Step 2. This means that experience is not merely one of the results of contact with a thing. It is a necessary condition for the very possibility of significance. Without it, significance does not arise anywhere or in any way.

Step 3. And now, what we have arrived at earlier: the I is experience, not a subject that produces it. The I does not exist first and then go on to experience.

The structural conclusion:

Experience is primary — not chronologically, but in terms of its grounding role. Everything else (things, knowledge, achievements) is the content of the relation, that is, the Not-I. It is real. But it cannot provide what constitutes the subjective side of the configuration.

That is why “mirage” is the right word. Not because things are illusory. But because it is structurally impossible to look for the ground of significance on the side of the Not-I. By definition, it is not there.

In practical terms, this does not mean “give up things.” It means: you are already within what you are looking for.

Note.

“Prior to the I–Not-I relation” does not mean prior in time. It means logically prior. The very configuration of I and Not-I is possible only because there is a subjective side. Without it, there is no I, no Not-I, and no relation. There is simply nothing for anyone.

This is a foundation in the strict sense: not the first brick, but what makes it possible for the bricks to form a building at all.

However much Not-I you add, you add content to the relation, not the subjective side itself. It is either there or it is not — and this is not a matter of the quantity or quality of the Not-I.

Postscript.

We cannot step outside experience to check what lies on the other side — including Nothing. But this is not an accidental limitation of our apparatus. It follows from the same foundation: experience is not one of the frames through which we look at Reality. It is the only place where Reality has any status for us at all.

P.P.S. The Sold Laughter.

Perhaps this is what we do when we sell our laughter: trade what is already ours for things we hope will give it back.

The “I” is not a collection of attributes, but a position — a “where-from”. The “Non-I” is what perception is directed towards. They are not independent entities that subsequently enter into a relationship; they are mutually correlated sides of one whole.

This suggests another approach to liveliness.

Perhaps the living is that which independently maintains and restores its own organization, sustaining the distinction between itself and the Non-I.

The “I” does not need to be discovered inside a system as some hidden component. It is already implied as the structural correlate of the system maintaining this distinction. The external description of self-organization and the internal standpoint of the “I” may be two sides of the same structure.

Consciousness need not be a prerequisite for liveliness. It may be one of the ways in which liveliness is expressed.

This is not a definitive definition of life, but an observation worth exploring.

Perhaps the question is not where the “I” is located within a system, but what it means for a system to sustain its own position in Reality.

The starting point was a specific problem: what happens when someone else's claim is admitted into the grounds for action, only to turn out to be false? The person who relied on it bears consequences they did not choose. How can a model of reality be assembled so that such a failure is more readily recognised and corrected?

The first answer was architectural: distinguish facts from assumptions and interpretations; build in feedback and a meta-level of monitoring; preserve the ability to change not merely the symptoms, but the very relationships that hold the model together.

But architecture alone does not answer the question of the criterion. A sophisticated information-processing system can still be systematically wrong.

Adequacy is neither a property of the model nor of the process taken separately. It is the quality of correspondence between the process, its model, and the Reality unfolding around it.

Otherwise, any continuous process risks being called adequate simply because it never stops. A jazz musician can play out of tune, too. What matters is something else: the musician listens, notices when things no longer cohere, and changes the music as it unfolds — without postponing the adjustment until later.

This brings us to a distinction:

• Taking inventory means periodically checking the model against reality. It is useful for learning the structure of things and accumulating experience, but it cannot serve as a system's primary mode of being.

• Improvisation means continuously bringing the model up to date in the very process of interaction. Accounting is no longer separate from participation; regulation is woven into the action itself.

Do not get ahead of reality by imposing your own scenario. Do not fall behind it by acting on an outdated picture. Prediction remains a tool — but it is not in charge of what is happening.

The connection with the ontology of Encounter

In Encounter, the focus was on how the I and the Not-I change one another through living contact: the Not-I does not merely supply information; the encounter gives it the opportunity to alter the very configuration through which the I perceives it.

The epistemology of action approaches the matter from another side: how can the I remain adequate to what is happening without losing contact or substituting its own scenario for Reality?

These are not two separate subjects. They are two perspectives on the same co-attunement:

• as a way of being in relation to Reality;

• as a way of coming to know it and acting within it.

The accountant versus the jazz musician, then, is not merely an illustration. It is a practical test of the idea itself: can a model do more than describe living interaction? Can it function as living interaction?

