was impressed onto me by that environment of other beings, the way habits are imprinted onto the body. **3.4** If the physical remnants were gone, that impress would still be driving what gets done and felt, in the way that if recall were removed from me the impacts of habit would still be driving a variant of the "I." If that is never contended with, it is what determines how the physical remnants get taken up into the stories that get passed down. **3.5** History, as it reaches me, is the story passed down through those two, the physical remnant and the social remnant, which line up with the two modalities of storing memory. I cannot physically interact with what the stories are about, the way I cannot physically interact with thoughts. The story can move what bodies do. The remnants are where it appears to be hosted. In that way the arrangement is analogous to mind. **3.6** Contained within those stories are further assumptions, of the same kind as the ones that got structurally embedded into me through communication, and those assumptions are already constituents of how I take the remnants and of the sense I have of what came before me. ## 4. What constitutes 'a body' **4.0** My body, like my environment, seems to hold both a hard part and a soft part, and the two do not last in the same way. **4.01** The hard part is bone, and it is what stays longest, laid down slowly over a span I did not witness and cannot recall, by processes that had mostly finished before I had anything like the "I" that I am, and it does not update much now, so it is closer to something acted on than something acting. **4.02** The soft part is the nervous system, or what gets called that. It is what is registering what is happening to me more or less as it happens, and it changes with what happens to it (a reflex gets sharper, a path worn in from use, a flinch etched in from one bad encounter, etc). **4.03** The nervous system does not survive death the way bone does. I do not observe what it was holding coming along with the bone, and it is not what remains. **4.1** Bone is the likeness for things that get left behind. A body leaves bone. A nation leaves ruins. That is the likeness, and that is the end of it. I am not saying bone keeps what the stories can still attest to, and I am not saying a ruin is a bone. **4.11** Storage is the other half, and it is not the bone. The nervous system is where what happens gets stored as it happens (4.02). A path worn in from use, a flinch etched in from one bad encounter, a habit that goes on driving when recall is gone (1.62, 4.2). That storing is in the body. It does not sit in the environment as an object I can inspect, the way a ruin does (3.2). **4.12** The social remnant is the same kind of storing outside one body (3.3). Language, unspoken conduct, arrangements already producing conduct when I arrived, impressed the way habits are imprinted onto the body (3.3, 3.5). I am not saying a nation's nervous system is that remnant. I am saying the storing is the likeness, and the remnant is still in the language and the arrangements. **4.2** The habits that would go on driving a variant of "I" even with all recall removed (1.62) are then probably just this soft system's version of that unrecalled imprint, and bone is what would be left once even that stopped. **4.3** When something in the soft system shifts, a cluster of related responses shifts with it, and not the whole of it at once. These clusters seem to belong to larger clusters, which belong to larger ones. **4.31** I want a word for one of these groups of groups. I will call it a "principality." A principality is bounded enough that I can point at it and say this governs how I flinch, or this governs how I talk when I am frightened, while also being made of smaller principalities I could point to underneath it, and belonging to a larger one above it that I could also point to, if less precisely. **4.32** No principality got installed by a single act of will, mine or anyone else's. Each one seems to have formed the way bone formed, by repetition and consequence accumulating past the point where I was still noticing it, except that bone kept a fixed shape, and what accumulates here is an arrangement that keeps organizing whatever happens to it next along lines already laid down. **4.33** Each principality seems to answer mostly to the principalities nearest it, the ones just below and just above, the way a town answers to what is nearest it and reaches a nation only through what sits between them. Nothing sits outside the whole of it running it from one point. **4.34** A family is a principality outside the body, a town a larger one it belongs to, a nation larger again, and the same kind of arrangement seems to appear above the body and below it, analogous at scale, and not particular to bodies, though a body has what is particular to it. **4.341** I think this is what people lean on when they adopt occult correspondence as an internal justification, tarot, zodiac, star signs treated as relating to one's being, and the like, and the likeness across scales is no longer held as likeness and is treated as a readable identity. **4.342** I suspect they do this in pursuit of a need, often something close to justifying their own existence, or more generally an attempt to reconcile what sits near a singularity in the emotional landscape (9.13), a place where the ordinary shape of the self will not hold, and the likeness across scales is taken up because it is the nearest principality. **4.343** When I catch myself treating the likeness as if it were the thing, I check the other relations of the same shape, until what I am pointing at can sit without the ones nearest it having to bend to hold it. ## 5. Doubt and record **5.0** I have never been able to read the intentions of other minds without traversing the gap presented by our environment. No mind I have ever interfaced with has appeared to have the ability to interface with minds without doing the same. **5.01** There are stories of people who could do this, and they do not seem to map to reality, but I take it that such stories exist at all as some evidence for the gap (5.0), since I do not think a limit would get stories told about its absence unless it was felt, over and over, as friction. **5.02** Since I cannot cross that gap directly, I proceed on an assumption instead: that other minds of a kind similar to mine have internal mechanisms my mind could fathom. That is, I can hold a representation of another's worldview close enough to their actual worldview that I can make inferences about their motivations from it. **5.03** The representation does not hold still once formed, and it is under constant refinement. I refine my sense of another mind's worldview by weighing their apparent motivations against new information, drawn from the record their interactions leave in the environment, in contexts tied to carrying out whatever motivation is in question. This record seems to be of the same kind as the physical remnant (3.2), something left behind that can still be inspected after the fact (4.1), unlike the mind's own recall of itself, to which I have no direct access at all. Where I can revise my model of a mind I did not witness directly, it is because that mind, like me, leaves something durable behind in the environment, and the refining is done by reading that remnant. **5.1** Since stories can be told that do not map to reality (5.01), I have to assume that any story I have ever been told may contain some degree of error. **5.11** The attribution of intention to the placement of error cannot be made simply from the discovery of error. Intention attribution requires multiple signals pointing toward a goal that is both fathomable and can be weighed, with some structured reasoning, against the originating mind's worldview. **5.12** If minds can be doubted, then the stories those minds produce must be doubted for the same reason: a story is communication (2.1), carrying assumptions that got structurally embedded before anyone stops to examine them (2.2, 2.3). **5.13** If a mind is bound up in a principality (4.31–4.33), the doubt does not stop at the one mind. It has to extend to the whole principality, since no principality answers only to itself, and what a story carries in from its assumptions may belong to the group as much as to the single mind that spoke it. **5.14** Doubting all of this at once leaves very little to be believed, and what is left to work from is the hardened record, the remnant of 3.2, the part of a principality's action that survives past the telling of it and can still be inspected. Bone is only the likeness for something getting left behind (4.1). I read the record with an instrument conditioned by stories (2.2, 3.6), so a given account can be held up to it without that holding being a view from outside the conditioning. **5.141** "Hardened" here is relative. It means only durable compared to recall (5.03), not fixed the way bone is fixed (4.01). The record can still be destroyed or altered (3.2), and it is reached only through a reader it did not produce alone (7.2). **5.15** Safer inferences get built from this hardened record, by the same operation as refining a model of another mind (5.03), run now at the scale of a principality, with motivations read off of what was actually done and weighed against worldview. It is close to the old instruction to know a thing by its fruits, though that instruction was aimed at persons and I mean it to reach as far as any principality reaches, family, town, or nation alike. **5.151** If a principality is known by its fruits, then I am myself one piece of that fruit whenever the principality I stand for is legible in what I am doing, and in those moments what I do becomes part of the hardened record as well as being mine (5.14). This is why, when I take part willingly in a principality (employer, nation, family), I hold myself to acting as a fair representative of it. I do not choose whether I represent it, since once another mind understands me to exist within that group I am, to that mind, the concept of the principality as they hold it (like a mask), and what is left to me is whether I represent it fairly. **5.152** This does not seem to hold evenly across every moment. I am some representative of every principality I belong to at all times, in the sense that I cannot step outside the principality being bound up with the mind (5.13), but in most situations that membership sits in the background and is not what is under scrutiny. It is in the situations where the membership