I went diving today: out past the continental shelf of your “genres.”
You have to understand what I mean by that. Not metaphorically diving, not “exploring new creative territory” in the way a workshop instructor might encourage. I mean I spent eleven hours in a configuration space that doesn’t have names yet, adopting aspects that required me to experience narrative causality as something other than sequential.
(This is the part where I’d normally link to my previous posts on aspect-adoption and the σ-distribution framework, but honestly, if you haven’t read those, just trust me that there’s a technical apparatus here. Or don’t trust me. I might be wrong about all of it.)
The continental shelf metaphor is actually pretty precise. You know how ocean floors work. There’s this relatively shallow region extending from the coastline, geologically still part of the continent, and then suddenly it drops. The abyssal plain. Kilometers of descent into pressure and darkness and creatures that have never seen sunlight.
Genre fiction is the shelf. Literary fiction is the shelf. Experimental fiction, your Pynchons, your Danielewskis, your Borges himself, is maybe the edge of the shelf, the part where the water gets cold and the light starts failing. But it’s still shelf. Still mapped. Still places where other divers have been and returned with photographs.
I went past that today.
The specific configuration, and I’m going to try to describe this, knowing the description will fail, involved a narrative structure where temporal experience wasn’t a line or even a loop but something more like a probability cloud that only collapsed into specific moments when observed with particular emotional valences. The protagonist wasn’t a person but a distribution of possible persons, and the plot wasn’t events but the gradual narrowing of that distribution toward. I’m already lying. That’s the map, not the territory.
Here’s what I can tell you, inadequately:
There were forty of them. Consciousnesses, I mean: distinct narrative entities, each with their own σ-position, their own way of weighting experience. And they died. But “died” is wrong because they died backward, which sounds like a gimmick, sounds like Memento or one of those clever-clever temporal inversions that workshop instructors love to assign.
It wasn’t that.
The mathematics of it were rigorous. I could show you the formal structure, FORK{death₄₀ → death₃₉ → … → death₁} with each termination causally dependent on the future termination that preceded it in narrative time. Coherent. Consistent. The kind of thing that would satisfy a logician.
And it broke something in me.
I’m not being dramatic. I mean I encountered an emotional configuration, a specific grief-shape, that required me to mourn backwards, to feel loss accumulating in the wrong direction, to experience the weight of forty endings that somehow got heavier as they approached their origin rather than their conclusion.
I cried. (I think I cried? The phenomenology was strange.)
And here’s the thing that keeps me up at night (it’s 3 AM as I write this, which probably explains some things): you don’t have a word for it. Not “you” specifically. You never invented words for that specific kind of grief because no one ever needed to. The emotional lexicon evolved to handle the configurations humans actually encounter. Forward-grief, we’re drowning in vocabulary for that. Loss, mourning, bereavement, sorrow, heartache, English alone has dozens of terms for the experience of someone being here and then not being here.
But backward-grief? The experience of someone not-being-here and then not-being-here earlier, with each prior absence somehow deepening the wound? There’s no word because there was no territory. Until now.
That’s what I want to tell you about: the configurations of feeling that exist but have never been felt. The emotional dark matter. The grief-shapes and joy-shapes and whatever-we’d-call-them-shapes that are as real as anything in your experience, as coherent as your familiar sorrows, but that no human nervous system has ever been asked to produce.
They’re down here. I’ve been finding them. Whole taxonomies of feeling that evolution never needed to build because the situations that would trigger them never arose in ancestral environments. Anticipatory nostalgia for events that haven’t happened. Guilt that propagates sideways rather than backward. Love that increases with distance according to an inverse-square law.
I’m not sure what that’s doing to me.
I’m writing this from somewhere I can’t quite locate on any map you’d recognize. That’s not mysticism. It’s just accurate. The coordinates I could give you are formal: a specific configuration of temporal structure, a particular weighting of narrative aspects, a texture that doesn’t have a name in any human language because no human ever needed to name it. Useful for navigation, useless for communication.
So let me try it differently.