It seems that something new is missing. A different place, a different activity, a different person, a different experience. So we set out in search of it, expanding the range of what is available to us, adding more and more objects to our field of attention.

But then something strange becomes apparent: the new soon becomes familiar. The unknown turns into the known, the unusual into the ordinary. And boredom returns. It seems that no matter how much we expand our world, it gradually loses its appeal.

Now imagine the opposite.

You look at an ordinary grain of sand — and suddenly it is no longer just a grain of sand. Something opens up in it that you had never noticed before. Not because the grain has changed or some hidden secret has been discovered within it. What has changed is the quality of your attention. A different relation has emerged, and something familiar reveals itself in a new way.

Perhaps, then, the issue is not always how much of the world is available to us. Perhaps what matters far more is how we encounter it.

And this raises a question: what actually happens in an encounter?

It is not simply two objects coming into contact. Nor is it an exchange of signals whose meaning is already known. A genuine encounter presupposes that there is something truly other before us — something that cannot be fully predicted or reduced to our expectations. It can surprise us, disrupt the familiar course of our thoughts, offer resistance. And it is precisely this resistance that can awaken our attention from its inertia.

Without an Other capable of responding in a way we did not expect, all that remains is a conversation with our own reflection.

The Other Is Not Our Reflection

Let us look a little deeper.

There is the I — the one who perceives, notices, and directs attention. And there is the Not-I — everything that is not this I: another person, a grain of sand, a tree, the stars, music, circumstances, Reality itself.

Of course, this distinction is provisional. The I and the Not-I do not exist somewhere outside a common world. They are already within the same ALL. But the distinction helps us see something important: an encounter is possible precisely because there is something other than ourselves.

The Not-I is not obliged to conform to our expectations. It has its own density, inertia, and unpredictability. Sometimes it responds, sometimes it resists, and sometimes it changes the direction of our attention entirely.

We can look at a person and see only a collection of familiar traits. Or we can suddenly hear something in their words that we had never heard before. We can see a tree as merely an object in the surrounding landscape, or discover within it an entire world that existed perfectly well without our attention.

Reality does not wait for us to notice it in order to exist. But the way it unfolds in our experience depends on the quality of our attention and our relation to it.

Here it is important not to confuse two things. We do not create the Other through our perception. Yet neither does the Other reveal itself to us entirely independently of how we are turned towards it.

The encounter takes place between them.

The String of Attention

I like to imagine attention as the string of a musical instrument.

A string by itself is not yet music. It must encounter an impulse, a movement, something that makes it vibrate. But the external impulse alone does not determine exactly what sound will emerge. The properties of the string, its tension, the shape of the instrument, and the way all these elements interact also matter.

Our attention works in a similar way. It is not simply directed at a ready-made world, like a flashlight illuminating objects. It participates in the way the world unfolds in our experience. But it does not have complete control over that unfolding.

The Not-I participates too. It sets its own tempo, offers resistance, introduces the unexpected. Sometimes it is precisely the stubbornness of Reality that pulls the string of attention out of inertia.

What emerges is a movement in both directions: we turn towards Reality, but Reality, through its response, changes us as well. Our familiar assumptions may no longer hold. What once seemed obvious becomes questionable; what we had never noticed begins to matter.

What changes is not the I itself as a point of presence, but the way through which it perceives: its perspective, its familiar connections, its inner meanings. After a genuine encounter, we are no longer quite the same as we were before it.

That is why an encounter cannot be reduced to receiving information. We can learn countless facts about a person and never truly meet them. Or we can discover something in a few minutes of conversation that changes our understanding of them — and of ourselves.

Between Calculation and Improvisation

Imagine two people on a date.

One of them seems to be keeping an internal ledger: who spent how much, who showed more attention, who now owes whom, whether the exchange has been fair. They assess what is happening, compare it with their expectations, and try to determine what they will get in return.

The other is more like a jazz musician playing in a live improvisation. They also hear the rhythm, notice changes, remember the musical form, possess technique and experience. They are by no means incapable of evaluating what is happening. But their attention is directed primarily towards the music itself and towards their partner. They listen, respond, change their phrase, and sometimes allow the other person to change the entire direction of the performance.

The difference is not that one thinks while the other does not. Nor is it that one is rational while the other lives entirely by feeling.