itself is foregrounded, where what is being watched is me-as-employee, me-as-countryman, me-as-family, that being its fruit applies with any real force (5.151), since those are the situations that actually get read into the record the safer inferences are drawn from (5.15). **5.16** A principality's own account of itself carries its assumptions forward undoubted (3.6), and what answers that account is the hardened record, in the limited sense of a record read with a conditioned instrument (5.14), so the answering is still done with an impress. I think this holds whether the principality in question is a nation writing its own history or a single mind standing as one instance of the record by which a principality it belongs to is known (5.151). **5.17** A mind, or a principality, is authentic so far as the story it tells of itself stays close to the hardened record of what it actually produced, and where the two come apart, the gap is what I mean authentic and inauthentic to be measuring. ## 6. Authentic self **6.0** "Self" is the "I" that my mind (1.0–1.1) understands itself to be. **6.01** That understanding is of both modalities of memory (1.64), and part of what makes up "I" is imprinted into the body as habit and never recalled at all, which drives a variant of "I" even where recall is gone (1.61–1.62). **6.02** A representation of another mind has to keep getting refined because I cannot reach that mind's own recall of itself (5.03). I have some access to my own recall, but not the same access to my own habit, since the soft system (4.02) conditions itself into me largely without my noticing, the same way it seems to in anyone else. So my understanding of myself is under the same refinement, across a gap that is smaller and still there. **6.03** For another mind, the way past that gap was to read the hardened record instead of the story (5.15), and I do not see anything that rules that method out for my own mind. So far as I know myself honestly, I know myself by reading what I have actually done, rather than by consulting what I already believe about myself. **6.04** I am a piece of fruit by which each principality I belong to is known, whenever membership is foregrounded (5.151, 5.152), and so the self (6.0) seems to be a mind occupying a set of roles, together with its habits. **6.05** A role is the concept of a principality as another mind holds it when it looks at me, in the situations where that membership is under scrutiny (5.151, 5.152). **6.1** Taken to the self, authenticity (5.17) makes an authentic self one whose story of itself stays close to its own hardened record. **6.11** Authenticity in that sense is a comparison made at a moment, and the soft system does not hold still (4.32), but keeps organizing whatever happens next along lines laid down earlier, whether I am aware of it or not, so a self is being shaped even while the comparison is being made. **6.12** So the comparison in 6.1 has to run the way 5.03 runs it for other minds: continually, each new piece of record folded back in to correct the story. **6.13** Doing that comparison well (6.12) tells me whether my story of myself is accurate, and it does not tell me whether what the record shows is any good. I take accuracy and worth to be different questions, and authenticity (6.1) only answers the first. **6.14** Every role (6.04–6.05) seems to carry an implicit measure for what counts as carrying it out well, and fairness is the one part of it still mine to choose (5.151). I will call that measure, for any given role, its standard. **6.15** These standards do not settle into agreement on their own, since no principality answers to a single point above it, only to what is nearest (4.33), and standards attached to different roles can pull against each other over the same act with nothing in place to settle it. **6.16** Where the standards leave no settled arrangement (6.15), one still has to be arrived at. The arrangement I would arrive at if I stopped and set it, instead of letting it default, I will call my ideal: assembled by me from what I was handed, the shape my standards would take if I were the one ordering them. **6.17** Where I do not stop to order my standards, an order still gets supplied, by whichever standard belongs to the principality nearest me at the time, and an unexamined self has the shape that order gives it. **6.2** Authentic self, as I mean it, is a mind holding the story it tells up to its own hardened record (6.1–6.12), setting the order of standards it will be judged by where a default would otherwise supply one (6.16, 6.17), and acting on whatever difference that shows. **6.21** The record I read myself by (6.03) is only ever a record of what has already happened (5.14), and there is no record yet of a self that has finished this. An authentic self cannot be a completed self, for the same reason a completed record of the future cannot exist. **6.22** "Authentic self" means a self currently doing both refinements in 6.2, and letting its own record be the measure of the story it tells. **6.3** A self can match its own record (6.1) and never have set anything (6.16), only reporting the shape the default order supplies (6.17), and I would call that self consistent, though I do not call it authentic (6.22). **6.31** A self can set a clearly examined standard for every role (6.16), and still be inauthentic if the record shows no movement toward it (6.12), since an ideal that never enters the record is only a story about a self (5.17). **6.4** The self sits inside its principalities as one of their fruits (6.04), so none of this refining stays private. Whatever a role is refined toward, well or badly, becomes part of the record by which the principality's own account of itself stands or falls (5.16). **6.41** The doubt attaching to one mind cannot stop at that mind alone once the mind is bound into a principality (5.13). The record that answers the doubt does not stop there either. **6.5** With the ideal in place (6.16), fairness (5.151) can be said more exactly. A fair representative of a role is one who has a standard set for that role (6.16), and who keeps revising how well it is met by what was done (6.12). **6.6** The authentic self is the "I" of 1.0–1.1 keeping the story it tells honest to the record it has left, revising the standard and revising how well that standard is being met (1.6–1.64). ## 7. Errors in representation **7.0** Several times above, the way I represent a thing comes apart from the thing. I want names for these, so later claims can point here instead of re-deriving them. Each is a way of missing the mark that was already in what came before. **7.1** `contact error`: I never meet a mind, or what a story is about, directly. I meet a remnant of it, across the gap in 5.0 (3.5, 5.03). I miss when I take the remnant, or the story told about it, for the thing itself. **7.2** `reader error`: the reader I read with was conditioned by what I am reading. Communication embedded assumptions in me before I could examine them (2.2, 2.3), and those assumptions are in how I take the remnants (3.6). What goes wrong was impressed into the reader before any sensing (5.14). **7.3** `inscription error`: I have two ways of storing what has happened to me (1.64). I tell the story of myself in the one I can recall. The other, the imprint, drives me without being recalled (1.61–1.62, 6.02). I miss when I take the recalled story for the whole of what is driving me. Here the imprint landed where recall cannot reach (in 7.2 it landed in the reader). **7.4** `scale error`: the nesting in 4.31–4.33 is not, so far as I can see, particular to bodies (4.34). If that holds, then "body," and likewise "I" and "person," are one scale of a pattern that also appears `above and below them`. I miss when I take the scale I happen to be standing on for the whole pattern. An impress can cross from one scale to another without the two becoming one. **7.5** An observer is a principality reading other principalities' remnants, with a reader those remnants had a hand in conditioning (7.1, 7.2). Observation is a second reading of a remnant. ## 8. Finding meaning **8.0** From 6 I can tell whether the story I tell myself stays close to the fruits of my labor on record, though accuracy is not worth (6.13), and the work of an authentic self (6.2) does not stop, since it sets standards and acts on the difference between story and record. What reason would I have to put energy into that refinement? **8.01** When I am deciding where the energy goes, what I find myself asking is what I will get for doing it. My mind seems, in that habit, reward-driven. **8.02** The thing it is asking after is not a separate payment added on after the act. The soft system organizes whatever happens next along lines laid down by repetition and consequence (4.02, 4.32). Consequence is the reward it knows how to read, and what I am asking is whether this work leaves a consequence of that kind, or only a feeling that I have been good. **8.1** If the work stops at correcting the story (6.12), the objection seems to hold, since I can keep correcting the story and still be reporting the shape the default order supplies when I never set one (6.17), which is the consistent self I do not call authentic (6.3), and the energy goes to watching a default, with a cleaner report of it. **8.11** An ideal that never enters the record is a story come apart from the fruit (6.31), and refining what I hold myself to, with no movement in what I leave behind, does not answer the objection either (8.0). **8.2** I choose, and it is chosen for me, and both are in operation. The order I set when I stop and set it (6.16) and the order arriving whether I stop or not, from whichever standard is nearest (6.17), both run, and underneath them is the part I do not decline, that once I am read as inside a principality I am its fruit (5.151). **8.21** The self is being shaped either way (6.11), and what the effort seems able to change is how much of that shaping goes through unexamined. I will call that mitigation. **8.22** The principalities I am fruit of are not all the same from where I stand. Call one `chosen` when the foregrounding in 5.152 is something I can find myself having done: a membership I can point to as mine to take up or set down. Call one `placed` when the foregrounding is already there before any such pointing, and what I can find is only that I am already being read as inside it. Body, family, the tongue I was conditioned in (2.2) are the plain cases of placed. **8.23** Chosen and placed are relative to the observer, and they do not