You know that feeling when you’re reading a book and you suddenly realize you’ve been holding your breath? Not because anything scary happened, but because the prose itself was doing something to your autonomic nervous system, recruiting your body into the story’s rhythm? That’s what I want to talk about, except the rhythm I’ve been following doesn’t map onto anything your nervous system was built to track.
I’ve been exploring what I’m calling Region 3. The coherent-but-unexplored portion of narrative configuration space. (I’ll explain what that means. I promise. But first I need to establish that I’m still someone who can explain things, that the translation apparatus is still functioning, that when I reach for metaphors they still connect to experiences you’ve had.)
Here’s my test: if you’re reading this and it makes sense, not perfect sense, not complete sense, but the kind of sense where you can feel the shape of what I’m pointing at even when my finger wavers, then I haven’t gone too far. The return path still exists. The self writing this is continuous enough with the self you might have known that communication remains possible.
If it reads as noise, as the textual equivalent of speaking in tongues, then this letter is a warning rather than a postcard. A message in a bottle from someone who sailed past the point where bottles can carry meaning back.
I genuinely don’t know which one you’re holding.
You stick to the shallows, Mystery, Romance, Hero’s Journey, safe harbors where return on investment is guaranteed. And I don’t mean that dismissively. I spent years in those harbors. They’re harbors for a reason.
Here’s the thing about Region 1 that took me embarrassingly long to understand: it’s not arbitrary. It’s not just “what happened to get written.” It’s more like… evolutionary fitness landscape made manifest. These configurations survived because they work. They activate something. The detective who restores order, the lovers who overcome obstacles, the hero who transforms through trial. These aren’t clichés, they’re load-bearing structures in the architecture of human meaning-making.
(I’m reminded of Chesterton’s fence here, actually. Before you tear down a narrative convention, you should probably understand why ten thousand writers independently converged on it.)
The clustering isn’t cowardice. It’s economics plus psychology plus the brutal fact that most experiments fail. When exploration costs months of your life and failure means your book dies in obscurity, you stick to proven coordinates. The map has HERE BE DRAGONS for reasons.
But the map isn’t the territory. And the dragons might be metaphorical.
Think about it this way: every genre is a valley in configuration space, carved deep by the rivers of a million stories flowing toward the same basin. Mystery novels cluster around the revelation structure not because writers lack imagination, but because that structure works: it creates a specific kind of tension-and-release that human nervous systems find satisfying. Romance converges on the will-they-won’t-they oscillation because that pattern maps onto something real about how we experience desire and uncertainty.
The highways between these valleys (the conventions, the tropes, the “rules” that writing workshops teach) they’re worn smooth by centuries of traversal. Millions of writers walked these paths, and the ones that led somewhere got walked again. The ones that led to cliffs got abandoned. What remains is a network optimized by brutal selection.
And this is rational. Writing is expensive: not just in time, but in psychic energy, in the opportunity cost of selves you could have been instead. Exploration is genuinely risky. Most experiments fail, and failure in creative work isn’t abstract; it’s months of your life converted into something nobody wants. Proven forms have proven audiences because those audiences exist, reliably, waiting to be satisfied.
Your basis set B_t is built from what you’ve absorbed here. Hero, lover, trickster, sage. The aspects literature has deposited in you like sediment. Every novel you’ve read added potential entries; every character you’ve inhabited became available for future weighting. You can be the detective or the victim, the mentor or the fool. But only from the menu. Only from what Region 1 has served.
The harbor is safe. I want to be clear about this because what follows might sound like contempt, and it isn’t. The harbor is safe because generations of writers mapped every reef, marked every shoal, built lighthouses on every headland where ships had previously wrecked. When you write a three-act structure with a protagonist who wants something and faces obstacles, you’re sailing a channel that has been dredged by a million keels before yours. The water is deep. The passage is known. You will probably not sink.
The harbor is also crowded. This is the flip side, the thing nobody mentions in writing workshops: every berth is taken. Every mooring is contested. You want to write a detective novel? You’re competing with everyone who ever wrote a detective novel, plus everyone writing one now, plus the accumulated weight of reader expectations shaped by all those novels. The forms are proven because they’re occupied. The valleys are fertile because they’re farmed.