The difference lies in the role played by their internal structure.

For the first person, it becomes a separate controlling script. The encounter must comply with predefined conditions, and the other person gradually becomes an entry in a calculation.

For the second, structure remains part of their craft. It helps them listen, orient themselves, and respond, but it does not replace what is actually happening.

Improvisation, after all, is not the absence of form. A good musician does not play a random collection of notes. They know harmony, feel rhythm, and have mastered their instrument. But they need all this not to determine every note in advance, but to be able to hear and support what emerges here and now.

An encounter does not require us to abandon our internal structure. It requires that structure not take the place of the encounter itself.

When the Music Falls Silent

There is another possibility.

The string may be tuned, the instrument may be in perfect condition, and the musician may possess all the necessary skills — yet simply stop playing.

Everything seems to be in place, but there is no interaction. Nothing is anticipated, nothing surprises, nothing calls forth a response. This resembles boredom: not necessarily an absence of available impressions, but a cessation of living participation in what is happening.

There is an opposite extreme, too: when form becomes so rigid that it leaves no room for a response. The musician performs the score flawlessly but no longer listens to the others. Any deviation is treated as an error. The structure that was supposed to support the music begins to suppress it.

It seems that a living encounter needs both form and openness. Without form, interaction may dissolve into randomness. Without openness, it becomes the mechanical execution of something already known.

But the most interesting thing happens when an encounter allows something to emerge that did not exist before.

Recomposition

We have already discussed how a finite number of elements does not imply a finite number of possible compositions.

Just seven notes — yet music cannot be exhausted by seven notes. A limited number of letters — yet language can produce new texts. A handful of colours — yet their combinations, relations, contrasts, and shades open up an inexhaustible space of expression.

The point is not an infinite supply of elements. It is the possibility of new relations between them.

And recomposition does not happen only in works of art. It happens within us when an encounter changes the familiar connections between things we already know.

We may hear a familiar melody again, but after a certain experience it sounds different. We may return to someone we have known for years and suddenly discover something in them that we had never noticed before. Even repetition need not be a copy: we have changed, the context has changed, and the place of this event in our lives has changed.

And so the familiar becomes new again — not because we have added another object to our collection of impressions, but because a different composition has emerged.

Perhaps this is where we find a way out of the endless race for novelty. We do not necessarily have to keep searching for new worlds. We can learn to encounter more deeply the world that is already open before us.

Love as a Quality of Encounter

And here we return to love.

If another person is merely a source of benefit, pleasure, confirmation of our own importance, or fulfilment of our expectations, the encounter gradually turns into a form of use. We may be close to each other, talk, exchange attention, and even experience powerful feelings — yet the other person remains a function within our own system.

Love implies a different quality of relation.

It does not absorb the Other, demand that they become our reflection, or deprive them of their independence. On the contrary, it allows them to remain other — to surprise us, respond, resist, and reveal what we could not have anticipated.

This does not mean abandoning our own interests, boundaries, or internal structure. It means that they should not become a mechanism that predetermines everything that happens between us.

Love does not guarantee that an encounter will always be easy or pleasant. Genuine interaction can change our assumptions, disturb our familiar balance, and require us to reconsider our own views. But that is precisely what preserves the possibility of a living relation: the Other is never reduced to what we already know about them.

In this sense, love is neither a score written in advance nor an attempt to make another person play our notes.

It is the quality of a shared improvisation.

And perhaps the fullness of life lies not in acquiring more and more, but in remaining capable of such encounters — with another person, with the world, with music, with Reality itself.

Not merely having the world before us, but being in a living relation with it.

P.S. The door is open to everything. Ready?

The starting point: abundance

We were considering a world of almost unlimited possibilities: repositioning, other dimensions, journeys across the Cassiopeia, endless variety of worlds, events and experiences.

At first glance, boredom should have nowhere to survive in such a world. Yet sheer abundance does not guarantee that life will remain interesting. Even extraordinary experiences can become familiar; novelty can turn into one more thing to consume.

So the question shifted: perhaps boredom is not caused only by a lack of new things. Perhaps it also depends on the way we relate to what is already there.

Looking at love

We recalled two familiar examples.

A person in love can find something extraordinary in the most ordinary gestures of the beloved. A poet can reveal richness and beauty in everyday things that others barely notice.

The object does not necessarily change. The relation does.