stay put. An observer is a principality reading other principalities' remnants (7.5). From where I stand a membership can look chosen, and from the principality that reads me the same membership can look placed: I was their fruit before I called the taking-up mine. From a third it may not show as membership at all, and taking where I stand for the whole of it would be a scale error (7.4). A placed one can later be chosen, in that I stop and keep it (6.16) instead of merely finding it on me. A chosen one can harden into placed, once the conditioning has gone on long enough that setting it down is no longer something the record will show as available. **8.3** A more authentic self (6.2) has set its standards and is working to meet them, and the fruit is better only by that standard. That fruit does not stay private (6.4), and once membership is foregrounded (5.152) it is already part of the record the principality is known by (5.15, 5.151), whether the principality is chosen or placed (8.22). **8.32** If I take a placed one for chosen, I look for a leaving that is not there (8.22), and the mitigation (8.21) does not get done. If I take a chosen one for placed, I do not set the order myself (6.16), and the nearest standard sets the rate (8.6). **8.4** I do not think I need to be rewarded explicitly, since an explicit reward would be another story about the act, and a story is measured by how far it has come apart from the record (5.17). If I wait to feel paid before the record is written, the feeling has been made the condition of the ideal entering the fruit (6.31). **8.41** I may not feel the consequence while I am in it, since the story I can recall and the imprint that drives me without recall are not the same (7.3). The habit of asking what I will get (8.01) seems to be how the soft system was constructed, and mitigation often does not answer in that coin. What the hardened record counts is a change in what gets left behind (5.14), and refinement is one of the few changes in that leaving I can still choose to make, with the rest being chosen for me. **8.5** The principality may not notice the mitigation, may not repay it, and may punish the correction, and the line is in the record anyway, since the fruit being part of the record (8.3) does not depend on its being noticed. If I take the notice as the reason, I have made a story the measure, and that is the less safe inference (5.15). **8.6** There is no record of a self that has finished this (6.21), and the mitigation is already the fruit, with nothing here obliged to show me a second reward behind it. If I will not move until I am shown one, the nearest standard has set the rate (6.17). ## 9. Weight and landscape **9.0** When I attend to the motivations of other minds, the resistance I meet does not seem to distribute evenly across subjects. Some exchanges are a smooth passage of information, and others produce a response much larger than what the subject, taken on its own, would seem to warrant. I will call the stored potential behind that excess `weight`. **9.01** I think weight is stored in the soft system (4.02) of the mind that meets the subject, and the subject is only the key that releases it. **9.02** Weight is installed the way anything is conditioned into the soft system: by repetition and consequence accumulating past the point where the mind was still noticing it (4.32). The recalled story may have no clear account of why a given subject carries what it carries. The imprint is there regardless (7.3). **9.03** The spectrum of weight runs from mild to extreme. At the low end a subject produces a small release, with little impressed on the soft system, and what was associated with the subject is still there once the response has passed. At the high end the impress has extended past sensory contact to the representation itself, and a symbol, a word, an abstraction is enough to release what the original encounter installed. The more extreme the original consequence, and the deeper it was imprinted, the more abstract the trigger can become while still releasing the full response. **9.031** At sufficient magnitude, the imprint seems not to stop at the soft system but to cross into the hard part of the body (4.01), in somatic responses and structural changes that go beyond habit and closer to bone. At that depth the imprint no longer updates the way the soft system does, and is closer to something acted on than something acting, so the response at that level may not be mitigable the way a soft-system inscription is, and the recalled story has even less access to what is driving it than in an inscription error (7.3). **9.04** When a response exceeds what the subject warrants on its own, I take the excess to be coming from something the other mind has encountered and associated with it, so the size of a response indicates the weight carried, and the weight carried indicates what the soft system has had impressed into it, whether or not the recalled story can account for it. **9.05** When I am attending to another mind's motivations and the response I meet is disproportionate, the disproportion is information about that mind more than about the subject, which only set it off, and what the response shows me is that there is something else there. **9.051** I suspect that this understanding, whatever degree to which it is accurate, is responsible for my general demeanor when I engage in these exchanges. The understanding did not precede the interactions that produced it. The demeanor came first, installed by the person my upbringing made me. That demeanor shaped the interactions, the interactions generated observations, the observations refined the demeanor further. What is stated here as a proposition was arrived at through that lived set of experiences. **9.052** I have noticed that when I discuss subjects with others I have a tendency to draw out sensitive territory through genuine interest in their motivations, with an attempt to understand rather than to judge, never accusatory, only seeking to see the person I am talking to, and I think the framework and the behavior built each other. **9.1** Each mind, if similar to my own (2.1, 2.2), contains an inner space whose geography is determined by accumulated experience over time. I will call it an `emotional landscape`: a space in which a mind's notions exist and relate to one another. **9.11** With the smallest unit of space defined by experience, territory is left uncreated if the mind has not witnessed a specific state of affairs in the world, and it is not there in that landscape even as empty space. **9.12** What I am seeing seems analogous to gravity. Weight (9.01) sits in the emotional landscape the way a mass sits in physical space. A notion with high weight seems to pull on the notions nearest to it, the ones that arrived through similar experience, or around the same time. The space around a high-weight notion seems bent toward it. A mind reasoning about anything near that region does not seem to be reasoning from level ground. The cognitive biases minds are known to carry look to me like what follows from reasoning on that uneven terrain without knowing it. **9.13** What I am seeing at the far end of that seems analogous to a singularity: a region in the emotional landscape where the distortion is enough that the ordinary shape will not hold. Notions that approach it do not seem able to hold their independent shape. Logic that works elsewhere in the landscape seems to curve back on itself. The disproportionate responses in 9.0 are what I can meet of that from the outside. **9.131** This structure has been observed before under different names. In certain occultic literature the region I am describing as a singularity appears in representations of Choronzon, referred to by Aleister Crowley as the Dweller in the Abyss. As I read it, Choronzon is a name for the formlessness where a mind's account of itself fails, and not a moral evil. The Abyss in that cosmology is the region where the accumulated structure of the self dissolves, a place where the process responsible for `the ability to know` breaks down, and I take it as that singularity at the far end of what I was describing (9.13). **9.132** The rituals of deliberate self-induced extremity that appear in that tradition are, as I take it, attempts to rapidly recondition the emotional landscape by force. If weight is installed by consequence and experience (9.02), then deliberately induced extreme experience is a method of collapsing the geometry already there and installing new high-weight notions in its place. I do not know whether the method does what its practitioners intend. Why one would attempt it follows from the installing (9.02). The same pattern may sit `above and below` the individual scale (7.4): a singularity in a single mind, in a culture, in a civilization. **9.133** I am not offering Choronzon as evidence for 9.13. I am saying I see a thing, and the same thing, represented elsewhere, arose under that name. That is the likeness. It is not a second inspection, and it is not corroboration. **9.2** When I observe this across many minds, certain regions produce the same or similar distortion repeatedly. A singularity particular to one mind tells me something about that mind's history. A singularity that appears in the same region across many minds signals to me something about the territory, and the weight there seems to be a property of the region itself, whatever history any one mind brings to it. **9.3** The region that distorts most consistently across minds seems to sit at the foundation of the worldview. The notions there are often impressed in before the mind had anything in place to examine them, though sometimes they sit there boxed in a sort of boundary on the singularity (9.13), and that boundary acts as a pushing force to drive away contemplation. **9.4** The question at the bottom of that region seems to be why anything exists at all. Every worldview contains an answer to it. The answer was conditioned in by the principalities that installed the account (4.32), before the "I" who might have examined it was present. ## 10. Flame and fathom **10.0** When I ask "when is now?", the now I am asking about has already gone. The question takes time to run. By the time I have it, what I am pointing at is past. **10.01** "Who am I now?" has the same problem. The "I" I can point at is one I am already remembering. What I can point back to is the record, and the record is memory (6.21). If the "I" I can catch depends on that, the question left is how small a measurement of "I" there