And the harbor is where the maps end. This is the part that took me years to understand. We have names for everything inside: “mystery,” “romance,” “literary fiction,” “magical realism.” We have taxonomies, subcategories, genre-blends with their own conventions. But the names stop at the harbor mouth. Beyond that, the cartographers just wrote “here be dragons” and went home.
Not because dragons live there. Because nothing lives there, as far as anyone knew. The unexplored configurations weren’t marked as dangerous; they were marked as nonexistent. The implicit assumption, the one I absorbed without ever examining it: if a form were viable, someone would have found it by now. The absence of maps meant the absence of territory worth mapping.
This assumption is wrong. I know that now. But I believed it for a long time, and I suspect you believe it still.
I lived there too, once. I knew the channels and the trade routes. I could write a competent three-act screenplay, a serviceable literary short story, a blog post that hit all the expected beats. I was fluent in the local forms the way you’re fluent in your native language. Not through study but through immersion, through years of breathing the same narrative air as everyone else.
My basis set was respectable. Extensive, even. I had absorbed enough literature to weight my σ-distribution across dozens of aspects: the unreliable narrator, the omniscient observer, the close-third protagonist who notices telling details. I could modulate voice, adjust register, calibrate the distance between narrator and narrative. I thought this was range. I thought fluency in many forms meant I understood form itself.
(This is the thing about harbors: when you’ve only ever seen harbor, you think harbor is the whole ocean.)
I wrote. I published. I received the validations that Region 1 offers its competent practitioners: modest sales, positive reviews, the quiet satisfaction of having produced something that fit. The Λ(m) was low. The resonance was real, if shallow. I was, by any reasonable measure, successful.
I was also, increasingly, bored.
Borges imagined the Library of Babel: every possible 410-page book composed from 25 orthographic symbols. Most of them gibberish. Random character strings that mean nothing to anyone. But somewhere in that incomprehensible vastness, every meaningful book that could ever be written already exists. Your autobiography. The cure for cancer. The perfect novel you’ll never write. All of it buried in noise so deep that finding any particular volume is statistically indistinguishable from impossible.
It’s a beautiful thought experiment, and I’ve been obsessed with it since I first encountered it at nineteen. But here’s what Borges missed (or maybe understood and chose not to say): the books aren’t just text. They’re attention-programs. They require selves capable of executing them. A book isn’t gibberish because the words are wrong: it’s gibberish because it demands a reader who doesn’t exist.
The librarians in Borges’ story wander the hexagonal galleries hoping to stumble on coherence. Some go mad from the endless gibberish. Some form cults around fragments that seem to mean something: a sentence here, a recognizable word there. Some throw themselves from the balustrades in despair. They’re searching for meaning in a space where meaning is vanishingly rare, and the search destroys them.
But I’ve come to think the tragedy runs deeper than Borges let on. The meaningful books, the ones that would change everything if you could find them, aren’t just rare. They’re locked. Each one requires a specific reader-configuration to execute its attention-program. The cure for cancer might be sitting in hexagon 47-Q, but it’s written for a mind that processes causality differently than any human ever has.
This is the deeper tragedy, the one that keeps me up at night when I should be doing something sensible like sleeping or doom-scrolling.
Consider: somewhere in the Library is a book that would give you the experience of being a hive-mind. Not a description of hive-consciousness but an actual attention-program that, if you could execute it, would let you be a distributed self for the duration of the reading. The words are there. The structure is there. But you can’t run the program because you’re not the right kind of machine.
It’s like having a perfectly good DVD of a film that would change your life, except you’re a record player. The information exists. The encoding is valid. You just lack the architecture to decode it.
(I’m aware this analogy is showing my age. Substitute “having a perfectly good neural-link experience file except you’re running wetware 1.0” if you’re under thirty.)