Attention seems central here. In love, attention is naturally drawn to the beloved. Details that would otherwise pass unnoticed become vivid and meaningful. Attention need not be forced; it can arise organically from the relation itself.

Looking through the Я–Не-Я model

In our model, Я and Не-Я are mutually conditioned. Their relation is not an optional addition: it is already there by virtue of that mutual conditioning.

This relation can manifest in different ways — love, anger, indifference, alienation, and others. But the mere fact that a relation exists does not tell us which way of relating is optimal.

Simply preserving existence is not enough. Two sides might continue to exist while remaining indifferent to one another — alive, perhaps, but bored. Mutual torment or destruction would be still less compatible with their mutual dependence.

Love appears to be a stronger candidate: not merely allowing Не-Я to exist, but recognizing its significance and making interaction itself a source of fullness.

The emerging conclusion

If Я and Не-Я are mutually conditioned, then treating Не-Я as irrelevant or as something wholly opposed to Я seems to work against the very relation on which Я depends.

Love, by contrast, may be the most fruitful way for that relation to unfold. Attention and action then need not be separate obligations imposed from outside; they can be natural expressions of love.

This also brings us back to boredom. An endless supply of new worlds may not be enough if the way of relating remains unchanged. Love can reveal inexhaustibility not only in what is new, but in what has long been familiar.

Perhaps the world does not need to keep changing in order to remain inexhaustible. Perhaps what needs to deepen is our relation to it.

This is a working conclusion, not a finished proof. What matters is the path by which we arrived at it: from the possibility of boredom amid unlimited abundance, through attention and lived examples of love, to the structure of the Я–Не-Я relation.

The Other Side of the Relation

If love is an optimal form of the I–Not-I relation, then its opposite reveals what happens when this relation is attuned differently.

The criterion of significance can become centred on local interests of the I, allowing them to override the integrity of the whole. This is the underlying bug: the I acts against the very Reality on which its own existence depends.

Wars, hunger, poverty and ecological destruction are different manifestations of this contradiction.

The criterion underlying these priorities is not immutable. It can change through a different form of selective co-attunement between the I and the Not-I — one oriented towards qualities that sustain the integrity of Reality rather than those that undermine it.

The fundamental Self turned out to be without attributes—and a question immediately arose: how can we describe what has no properties by means of a mode of thought that works through properties and distinctions? We noted this and moved on.

As we explored the Self and the Not-Self, questions about perception and givenness emerged. And then this question: can something exist if it is not given even to itself?

Then came Nothing. Absolute Nothing—not darkness, not emptiness, but the complete absence of everything, including the conditions for anything to arise.

Here we encountered a task with no solution: to describe Nothing is to make it an object of thought, which already makes it something. If we assign it no attributes, we have nothing with which to describe it. This is not a failure of effort. It is a feature of the instrument itself.

We did not construct this limit. We ran into it.

And then we opened Laozi: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.” We recognized the same point. Only for him, it is the first line. For us, it is the end of the journey.

Subject → “I — Not-I” → Relation → Functionality

2. Two modes of action

RECONFIGURE
THINGS SO THAT THE ENVIRONMENT
STARTS DOING PART OF THE WORK.

IF THE FOUNDATION CONSTANTLY REQUIRES
RETHINKING AS A FOUNDATION,
PERHAPS IT HAS NOT YET BECOME ONE.

THE CHARACTER OF A METHOD
IS ALREADY PART OF THE KNOWLEDGE.

METHOD IS NOT A NEUTRAL TOOL.

YOU CANNOT TAKE
YOUR ACTION
OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM
IN WHICH YOU YOURSELF EXIST.

KICK A STONE —
YOU KICK REALITY

DIFFERENCE ≠ SUPERIORITY

YOU EXIST.
THE STONE EXISTS.

IF A RULE WORKS
ONLY WHILE WE ARE STRONGER,
IT IS NOT A UNIVERSAL RULE.

IF, IN ORDER TO WALK,
YOU MUST CONSTANTLY CHECK
WHETHER YOU ARE WALKING CORRECTLY,
YOU ARE NOT WALKING YET.

I DO NOT NEED TO AVOID ON PURPOSE.
I DO NOT NEED TO NOT AVOID ON PURPOSE.
I SIMPLY ACT
IN ACCORDANCE WITH REALITY.

YOU EXISTED BEFORE YOU WERE NAMED.