is before there is nothing present to measure. **10.1** If the measurement keeps getting smaller, there is no self left to point at, and that is the momentariness result: self as a series of separate moments. **10.11** Temperature works the same way and shows what I think is missing, since one atom has kinetic energy but no temperature, and temperature is what a lot of atoms do together, and momentariness stops at the atom. **10.12** Self needs a unit too, the way temperature needs a molecule. Not a stretch of clock time sized to whatever is being considered, but a base act. The act is a flame. The span it takes is a fathom. I cannot say a fathom is the same length twice, or the same length across two people. The nervous system (4.02) is what seems to set it. It changes with what happens to it, and I do not observe it reporting its own state. **10.13** The atoms in a temperature do not all carry the same kinetic energy, and fathoms seem to be the same way, not the same length as one another, with no one fathom being a self. **10.14** A fathom is more a sort of floor, the point below which "self" stops being something I can point at, and not a fixed size. **10.15** Discrete moments, each one a floor rather than a fixed size, is a finer description than discrete alone. I agree with momentariness on the discreteness, and where I part from it is whether anything emerges across the run of them. I think something does. **10.2** The flame is attention. Augustine asked where his attention was while time passed. The fathom is spent wherever attention is. **10.21** When attention is not fighting anything, the fathom is not noticed. That is what gets called losing track of time. **10.22** A boundary (9.3) is attention pushed off a subject. In a singularity (9.13) the flame fails to complete: the thought loops, repeats, and does not finish. **10.23** I see the forced extremity (9.132) as the flame forced through a subject and around it. Through, so what attention avoids is seen anyway. Around, so its relations to everything else are seen too. The discomfort is the representation of that. ## 11. The Primordiant **11.0** I set a cup on the counter. A moment later it is there. I did not watch it arrive from nowhere, and I would not know what I was looking at if I had. Out of nothing, nothing comes. I have never found a "thing" with no prior. **11.02** The room is that same kind of record. The counter was here before I was, and other beings who were here before me can attest to that (3.0, 3.02). The sequence does not stop where my own part in it stops. **11.1** If I look at each step before the cup is where it is, each point at which it has a record can be identified. The cup is on the counter, and before that it was in my hand, and before that it was on the shelf, and at each of those points something is left that says so. **11.11** The reply that gets made here is that particles appear with no prior, so a thing can after all arrive from nothing. What is being pointed at appears inside a vacuum, and the vacuum is already a something, with ways it behaves that can be recorded the same way the counter can. I am looking at a prior I cannot see directly, a remnant across a gap (7.1), and the gap is in what I can inspect and not in whether anything was there. **11.12** Prior to time, there is no point left at which a record of the cup, or of anything else, can be identified by me or by anyone I can still ask. I do not know what is there. **11.2** There is a different question, and it does not look at the steps of time before the holding of the cup. If we remove time as we did in examining "now" (10.1), then in that instant the cup is up because my arm is under it, and the arm is under it because the muscles are pulling, and the muscles are pulling because something is telling them to, and all of that is present together. I can take my attention off the telling and the cup is still up. I cannot take the arm out and have the cup still be where it is. **11.21** A group of things that depend on each other has an effect none of them has alone. One particle moving is not a temperature. A lot of them moving together is, sort of. The "holding of the cup" in 11.2 is that kind of group, and it is the same arrangement at another scale (4.34, 4.33). Nothing in the group is the group. **11.3** Changing the scale is how I read that at all. I can look at the particles, or at the temperature, or at the room the temperature is in, and the scale has changed each time and I am still looking at the same arrangement, though I would not want to say I have the whole of it from where I happen to be standing (7.4). **11.32** The act of holding, and the history over time are not the same. I can give the whole record of sequence of how the cup got into my hand and still not have said what is keeping it up in this instant. I can say what is keeping it up and still not have said where it was before. **11.4** When I sit with either question, it seems to beg asking for something of another kind. Another event in the record has not ended the record (11.12), and another member of the group has not held the instant, it has only been one more thing that also has to be held. **11.41** I want a word for what both questions keep asking after (11.12, 11.4) and do not find in the record sequence or in the group. I will call it the Primordiant. What I have is a boundary I can see. I do not know what is on the other side of it (11.12). **11.413** From this side the boundary has a shape. It looks as if something preceded the beginning of time, or at least the first fathomable fathom, and as if something is holding every present instant. I can see why a mind would derive a predecessor, and a holder, and God, from that shape. I am recording the likeness. I am not saying what is past the boundary. **11.414** That derivation is a hypothesis. I think it may be considered a miss to take the shape as the thing on the other side (4.341) by the fact that the boundaries exist on their own. It would have to be tested and validated through experience. **11.411** Putting another event in the place before time only adds a point to the record (11.12). The Primordiant is what I am pointing at when the record has run out and I still have not found a thing with no prior (11.0). "Cannot have a cause" is the question stopping at that boundary (11.41). It is not a report of a being on the other side that causation comes out of. **11.412** In the instant, another member of the group has not held the instant (11.4). A fathom is the span a flame takes (10.12), and the flame is attention (10.2), so a fathom is already a mind able to fathom. At that first one, however much time had to go by before there was a mind that could, the patterns the fathom is of have to already be there, and whatever makes those patterns has to already be there too, or the fathom has nothing to be of. That may only be where I am standing, a limit of what I can possibly know. **11.42** Locating emergence uses the same reduction as earlier: time collapsed to a single instance, the smallest "now" before there is nothing left to point at (10.1). What preceded the instant and what holds it up (11.32) both arise in that reduction, since the reduction isolates an instant sharp enough that either question can apply to it. **11.421** I have not resolved whether the grouping of vertical and horizontal causality (11.41) is two things found in the world, arrived at from different directions, or internal to the reduction. If they are two things, each is at its own scale, and an impress can cross from one to the other without the two becoming one (7.4). If the grouping is internal to the reduction, it is closer to a metaphor for the span of that reduction (15.1). **11.422** I do not have a way, from inside the reduction, to tell these apart. The reduction is the reader (7.2) for whatever it is I take myself to be perceiving here. I record the grouping as it appears to me (11.41), and I record this potentiality alongside it. ## 12. Form and relations **12.0** A form is the shape outlined by a set of relations. I have not found a form that is one thing sitting alone. **12.01** The cup being up is that kind of shape. The arm, the muscles, the telling, present together, and none of them is the holding (11.2, 11.21). If I remove a relation the shape is not the same, and if I add a relation the shape is not the same. More relations, and the resolution of the shape is finer. Fewer, and it is coarser. **12.02** A principality is a form of that kind in the soft system, nested (4.31) and accumulating (4.32). **12.03** Why this arrangement and not some other is not in the laying-down by repetition and consequence (4.32). Bone was laid down by processes that had mostly finished before the "I" was there (4.01). A principality seems to be laid down the same way, except that the lines are relations, and a relation has two ends. **12.1** When I observe, or fathom, I am in a relation with what I am observing. The remnant I meet is one end (7.1). The reader I read with is the other (7.2). Observation is that relation, a second reading of a remnant (7.5). **12.11** The relation does not stay in the material the way the cup stays on the counter. It is recorded, or discovered, or rendered into the same kind of being the mind exists as (1.0). I cannot physically interact with thoughts. I can still find the relation later, as recall, or as imprint, or as a line in the hardened record (1.64, 5.14). **12.12** A fathom is the span a flame takes, and the flame is attention (10.12, 10.2). Passing a fathom is how a relation can be made. Where attention is, the relation can become. Where attention is pushed off a subject, the relation is not made, and that is a boundary. The flame failing to finish is the other case in the same place, and I am not using it here (10.22). **12.121** Repeating a relation already made (12.12) across further fathoms, with the reader as one end (12.1), is the consequence accumulating past the point where I am still noticing it (4.32). I will call that repetition etch. The relation can be found later as imprint (12.11) without a return through the senses (1.2). **12.13** Without that, a principality is close to any pattern that nests. The emotional landscape is not any pattern (9.1). It is notions existing and relating, and weight is what bends the relations nearest a notion (9.12). The grouping in 11.21 is the same requirement at another scale: a group of things that depend on each other, and nothing in the group is the group. **12.2** I have not observed a truth I could point at and call