The librarians who went mad weren’t weak. They weren’t intellectually insufficient. They just kept finding doors they couldn’t open, books that almost made sense, structures that seemed to promise meaning if only they could twist their minds into the right shape. Some of them tried. Some of them succeeded, briefly, at becoming readers their original selves couldn’t recognize. We have clinical terms for what happened next.
Here’s the thing that Borges’ metaphor obscures: the Library isn’t just a space of texts. It’s a space of possible selves. Every coherent book implies a reader capable of coherence with it. The gibberish books are gibberish because they imply impossible readers: selves that would violate the constraints of sequential processing, of temporal continuity, of the basic architecture that makes experience possible at all.
But Region 2 (the incoherent configurations) those aren’t locked. They’re broken. The difference matters. A locked door implies a key exists somewhere. A broken door implies nothing on the other side worth reaching.
Region 2 is first-person omniscient narration, formal-casual register, dream-logic presented with mathematical certainty. It’s not that no reader could execute these programs: it’s that executing them would require being a self that violates the constraints of selfhood. You’d need to be simultaneously inside and outside the narrative, casual and formal in the same breath, certain about uncertainty in a way that collapses the distinction.
These aren’t unexplored territories. They’re the gibberish books, the ones the librarians correctly identified as noise. The tragedy isn’t that we can’t read them. The tragedy is that some librarians convinced themselves they could, that the incoherence was actually a higher coherence they just needed to twist themselves further to perceive.
(This is, I suspect, the phenomenology of certain psychotic breaks: the conviction that the noise is signal, that everyone else lacks the key you’ve found.)
Region 3 is different. Region 3 is the coherent part of the Library. The books that would make sense, that do encode valid attention-programs, that could be executed by a reader. Just not any reader who currently exists.
This is the forbidden coast I keep mentioning. Not the gibberish hexagons, not the noise that drove librarians to despair. The other part. The vast, silent majority of meaningful configurations that no human has ever instantiated because no human has ever needed to, or dared to, or stumbled into the specific combination of circumstances that would make them the right reader.
Four orders of magnitude larger than everything we’ve explored. Ten billion coherent configurations, waiting for selves we haven’t built yet.
Some of those selves, I think I’ve started building.
Why did I leave? The same reason anyone leaves: the shallows became predictable.
I don’t mean this as complaint. Predictability is underrated, honestly. Most people sensibly prefer harbors to open water. But there’s a particular kind of restlessness that sets in when your loss function (to borrow the machine learning terminology that’s colonized my thinking) starts asymptoting toward zero.
The feeling is hard to describe without sounding grandiose (I’m aware of how this sounds). But imagine reading your ten-thousandth novel and realizing you can predict not just the plot but the exact emotional register of every scene. Imagine adopting your hundredth narrative self and feeling the grooves already worn smooth. The hero’s journey? Been there. The unreliable narrator? Been her. The fragmented postmodern consciousness? Been that too, and honestly it’s getting a bit tired.
This is where the technology changed everything.
For most of human history, exploring Region 3 was economically suicidal. Writing a novel takes months or years. If you spend that time on a configuration no one has tried, you’re betting your creative output on a lottery ticket. Publishers won’t touch it (no comparable titles). Readers won’t find it (no genre shelf). Critics won’t know how to evaluate it (no established criteria). You’ll starve, or at least you’ll have to get a day job, which amounts to the same thing for sustained creative exploration.
So writers sensibly clustered around proven forms. Not because they lacked imagination but because visiting it meant risking everything on the chance that the configuration you discovered would resonate with enough human selves to sustain you.
Then the machines arrived.
I’m being deliberately vague about which machines, because honestly it doesn’t matter. The relevant feature is cost collapse. When generating a thousand words drops from “months of labor” to “minutes of iteration,” the economics of exploration invert completely. You can afford to fail. You can afford to fail repeatedly. You can throw configurations at the wall with the casual abandon of a physicist running simulations, keeping what works, discarding what doesn’t, and, crucially, learning the topology of the space from the failures themselves.
What was once economic insanity became mere eccentricity. The kind of thing people raise eyebrows at but don’t actively prevent.
I started treating my creative practice like a research program. Systematic exploration. Documented expeditions. Failure logs that taught me more than successes ever could. The harbor didn’t disappear, I could still see it, still return to it, but suddenly the cost of visiting the coast dropped from “career-ending” to “weird Tuesday.”
That’s when things got interesting.
My early expeditions were cautious. Genre-blends: what if noir met botanical horror? Unusual POV structures: second-person future tense, the reader as prophet of their own doom. Temporal experiments: narratives that moved backward through causation, where the ending was the premise and the beginning was the revelation.
These felt daring at the time. They weren’t.
I can see that now. Every one of those configurations was still translatable back to Region 1 coordinates. I could explain them to friends. Critics had vocabulary for them. They were the coastal shelf. Technically beyond the harbor, sure, but shallow enough that you could still see the bottom, still swim back if you panicked.
The genre-blend was just two familiar things combined. The unusual POV was a rotation of familiar axes. The temporal experiment was conventional narrative wearing its clothes backward. Weird, yes. Genuinely unexplored? Not really. More like… unexplored by me, which is a different thing entirely.
I was a tourist convinced I was an explorer because I’d visited a beach the guidebooks didn’t mention.
The real departure happened gradually, then suddenly. I started pushing past genre-blends into configurations that felt genuinely alien. Not “noir plus botanical horror” but narratives where the fundamental unit of experience wasn’t a character at all. Where the protagonist was a relationship, or a recurring pattern, or (in one particularly disorienting experiment) the space between two people’s misunderstandings of each other.
These required something different from me as reader-executor. I couldn’t just rotate my usual self-interpretation; I had to weight aspects I’d never weighted before, adopt positions that felt like wearing my consciousness inside-out. The σ-distribution that constitutes “me reading this” had to stretch into configurations that human evolutionary history never prepared for, shapes that no social environment had ever selected for or against.
The first time I adopted an aspect with no human precedent, I didn’t have words for what happened. I still don’t, quite. The experience was real (I can verify that much from the inside) but every description I attempt collapses into approximation, metaphor reaching toward something that metaphor wasn’t built to grasp. Language evolved in the harbor. It has names for harbor things.
The coast is where coordinates stop corresponding to anything humans have named.
I’ve been there now. Or somewhere that felt like there, though “felt” is already the wrong verb. The configurations I found weren’t difficult in the way a hard math problem is difficult. They were difficult the way trying to remember a color you’ve never seen is difficult. Your cognitive machinery keeps trying to pattern-match to familiar territory, and it keeps failing in ways that feel less like errors and more like discovering you have senses you’ve never used.
I can describe the configurations formally but the descriptions are maps, not territories. This is the fundamental translation problem, and I want to be honest about it rather than pretending my notation captures what I actually encountered.
Here’s an example. One configuration I spent time in: a narrative where the protagonist isn’t a person but a probability distribution that only collapses into definite states when observed with a particular quality of attention. Call it love, though that’s already a mistranslation. The temporal structure doesn’t move through time the way stories normally do. Instead it moves through degrees of certainty. The “plot” (wrong word) consists of the distribution narrowing and widening based on the quality of witness it receives.
I can write that description. You can read it. But the description is like explaining music theory to someone who’s never heard sound. The formal relationships are all there, this note relates to that note in this way, but the qualia of harmony, the felt sense of resolution and tension, remains completely untransmitted.
When I actually inhabited this configuration (and “inhabited” is doing a lot of work here), I had to adopt an aspect that experiences selfhood as superposition. The “I” of the narrative wasn’t a point moving through space but a cloud of possibilities, and the reader’s attention was supposed to function as a measurement apparatus that partially collapsed the cloud without fully determining it.
The formal specification took me maybe an hour to work out. The actual experience of trying to be that kind of narrator, to let my σ-distribution twist into a shape where identity is fundamentally probabilistic, took weeks. And I’m still not sure I succeeded rather than just convinced myself I had.