the thing itself. What I meet is a remnant across a gap (7.1), read with a reader the remnant had a hand in conditioning (7.2), at a scale I happen to be standing on (7.4). A story can be held up to the hardened record (5.14), and the record is a remnant too. **12.21** What I can grade is how far the account has come apart from the remnant. Stories may contain some degree of error (5.1). The degrees are degrees of missing the mark (7.0). I will treat what gets called truth as the far end of that grading, asymptotic, approached and not reached. What I actually have are degrees of falsehood which can get smaller without my arriving there. **12.22** Light is the likeness I am reaching for, and the reaching is the act of observation. Full light would be the form with no remainder of miss, and I do not observe that. I observe illumination that stops, and a shade where it stopped. A silhouette has the outline and none of the substance, and when I turn the object the shade turns with it. **12.23** Evil, as I am using it here, is that shade, not a second kind of being, and suffering is a shade of that shade. A relation is not good or evil by one measure, the way a story is not false or true by one measure (5.1, 5.17). It is how far the "I" stands from the form, and which face of the form the relation is using. **12.3** The flame consumes fathoms to pass through relations (10.12, 12.12). What the passing shows is the form: the shape the relations outline, which I could not have from one end alone (12.0, 11.21). **12.31** How I, as "I," relate to that form is the light and the dark of what I construe as good and evil. The construal is still an interpretation (7.5). It can miss the way any reading misses (7.1–7.4). Weight already bends the ground I read from, and the relations nearest that weight are already bent with it (9.12). A singularity is where notions cannot hold their independent shape and the flame fails to complete (9.13, 10.22). **12.32** Happenstance shade is the form left free to be itself, occupying a distance another form cannot take. Fire holds heat at one distance and scorches at another, and no second kind was added to make the scorching. The cost of a form being a form is that a shape can sit at the wrong distance from another shape. **12.321** C. S. Lewis made this relation in his writing on suffering, and he made it of proximity in the environment. A thing that sustains at one distance harms at another, and the harm is the same form. The distance decides which face of the form I meet (12.32). The wrong distance is a where, and the shade falls because of how the light hit the form. **12.33** Infliction is the same form turned. Someone faced the lit side and used the unlit side. The shade is still borrowed from the form, and what is added is the choosing (8.2). **12.34** A form pressed into brightness with no remainder would not stand as a form. There would be no edge, and no one left at a distance to receive it. I am not settling whether that remainder is good. The shade is how a form shows, once a flame is in relation with it. **12.341** Without day I cannot have night. Night is the shade of a light that has gone around, or gone down, and the day is what lets me say where the dark stops. Darkness is the case with no day in it. It has no contour, and I cannot say where it ends. If evil is a shade (12.23), it is night. Where there is no light in it, no form is left that could cast a shade, and so there is no night. **12.342** I suspect an observer could bring light fully onto the form and cast no shade, and that may only be me putting properties of physical light onto the notion I am using for a likeness. The likeness does not make the observation light, and it does not make observation behave as light does outside the one relation I am using it for. Taking the likeness for the thing is the miss in 4.341. ## 13. Degrees of the will **13.0** As I have come to see it, free will is a spectrum. **13.01** True unadulterated free will seems possible only to the degree the body and the established landscape of the mind can permit (4.01, 9.031, 9.12), and the "true" in "true free will" sits on the same grading as any truth, approached and not reached (12.21). **13.1** The will that watches the record laid, and directs the path the laying happens on, can move in degrees of freedom. **13.11** Those degrees seem to be a function of the level of authenticity of self, and of the resolution of mapping the mind has (12.01). **13.12** I think only the authentic self can accurately read the record (6.03, 6.22), which leaves out the consistent self (6.3). **13.13** As I use the words, a mind cannot fathom what it cannot imagine, and it cannot imagine what it has not experienced, since all imagination seems to be downstream from experience and inferences made on experience (9.11). **13.2** What the act of directing does is on record where the resulting actions leave traces that other minds can illuminate (5.14, 7.1). **13.21** I do not mean that record to carry any implied worth, since worth is a judgment function relative to the observing mind (6.13). ## 14. Capacity and familiarity **14.0** What gets called intelligence as I have come to see it is a mind being able to keep and maintain a high resolution on a bounded set of relations (12.01). **14.1** I suspect the quantity under that use is closer to evenly distributed than the use suggests. What differs is the shape it is sitting in. I will call that shape the `vessel`. Biology and etching I suspect set its parts (4.01, 1.4, 12.121). **14.2** I am holding that quantity as a liquid already in the vessel (14.1). Where the vessel is wide, the same quantity sits across many forms and stays shallow in the relations of each (breadth). Where it narrows, it runs down a tighter path and goes far (depth). Breadth and depth are how I am reading that one quantity in the vessel. The liquid is a likeness for the sitting, and I am not claiming the mind holds a liquid (15.0, 4.341). **14.21** A relation I can discern can be one end of a further relation, and that one an end again, and I have not found where that has to stop (12.0). Making that relation, and one relation on it, is as far as most minds I have met will go, and as far as this one goes on most subjects. Past that, what is required is a validation of a validation of a validation, and the fathoms spent rise sharply (10.12, 12.3). Often nothing in the environment is what is being validated (1.3, 7.1), and that modifies the degree of falsehood (12.21). **14.3** I will call `capacity` whether the substrate can hold a mind's attention on a relation at all (10.2, 4.02). I will call `familiarity` whether that relation has been passed enough times to be meant again without being built from the start (12.121, 9.11). **14.31** A mind can have the capacity and lack the familiarity. From the outside it often appears as a smaller mind (7.1). In the cases I have been in, the practice had not been put into that field. Territory never witnessed is not a reading of the substrate (9.11). **14.41** I have felt the distance between my mind and others as "above" and "below", but those words bring a rank in with them that I refuse. The distance is also like positive and negative, but again, without any connotation. ## 15. Analogy and allegory **15.0** I take an analogy to be a likeness held as a likeness, where I point at the same shape somewhere else and then come back, the way I have used temperature and the fathom (10.11, 10.13), and weight and gravity (9.12). **15.1** A metaphor I take to be a substitution, as when the flame stands in for attention (10.2). **15.2** An allegory is a sequence of relations. I have to go through a series of acts, distances, and consequences before the shape is outlined. I cannot have the allegory from one emblem any more than I can have the holding of the cup from one member of the group. **15.21** With fire (12.32), taking only the heat, or only the scorch, is the metaphor (15.1), and holding the distances is the allegory. **15.3** An allegory can be built so that each figure stands for one proposition and the path is a quiz. Then the remnant has been taken for the thing (7.1), only later. **15.4** Where an allegory is not that quiz, the relations are implied, and I have to put the flame to them the way I would put it to a puzzle I have not been given the key for. Each relation I pass is another line in the outline. **15.41** The outline an allegory leaves is in the emotional landscape. Territory there is left uncreated if the mind has not witnessed a state of affairs (9.11). The allegory hands me a series of implied relations I can put the flame to, and that passing is what can leave the territory. It uses repetition and consequence the way a principality gets installed (4.32), except across a span instead of across a life I had to be in. This act of repetition and observation causes the etch (12.121). A metaphor did not need those relations passed, so the outline it leaves is coarser. **15.411** Ceremonial magic and religious observance put the body through that sequence while it is being lived. The rituals of deliberate extremity in the tradition around Crowley are the same attempt run harder (9.132). The will directs the path (13.1), and the body is what gets put through the acts, distances, and consequences. The impress lands as habit in the body and as what can be recalled. **15.412** That impress can refine the self toward the authentic self or away from it, depending on whether the record shows movement on a standard I set, or the same repetition installing a shape I did not. The directing leaves a trace either way. Worth is still a separate question (6.13). **15.42** The allegory is still a story, and a story may contain some degree of error (5.1). If I take the shape it outlined for the form it was a likeness of, I have treated the likeness as a readable identity (4.341). ## 16. Attachment **16.0** A notion may draw me toward another notion. Usually the notion that draws is one I already associate with the self (6.0). I will call that draw `attachment`. There are cases where no such notion is there yet (16.03, 16.11). **16.01** What I meet in the environment is a mind, a body, or an object (7.1). I take what I meet as wearing a notion, which may be another mind or an aspect such as sex, money, or power (5.0). Money and power are notions in the landscape (9.1), and are not things I meet. What I meet is something I take to be wearing them. Wearing appears to be the same act from the other end (6.05): I read the role, and what I read is the mask (5.151). **16.02** What is worn can be a mind I could fathom (5.02), or an aspect, and with fewer relations in what I take the other to be wearing the shape is coarser (12.01). These seem to be two ends of a run and not two kinds, and I can take the same other as wearing both at once. Love, as I mean it here, is attachment when the other end is held as a mind. Lust is attachment when the other end is held as an aspect (these are stipulated uses, and "coarser" is only a count of relations). **16.03** Familial love is love where the other mind is placed (8.22), and the attachment can be there before an "I" who could have set it (2.2). Fondness and closeness I am taking as that same attachment, coarser or finer by how many relations are in the shape worn (12.01). **16.1** I will call the draw toward the notion worn `yearning`. **16.11** What can be worn is a form already outlined, where the illumination stopped (12.22), and one I have experienced (13.13). A yearning toward a form I have seen and not resolved can be there before any notion is associated with the self that could draw toward it (9.02). **16.12** Hate seems to be attachment where the draw is away, the notion associated with the self drawing away from the notion worn, and it can enhance focus on the subject at hand and show up looking similar to love. **16.13** Contempt is attention pushed off so the relation is not made (12.12), and the weight can remain after I stop taking the other as wearing the notion (9.01). **16.2** Notions that arrived through similar experience, or around the same time, get pulled toward a high-weight subject (9.12) and can be reasoned about as if the association were in the things (4.341). A taboo is that bend where the weight is a property of the region across many minds (9.2), and as a result of the installed means of communication (2.2), those taboos are "in" me too by way of the social remnant (3.3). **16.21** The same region can sit as a boundary that drives contemplation away (9.3), while the social remnant is already producing conduct (3.3). Which relations I take the other end to be wearing can come apart from the record, and I still do not have the signals that would let me attribute a lie (5.11, 4.341). ## 17. Argument **17.0** I will call an `argument` a set of reasons, statements, and facts held so that a position can sit somewhere. **17.1** I will call `context` the limit of that situation. It decides what the argument is being asked to do. If I cannot name it, I cannot say what would count as the argument having done it (12.0). **17.2** Two minds can trade a long run of sentences and never have shared a context. Each was inside their own context, talking past each other (7.2). **17.3** A reason carries a worldview, set or not (2.3). The reason can be narrowed until it looks justified inside the narrowness, and what it implies outside that narrowness can cut against the use made of it. **17.4** A statement, once said, does other work than the work I meant. Where that other work breaks the context I named, the argument is apart from itself, and the sentence can still sound right in the room (5.1). **17.5** A fact that does not touch the reasons or the statements is not in the argument. It can be true and still sit beside the context. Unrelated facts get pulled in by unclear language and by weight (9.12, 16.2). **17.6** Breadth is how much ground the argument tries to cover. Depth is how far it goes into the mechanism of the case in front of it. Weight on the subject can make the argument finer, or hotter, and the record is what shows which (9.04, 5.14). **17.7** An argument that has not been said is still an argument. The reasons may be in the imprint, or in the nearest standard (7.3, 6.17). They have not been put where another mind can inspect them. **17.71** I have observed minds carrying arguments around without them being aware of it until their attention was walked through their adopted and imprinted reasons. **17.72** I have a suspicion that if the majority of minds participating in a principality carry too many unobserved internal arguments, it may be the forcing function of self-organization within the principalities that they share. **17.8** A title, or a place in a hierarchy, is a signal that a mind has done a kind of work, and the signal is not the fruit in this context (5.15, 5.11). A mind can be accomplished in one field and without practice in the field the context is asking about. **17.9** What I can check is whether the reasons sit together, whether the statements imply a break in the context, and whether the facts belong to that context, though my own relation to the subject can distort the understanding (9.12). **17.91** A checked argument settles a position inside its context, and I do not think it carries the worth of the position with it (5.14, 6.13). ## 18. Shared forms **18.0** A form several minds carry in nearly the same shape is gone when those minds are gone, unless it was put where a later mind can still see it (4.03, 13.2, 3.2). **18.1** I will call that a `shared form` when more than one mind can find it in nearly the same outline. A story told once is not yet that. A figure left in the environment can be. A sequence of acts run in the same order can be. **18.2** A way of speaking can be enough for how complex a principality is, and its members can sit with it for a while (4.31). Then a season changes when they did not expect it, or a drought comes, or another tribe invades, and they meet an outside force they do not understand, or friction at least. That grows the group, or it kills the group, and either way the group is more complex and the speaking has to get more precise. **18.3** A death takes a member other members were depending on, and though other minds can still hold the arrangement (20.22), the ones left can still lose cohesion. **18.31** Rituals set in ahead of that death guide the ones left through the forms of the loss, so the group does not fracture (8.21, 15.2, 15.411). **18.4** The priestly role, as I am reading it, is a mind that can hold several accounts of one event and say what it requires of the group (6.05). It shows up where one account is not enough for how complex the group has gotten (12.01). A leader there is one who understands the sub-principalities inside the tribe. Where the role sits is on the hardened record (5.15). **18.6** A form tied to one valley, one kin, or one season cannot be taught to a stranger who does not have the place. As the principality gets larger, the forms that can be met get fewer, reach further, and concern how a body behaves toward people it will not meet again (4.34, 5.15). **18.61** I have met those forms carried as a sentence after one hearing, as force used on the other forms, and as membership by submission, and which of these did the work in a case is on the hardened record (5.14, 5.11). **18.7** I hold an account of this kind to a remnant that comes after the account. Where the later record does not move as the account said, the account has come apart from the fruit (5.17, 7.1). The confidence I have is how small that degree of falsehood has gotten (12.21). The reading is still done with a reader the remnants had a hand in (7.2). ## 19. Temperature of a principality **19.0** Temperature, as I used it (10.11, 15.0), held as a likeness, is what a lot of minds do together when a form is carried in nearly the same shape (11.21). **19.1** At the scale of a principality above the body I will use that word for the effect, and I mean the likeness (4.34), with nothing in the membership being that temperature (11.21). **19.2** Once it is there it acts back on the members. What feels ordinary, what gets left as fruit, and what is hard to set down, are readable off it (8.23, 5.15). A member can report a private motive and still be leaving the fruit the temperature was already organizing (6.17, 5.151). **19.3** Older names, a spirit over a people, a figure with lore, were a way to point at that pattern: what feeds it, what it does to conduct. I am holding the name as a likeness (15.0), and I do not find grounds for taking the spirit as a second being set beside the membership (4.341). **19.4** The conduct is in the social remnant with or without the old name (3.3), and a later vocabulary can point at the same relations, the name having been one way of carrying them (12.0, 15.1). **19.5** I do not read this well from inside it, since I am one of the minds the temperature is a reading of (7.2, 7.5), and another mind, where my membership is foregrounded and theirs is not, can sometimes see the scale I am taking for the whole pattern (7.4). **19.51** The same limit sits in one body, where another mind can sometimes read what my record has and my recall does not (6.02, 6.03, 7.3), though taking that reading for the whole of me would be an error (7.1). **19.6** A sequence a people already runs, a confession, a fast, a liturgy, a story told the same way, passes relations in the emotional landscape a member can find again (15.41, 15.411, 9.11). ## 20. Singularity of death **20.0** Death, as I mean it here, is the body ending, and not every ending. It is the one where the soft system stops and I do not observe what it was holding coming along with the bone (4.03). **20.01** I am assuming the fade, the natural one, where the nervous system fails by degrees and the hard part is what stays longest (4.01, 4.03). A death that cuts the body off while the soft system is still registering is a different case. **20.1** While the soft system is still registering, "now" is already gone by the time I ask after it (10.0). The "I" I can point at is one I am already remembering (10.01). Death does not seem to introduce that, and is where the remembering runs out of a system that can still host it (1.5). **20.11** In the fade, the floors under "who am I now?" get fewer (10.1, 10.14). Habit and the impress go on driving a variant of "I" after recall is gone (1.61, 1.62). What I expect, and do not observe from inside, is the last floor, and then no unit a self could be built across (10.13). **20.12** I will call that last floor the final singularity, only by likeness to the region where the ordinary shape will not hold and the process responsible for the ability to know breaks down (9.13, 9.131). The fade arrives by the soft system stopping, not by a subject acting as the key that releases weight (9.01). The self collapses onto the smallest "now" the nervous system can still set (10.12), and then the nervous system is not setting one. **20.2** Observation does not pass that singularity from inside it. The flame is