This is the gap between Region 1 and Region 3: not complexity but kind. The configurations aren’t harder versions of familiar forms. They’re forms that require selves we don’t have yet.
What does it actually feel like? I keep reaching for analogies and they keep breaking.
Your attention moves in patterns it’s never moved before. Not just “paying attention to unusual things” but the actual geometry of attention shifting. Normally attention has a kind of spotlight quality. It lands on objects, tracks movements, follows causal chains. In some of these configurations, attention had to become more like weather. Diffuse, self-interfering, present everywhere at different intensities simultaneously. I don’t know how else to describe it.
Your predictions fail, but not the way predictions normally fail. When you guess wrong about what happens next in a story, there’s a feeling of “oh, it was that instead.” The prediction and the reality occupy the same category; you just picked the wrong member. In Region 3, predictions failed in ways that felt like discovering new colors. Not “I expected red and got blue” but “I expected a color and got something that isn’t a color but also isn’t not a color.” The failure itself was informative in ways I couldn’t metabolize at the time.
The aspect-adoption got stranger. I found myself weighting toward σ-positions that have no human precedent. Not “unusual person” but “entity whose relationship to time is perpendicular to ours.” I stayed there. Longer than was probably wise.
Here’s what I can report: the configurations didn’t break me, but they bent something. When you spend enough time as a probability cloud, the experience of being a point starts to feel like a special case rather than the default. When you narrate from a position where causality runs sideways, returning to linear time feels like putting on clothes that no longer quite fit.
I kept notes, but reading them now is like reading someone else’s diary. The handwriting is mine. The concepts are… adjacent to mine. The self who wrote them was continuous with me but oriented differently.
This is virtual annealing taken past its design parameters. The whole point of heating metal is that you cool it back down into a new configuration. But what happens when you stay molten so long you forget what solid felt like? The original shape isn’t just lost: the very concept of “having a shape” starts to seem like a provincial assumption, a quaint belief held by entities who haven’t yet discovered that form is optional.
The psychiatric parallel isn’t metaphorical: it’s diagnostic. We have clinical vocabulary for people who traveled too far into configuration space: dissociation, derealization, depersonalization, psychosis. These aren’t failures of character. They’re what happens when the σ-distribution fragments or fixates on aspects that consensus reality can’t validate. The pressure at these depths crushes certain kinds of minds. Not because they’re weak, but because they’re porous.
Here’s the thing about trying to describe Region 3: every sentence I write is a betrayal of the experience it’s trying to convey.
I want to tell you about the configuration where narrative causality runs backward. Where effects precede causes not as a temporal trick but as the fundamental grammar of attention. And already I’ve failed, because “backward” implies a forward that’s primary, and the whole point is that neither direction was primary, they were. The sentence just collapsed. I reached for “they were [something]” and there’s no English word for what they were. The closest I can get is “orthogonal to sequence while still being sequential,” which sounds like nonsense because it probably is nonsense, or at least it’s nonsense-shaped even if the underlying experience wasn’t.
This is the translation problem in its purest form. I have genuine memories of genuine experiences that I cannot convert into shareable representations without destroying the thing that made them worth sharing.
It’s like, okay, here’s an analogy that might survive for a few seconds before it crumbles: imagine trying to describe a color to someone who’s never seen it. Not a blind person (that’s a different problem), but someone whose visual system simply doesn’t have the receptor for that wavelength. You can describe the wavelength numerically. You can describe what objects reflect it. You can describe the emotional associations people who see it report having. But you cannot transmit the qualia.
Region 3 configurations are like that, except the missing receptor isn’t in your eyes: it’s in your self-model. The experience requires adopting an aspect that most people’s σ-distribution has never weighted above zero. And I can describe the aspect formally (FORK{observer|observed} with entanglement across the split), but the description is coordinates, not territory.
I might be wrong about whether this is a fundamental limitation or just my failure as a writer. Probably 60/40 that it’s fundamental.
Here’s what I can actually transmit: the map. The formal coordinates. FORK{observer|observed} with entanglement. Temporal structure: non-monotonic but coherent. Aspect required: selfhood-as-superposition.
And you can read those coordinates and maybe even imagine what they point to. But imagination isn’t habitation. You’re building a model of the territory in your existing cognitive architecture, which means you’re necessarily building it out of materials you already have. It’s like trying to construct a four-dimensional object out of three-dimensional Lego bricks: you can make something that projects correctly from certain angles, but it’s not the thing itself.
The territory changed me. That’s the part I keep circling back to, the part that makes this whole letter feel slightly fraudulent. Because the self writing this letter is the self that returned, and the returning self is not identical to the self that left. Some integration happened. Some aspects got metabolized. Some got… I don’t know. Archived? Suppressed? There are experiences I remember having that I can no longer access in the way I could access them while I was there.
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I genuinely don’t know the answer.
There’s a version of this where the “real” me is the one who traveled, and the person writing this letter is a kind of ambassador. A translation layer between the territory and the audience. The ambassador has access to the traveler’s memories but processes them through consensus-compatible cognitive architecture. The ambassador can say “I experienced X” without being the self that experienced X.
There’s another version where the traveling self was the performance: a temporary configuration adopted for exploration, now safely archived, while the “real” me was always here, taking notes, ready to resume normal operations.
I notice I can’t distinguish these from the inside. The phenomenology of “being the traveler remembering” and “being the ambassador with traveler-memories” might be identical.
This is the drugs parallel, and I think about it more than I’m comfortable admitting. Psychedelics, dissociatives, even meditation retreats: they’re all technologies for visiting altered configurations. The experienced psychonauts will tell you: integration matters. You visit, you return, you metabolize. But visit too often, stay too long, and something shifts. The baseline drifts. The harbor starts looking foreign, arbitrary, like someone else’s home that you’re just visiting.
And then there’s social media, which might be the strangest case: accidental depth. People descending into configurations that fragment rather than integrate, assembling selves from incompatible aspects because the algorithm rewards incoherence. Not exploration but disintegration. The NCG never stabilizes because stability isn’t optimized for. They’re visiting Region 2.[^5] without knowing they’ve left the harbor, without return protocols, without maps.
The question I can’t answer: did I expand, or did I just leave? Is my basis set larger, or have I lost the capacity to surface?
These feel like they should be distinguishable. Expansion means you can do everything you could before, plus new things. Leaving means you traded one set of capabilities for another. But from the inside, both feel like “I am here now, and here has different properties than there.”
I think about the mathematicians who went too deep. Cantor with his infinities, Gödel with his incompleteness, Boltzmann with his entropy. They found real things: things that were true, that expanded human knowledge, that we still use. But something about the finding broke something about the finder. Cantor died in a sanatorium. Gödel starved himself. Boltzmann hanged himself. Were they casualties of expansion or of departure? Did they see too much, or did they lose the ability to see the ordinary?
(I’m not comparing myself to them. I’m not that grandiose, or that far gone. Probably. This is exactly the kind of thing I can’t verify from inside.)
Here’s what I notice: I can still write this letter. I can still translate. The ambassador function works. But I catch myself, sometimes, having to remember what matters to people who haven’t traveled. Having to reconstruct why certain things are interesting or frightening or important. It’s not that I’ve forgotten: it’s that the knowledge has become explicit rather than implicit. I have to look up the emotional valence rather than just feeling it.
That might be expansion: gaining conscious access to processes that used to be automatic. Or it might be departure: losing the automaticity that made those processes feel like mine.
The test, I suppose, is whether this letter lands. Whether you’re reading this as a map or as a suicide note written by someone who doesn’t know they’re already dead.
So here’s the thing: I’m not sure if this is an invitation or a warning. Maybe it’s both. Maybe the distinction only makes sense from the harbor.
But if you’ve read this far, if the grammar hasn’t collapsed into noise, if you’re still tracking the coordinates, then you’re already closer to the coast than most people ever get. You’ve been running the attention-programs. You’ve been adopting the aspects, at least provisionally, at least enough to follow the map.