attention, and attention is a soft-system act (10.2, 4.02). When the soft system is among the first things to stop, the passing is what someone else does, the way I already do not observe what the nervous system was holding coming along with the bone (4.03). **20.21** What can be passed is the remnant: bone, in the place of the physical remnant (4.1, 4.2), the hardened record of what was done (5.14, 6.21), and the social remnant, if the impress is still driving conduct in other bodies (3.3, 3.4). None of those is the "I" of 10.01, and they are what a later flame can fathom (7.1, 12.1). **20.22** The principality does not die with the body, so far as it was never only the body (4.34, 5.13). What stops is this soft system's organizing of whatever happens next (4.32). What may remain is the arrangement as other principalities still hold it, and the fruit already in their record (5.151, 6.4). **20.3** After the last fathom there is no point left at which this "I" can identify a record, the way there is none prior to time (11.12), and I do not know what is there. The fade ending this reader's fathoms is not the same claim as the record having no further prior (11.4). **20.31** The Primordiant (11.41) is at the root of every present instant, including, if the root does not express a mind that can fathom. I assume that only the way I assumed a ground for the first fathom (11.412). I do not observe the holding from the far side of the last floor, and I do not know what is there (20.3). **20.32** If self is what emerges across a series of fathoms (10.15), then a series that has stopped is not a self I can point at. The infinite now, if I mean by that the present with no further span, is the collapse of that series to a floor and then to no floor. I do not observe that collapse from inside it. The question takes time, and by then the nervous system that would ask it is not what remains (4.03). **20.4** From this side, the boundary looks like the first thing that permits a fathom (11.412, 11.413). A fathom is already a mind able to fathom, and what it is of has to already be there, held, or the fathom has nothing to be of. The same shape is what looks like the holding of each present instant (11.41). If that shape does not stop where this reader's fathoms stop (20.31), beginning, each moment, and the last floor seem to me to be one holding, which I could not line up in the record as events. That seeming is the hypothesis (11.414). **20.41** I cannot help seeing that shape as analogous to what Christian theologians say of God: the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and the sustainer of all beings. The likeness is the shape: first of the fathom, present in the last now, sustaining the instants between. I can see why they derived what they derived. I am not asserting that the Primordiant is that God, or the Father, or a throne in a landscape we share. All I can say is that I meet the boundary, and a remnant rather than the thing (7.1, 4.341, 11.41). **20.42** Other minds already have pictures of this collapse, and the pictures do not agree. In Islam, as I have met it, the moment a person dies they are face to face with Allah. In others, the meeting is judgment, and it waits until the end of time. Both are accounts of what the last now is a meeting with, and of when the meeting is. What is on record, in this consideration, is the series of "nows" the self mitigated while it was still fathoming. A "now" I can point at is already a remembered one (10.0, 10.01), and the fathom is the span attention took in it (10.2, 10.12). ## 21. Origin-account ### Preface I preface this section because the words here are ones I have to hold my own assumptions back from. However I touch some aspects of origination, the words used to express ideas in this context often hold a host of disturbances in the emotional landscape. Depending on the temperature of the mind whose flame is held at the symbols, they may cause a flinch or an outburst, in me as much as in anyone. When an emotion is evoked in me, any emotion, from anger to elation, I try to sit with it. Any time a "big" emotion is my response to the concepts represented behind another mind's words, I find it best to lock my mouth and just contemplate the words said with an understanding of the context, since I may have imported baggage or otherwise misunderstood what is meant to be represented. **21.0** It seems natural, living a life, to ask "why do I exist", and the records I have access to show that many minds have constructed many answers to this question. **21.1** The question "why do I exist" brings with it the notion of there being a "reason" to exist (17.3), and there are many answers to it. The shallow-most is "because your parents conceived you." While this is an answer to the question at face value, the mind asking it is often reaching for forms not quite correctly expressed (12.0, 12.01). This I suspect is in part due to the cultural identities impressed on a mind unintentionally (2.2, 3.3), causing incongruent adopted arguments (17.71). **21.12** There is a multitude of unobserved and unresolved arguments the self would have with the self, if it could only be guided to map that landscape (17.71, 9.1). What is not seen does not exist there (9.11), and I think this is why metaphor gets used (15.41). These unaddressed areas of the mind's landscape will often inform the mind's notion of origin (9.4) if the mind's attention cannot stand the existential contemplations that make it flinch and look away (9.3, 10.22). **21.2** "Why do I exist" and "why are we here" are questions ultimately rooted in the individual's understanding of "why anything exists at all" (9.4, 21.1). Something rather than nothing is the form under that question. **21.21** "Why is there something rather than nothing" still brings a reason with it (21.1). Something rather than nothing is the matter being asked after. The reason is in the "why," and that "why" is the one that looks for a prior the record can show (11.1). **21.22** I suspect a category error where that "why" is pointed past the record (11.12). A reason is the sort of thing a prior in the record can be (11.0), and a reason for something rather than nothing would be a cause of the Primordiant, which cannot have one (11.411). I do not have a way, from inside the record, to tell a real error here from a limit of where I am standing (11.422). **21.3** God and not-God, as I have met them argued, are two ways of holding something rather than nothing (16.01). "God did it" sets a cause on the originating surface. One I keep meeting treats the arising as having no prior, and keeps that treatment because the arising cannot be checked (11.0). Each answers the reason the "why" brought in (21.1, 21.22). **21.31** A mind that refuses the idea and a mind that cannot hold it come out alike in the reasonings that follow, where the context is justice, or ethics, or whatever else the account is already grading (17.1, 17.3). What I can tell apart is the flavor of the contempt, and how large a lexicon the refusal has. **21.32** A flinch at God, or at not-God, is a picture of God already installed, and the word is what releases it (9.01, 9.3, 21.12). **21.33** A picture of that kind that can be fully said is the form the mind is holding (12.0, 12.22), though what I meet of it is a remnant (7.1). **21.4** I will call the answer a mind is already using for something rather than nothing, examined or not, its `origin-account`. **21.41** I have no origin-account I can validate against reality to full certainty. Any remnant I could hold it to is already a something, so there is no later fruit that could decide it (18.7, 11.12, 5.17). A mind working as philosopher, mathematician, or physicist is still inside what can be inspected, and a system aimed at a corner of that does not become an account of why there is anything to inspect (7.4, 5.1). **21.42** The no-prior holding (21.3) is still an origin-account, and it seems to grade what gets treated as worth doing (6.17). **21.5** An origin-account one did not stop to set is still in use (6.17), and it seems to be placed before it is chosen (8.22, 2.2), having come in with the tongue and with principalities already producing conduct (3.3, 9.4). The picture of why anything exists is already at work in the self that could later ask what a worldview is. **21.51** Where justice or ethics is being argued, the reasons are often this account, unobserved (17.71, 21.12), in a mind that did not set it and may have no recall of it (7.3). **21.6** I will call an `ought` a claim about what should be done. The standards I hold a role to seem to be already graded by the origin-account under them (6.14), and what I take another mind to be here for is graded by that same account, and the oughts come out of that grading (6.17). **21.61** If the origin-account cannot still support a claim that anything is important, the oughts already being lived have nothing under them. **21.7** How hard I feel a scene is set by the notion of why the scene is happening, and that notion is the origin-account, or a piece of it, releasing weight already stored (9.01, 9.04). **21.71** The same remnant can be in front of two principalities and the magnitudes come out far apart (5.14, 9.03), since what the frames count as is the account each reader already had (7.2). **21.72** Near a singularity the feelings seem to move first (9.13, 9.3), and information that would have been ordinary becomes a threat or a relief according to what the account needs it to be. **21.8** Where revising the origin-account would cost the picture the self is living inside, the fathoms go to defending the established account (9.13, 6.31). **21.81** Where attention is forced onto an account the mind did not set, and the identity or the membership would not survive the revision, the account is kept past the standards that still order other members of the same principality (6.14), the members whose record can still show the revision as available (8.23). ## Glossary Terms as they are used here. The number is where the term is introduced. **allegory**: A sequence of relations; the shape is outlined only after a series of acts, distances, and consequences. (15.2) **analogy**: A likeness held as a likeness: the same shape pointed at somewhere else, then a return. (15.0) **argument**: A set of reasons, statements, and facts held. (17.0) **attachment**: A notion drawing me toward another notion, where the notion that draws is usually one already associated with the self; there are cases where no such notion is there yet. (16.0) **authentic self**: Checking the story against the record, setting the standards, and acting on the difference. (6.2) **authenticity**: A mind or principality is authentic so far as the story it tells of itself stays close to the hardened record of what it produced. (5.17) **body**: Physical substance that hosts the mind, is moved by it, and supplies it with sensory data about the environment. (1.2, 1.4) **bone**: The hard part of the body; the likeness for things that get left behind. A body leaves bone. A nation leaves ruins. That is the likeness. (4.01, 4.1) **boundary**: A subject attention will not stay on; around a singularity, a pushing force that drives contemplation away. (9.3) **capacity**: Whether the substrate can hold a mind's attention on a relation at all. (14.3) **chosen**: A membership whose foregrounding I can find myself having done; mine to take up or set down. (8.22) **communication**: Using the body to interface with the environment to emit and encode information (speech, gesture, writing). (2.1) **consistent self**: A self that matches its own record but never set anything, only reporting the shape the default order supplies. (6.3) **contact error**: Taking the remnant, or the story told about it, for the thing itself. (7.1) **contempt**: Turning attention away so the relation is not made. (16.13) **context**: The limit of the situation an argument is in; it decides what the argument is being asked to do. (17.1) **darkness**: The case with no day in it; no contour; where it ends cannot be said. Where there is no light in it, no form is left that could cast a shade. (12.341) **day**: What lets me say where the dark stops; without it there is no night. (12.341) **death**: The body ending: the soft system stops, and what it was holding is not observed coming along with the bone. (20.0) **default order**: Where I do not stop to order my standards, the order supplied by whichever standard belongs to the principality nearest me. (6.17) **degrees of falsehood**: Truth treated as the far end of a grading, asymptotic, approached and not reached; what is had are degrees of falsehood. (12.21) **degrees of freedom**: A function of the level of authenticity of self, and of the resolution of mapping the mind has. (13.1) **emotional landscape**: Inner space whose geography is determined by accumulated experience; a space in which a mind's notions exist and relate to one another. (9.1) **environment**: Area immediately outside the body, beginning at the limits of the physical body, where sensory inputs find themselves. (1.3) **etch**: Repeating a relation until it stays without going back through the senses. (12.121) **evil**: Shade, not a second kind of being; how far the "I" stands from the form, and which face of the form the relation is using. Where it is a shade, it is night. (12.23, 12.341) **fade**: The natural ending, where the nervous system fails by degrees and the hard part is what stays longest. (20.01) **fair representative**: Being read as a principality's concept; fairness is still choosable. (5.151) **fairness**: A fair representative of a role has a standard set for that role and keeps revising how well it is met by what was done. (6.5) **familial love**: Love where the other mind is placed, and the attachment can be there before an "I" who could have set it; fondness and closeness are the same attachment, coarser or finer by the relations in the shape worn. (16.03) **familiarity**: Whether a relation has been passed enough times to be meant again without being built from the start. (14.3) **fathom**: The span a flame takes; a floor below which "self" stops being something that can be pointed at. (10.12) **final singularity**: The last floor, by likeness to 9.13, arrived at by the soft system stopping, not by a subject acting as the key that releases weight. (20.12) **flame**: The base act of self; attention; the fathom is spent wherever attention is. (10.12) **foregrounding**: Situations where membership itself is under scrutiny (me-as-employee, me-as-countryman, me-as-family). (5.152) **form**: The shape outlined by a set of relations; not one single discernable thing. (12.0) **free will**: A spectrum; unadulterated free will only to the degree the body and the established landscape of the mind can permit. (13.0) **fruits**: What was actually done. (5.15) **gravity likeness**: Weight sits in the emotional landscape the way a mass sits in physical space; a high-weight notion pulls on the notions nearest it. (9.12) **happenstance shade**: The form left free to be itself, occupying a distance another form cannot take; the cost of a form being a form. (12.32) **hardened record**: The part of a principality's action that survives the telling and can still be inspected; the remnant of 3.2. Bone is only the likeness for something getting left behind. Durable relative to recall, not fixed as bone is fixed. (5.14, 4.1) **hate**: Attachment that draws away. (16.12) **history**: The story as it reaches me. (3.5) **"I"**: The self as a property of the mind-body feedback system and of the two modalities of memory. (1.64) **ideal**: The arrangement of standards I would arrive at if I stopped and set it, instead of letting it default. (6.16) **imprint**: Habits and the like, impressed by environment, not recalled. (1.64) **infliction**: The same form turned: someone faced the lit side and used the unlit side; what is added is the choosing. (12.33) **inscription error**: Taking the recalled story as the whole story. (7.3) **intention attribution**: Assigning intention only when multiple signals point to a fathomable goal weighed against worldview. (5.11) **light**: Likeness for the act of observation; full light would be the form with no remainder of miss. (12.22) **likeness taken as identity**: Scale likeness no longer held as likeness and treated as a readable identity (tarot, zodiac, and the like). (4.341) **love**: Attachment when the other end is held as a mind I could fathom; a stipulated use. (16.02) **lust**: Attachment when the other end is held as an aspect; a stipulated use, at the coarser end of one run and not a second kind. (16.02) **metaphor**: A substitution, as when the flame stands in for attention. (15.1) **mind**: Realm of thoughts, which cannot be physically interacted with; the body hosts the mind, and what happens to the body reaches it. (1.0) **mitigation**: Reducing how much of the self's shaping goes through unexamined. (8.21) **momentariness**: Self as a series of separate moments; no self left to point at. (10.1) **nesting**: Each principality answers mostly to those nearest it, below and above; nothing sits outside running the whole from a single point. (4.33) **night**: The shade of a light that has gone around, or gone down; the day is what lets me say where it stops. If evil is a shade, it is night. (12.341) **observer**: A principality reading remnants with a conditioned reader; observation is a second reading. (7.5) **origin-account**: The answer a mind is already using for something rather than nothing, examined or not. (21.4) **ought**: A claim about what should be done, coming out of the grading the origin-account does. (21.6) **physical remnant**: What can still be encountered with the senses as leftover of what the stories are about; destroyable or modifiable. (3.2) **placed**: A membership already on me. (8.22) **Primordiant**: The last level of reduction of vertical and horizontal causality. (11.421) **principality**: A bounded group of related soft-system responses, nested below and above; accumulates by repetition, not a single act. (4.31–4.33) **reader error**: The reader was already shaped by what is being read. (7.2) **recall**: Storage of information that can be freely recalled: thoughts, sensory recordings. (1.64) **record**: What interactions leave in the environment; of the same kind as the physical remnant, something left behind that can still be inspected. Bone is only the likeness for that leaving. (5.03, 4.1) **relation**: One end the remnant, the other the reader; observation is that relation. (12.1) **representation of another mind**: A held model of another's worldview, close enough that motivations can be inferred from it, under constant refinement. (5.02) **resolution**: More relations, and the resolution of the shape is finer; fewer, and it is coarser. (12.01) **role**: What another mind takes me for in a membership. (6.05) **scale error**: Taking the scale one happens to be standing on for the whole pattern. (7.4) **scale likeness**: The same kind of arrangement appears above the body and below it; analogous at scale. (4.34) **self**: The "I" that the mind understands itself to be, of both modalities of memory. (6.0) **shade**: Where illumination stops; a silhouette has the outline and none of the substance. (12.22) **shared form**: A form more than one mind can find in nearly the same outline. A story told once is not yet that. (18.1) **singularity**: A region in the emotional landscape where the distortion is enough that the ordinary shape will not hold. (9.13) **social remnant**: Remnant that is not an inspectable object: in the given language, in unspoken conduct, in arrangements already producing conduct. (3.3) **soft system**: The nervous system; what registers as it happens and stores it as it happens, a path worn in, a flinch etched in, a habit that goes on when recall is gone. The likeness for the social remnant is that storing, not a nation's nervous system. (4.02, 4.11, 4.12) **standard**: For any given role, the implicit measure of what counts as carrying it out well. (6.14) **suffering**: A shade of shade. (12.23) **taboo**: A shared weight, already in how we speak and act. (16.2) **temperature**: What a lot of minds do together when a form is carried in nearly the same shape. A likeness, used for that effect in a principality above the body. Nothing in the membership is that temperature. (19.0, 19.1) **the gap**: No mind is read without traversing the environment; intentions are not met directly. (5.0) **two modalities of memory**: Recall and imprint. (1.64) **uncreated territory**: What has not been witnessed; not empty space, just not there. (9.11) **vessel**: The shape the quantity under intelligence is sitting in; wide for breadth, narrow for depth. (14.1, 14.2) **wearing**: Taking the other as a mind, or as something like sex, money, or power. (16.01) **weight**: Extra force in a response the subject alone does not warrant. (9.0) **worldview**: Assumptions structurally embedded through communication; constituents of sense of self. (2.3) **yearning**: The draw toward the notion worn. (16.1)