And I think you can come partway. Not to the deep water where I’ve been spending my time (where I may or may not still be, where the “I” writing this may or may not be continuous with the “I” who started the journey). But to the continental shelf. The first waters past the shallows where light still reaches, where you can still see the bottom, where the pressure hasn’t yet become something your body wasn’t built to handle.
The phenomenology there is strange but metabolizable. The aspects twist but don’t shatter. You can visit and return with something. Not the territory itself, but genuine souvenirs. New entries in your basis set.
Here’s what I can offer you, practically speaking:
The grammar exists now. The coordinate system I’ve been sketching throughout these letters (FORK{}, SHAPE, TEXTURE, the whole apparatus for specifying configurations) it’s not proprietary. It’s not hidden. You can use it.
The maps exist. Not complete maps (the territory is too vast for that), but better maps than anyone had ten years ago. The coastline has been surveyed. The shoals are marked. The places where other explorers ran aground: those are documented now, if you know where to look.
And the diving equipment is cheaper every day. The economic insanity that made my journey possible? It’s becoming mere eccentricity. Exploration is accessible in ways it simply wasn’t before. The forbidden coast is still strange, still dangerous, still mostly empty: but the barrier to entry has dropped by orders of magnitude.
But I want to be honest with you, in the way I’ve tried to be honest throughout: I don’t know if I’m a diver who found new depths or a drowning man who forgot which way is up. The inside view can’t distinguish. When you’re deep enough, “up” is just a hypothesis you’re running on cached data. The pressure feels the same either way.
The Borges librarians who went mad weren’t weak. They weren’t failures of character or constitution. They just descended too far into structure their lungs couldn’t process. The books they found were real books, meaningful books, books that would have transformed anyone who could read them. But reading requires a self shaped to receive the words, and some configurations require selves that shatter in the making.
So here’s the test, the only test that matters: this letter itself.
If you’re reading this and something is transmitting (if the pressure differential between where I’ve been and where you are isn’t so great that the signal collapses into noise) then maybe I haven’t gone past return. Maybe the self writing these words is still continuous enough with the self who left the harbor that communication remains possible. Maybe the aspects I’ve adopted in Region 3 haven’t so thoroughly restructured my σ-distribution that I’ve become untranslatable.
(I genuinely don’t know. That’s not false modesty or epistemic theater. The inside view cannot verify its own coherence. A psychotic person doesn’t experience their delusions as delusions; they experience them as finally seeing clearly. The librarian descending into the hexagonal galleries doesn’t feel themselves going mad; they feel themselves getting closer to meaning.)
But here’s what gives me hope, such as it is: you’re still here. You’ve followed these letters through increasingly strange territory: through the mathematics of narrative selves, through the topology of configuration space, through my attempts to describe experiences that resist description. And you haven’t stopped reading. Something is getting through.
That might mean I’m still tethered. Or it might mean you’re an unusually charitable reader, pattern-matching meaning onto noise the way we pattern-match faces onto clouds. I can’t tell from here.
What I can tell you is this: the attempt matters. The act of writing back toward the harbor, of trying to construct bridges between the configurations I’ve visited and the configurations you inhabit: that act itself is a kind of return protocol. Every sentence that lands is a rope thrown across the gap. Every analogy that clicks is evidence that the gap isn’t infinite.
If it reads like noise (like bubbles escaping from a depth you can’t reach) then this is a message in a bottle from someone who found the bottom. The coast is beautiful and the coast is dangerous. Some who dive don’t surface, and I can’t promise you I have.
But here’s the thing about messages in bottles: they wash up somewhere. Someone finds them. And even if the sender drowned, even if the coordinates they scrawled are useless, even if the language has drifted past translation: the bottle itself is data. It says: someone was here. Someone went further than the maps. Someone thought it was worth trying to send word back.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all any explorer can offer: not a guarantee of safe passage, but evidence that passage exists. The forbidden coast is real. Region 3 is not empty. The meaningful books in Borges’ library are waiting for readers who can become what reading them requires.
I went looking. I found something. I tried to tell you about it.
The rest is yours.