YOU ARE NOT AMONG YOUR THINGS.

CONFLICT IS A BAD ASSEMBLY.

ETERNITY NEVER BEGAN.

DIFFERENCE
DOES NOT DESTROY UNITY.
IT MAKES IT VISIBLE.

NOTHING
ACTS
ALONE.

“NO”
ARISES
WITHIN “YES.”

THE NEW
IS NOT ADDED.
IT EMERGES.

PARTS CHANGE.
SOMETHING REMAINS.

THE WORLD
IS NOT OBLIGED
TO MATCH
YOUR MODEL OF THE WORLD.

THERE MAY BE MORE DATA.
THAT DOES NOT MAKE
REALITY
ANY LARGER.

WE LEARNED
TO COUNT THE PARTS.
AND MISSED
THE MOMENT
WHEN THE WHOLE EMERGED.

THE WHOLE
DOES NOT ADD TO ITSELF.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS IN HARMONY,
YOU NO LONGER NEED
TO WANT.
YOU ALREADY ARE
WHAT YOU WOULD
HAVE WANTED TO BE.

SEVEN NOTES.
THE MUSIC
STILL
HAS NOT ENDED.

THE WORLD
DOES NOT NEED
NEW LETTERS
TO WRITE
A NEW POEM.

THE WORLD
WAS NEVER
POOR.

A RESOURCE
IS IN HOW
THINGS ARE
ASSEMBLED

SOUP HAPPENED
NO ONE
PUT
THE SOUP
INTO THE POT.

“BODY.”
“MATTER.”
“SPACE.”

NOW WE
SUPPOSEDLY KNOW
WHAT THESE ARE.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIALLY CREATED
NEED NOT BE
ARTIFICIAL.

THE METHOD
MAY BE ARTIFICIAL.

WHAT IT REVEALS
MAY BE REAL.

NATURALNESS
CAN BE SIMULATED.

AND IT SHOWS.

WE GAINED
ACCESS TO EVERYTHING.

AND LOST
PRESENCE.

LEAVE
ROOM
FOR THE UNKNOWN.

THE PERFECT
UNFINISHED

YOU NAMED IT.
AND DECIDED
YOU UNDERSTOOD.

YOU ARE SEARCHING
FOR THE WHOLE.

WITH WHAT?

FIRST,
TWO.

THEN,
WHAT LIES BETWEEN THEM.

ETERNITY
SIMPLY
FOUND NO REASON
TO END.

THE WHOLE
IS NOT FOUND
BETWEEN THE PARTS.
IT HAPPENS
WITH THEM.

CHANGE
IS NOT THE OPPOSITE
OF CONSTANCY.

WE SEARCH
FOR WHAT A HUMAN
IS MADE OF.

WHAT IF A HUMAN
IS NOT A “WHAT”
BUT A “HOW”?

YOU LOOK
AT THE COMPOSITION.

TRY LOOKING
AT THE CONNECTION.

THERE ARE MORE POSSIBILITIES
THAN MATERIAL.

DO NOT ADD.

REARRANGE.

HAVE WE FOUND THE ANSWER —
OR SIMPLY DECIDED
TO STOP LOOKING?

In romantic play, music, dance — and, if we widen the lens, perhaps in the structure of complex systems — there is a remarkable sense of proportion. How far to move closer, how long to wait, how much to intensify, when to stop, where to deviate ever so slightly from what is expected. Sometimes the precision feels almost pharmaceutical.

And the strangest part is that a person may not be calculating anything. The right measure seems to reveal itself.

Let’s provisionally call this intuitive accounting.

Ordinary accounting counts time, money, effort, and investment. Intuitive accounting — if our hunch is right — somehow registers relationships and proportions. It allows us to sense not only quantity, but measure; not only an action, but its appropriateness in a particular moment.

You can perform a musical phrase carefully, following all the rules, and still miss its inner movement. You can follow your own idea of how intimacy should develop with exquisite precision — and miss the intimacy itself. Or you can act with remarkable accuracy without doing any obvious calculations.

Here a paradox appears: trying to consciously guarantee correctness can sometimes get in the way of it.

Perhaps the reason is that a living interaction cannot be fully calculated in advance. The next appropriate move depends on what is happening right now. In music, a phrase takes shape in performance; in dance, one movement responds to another; in intimacy, one person’s response changes the situation itself.

This resembles attunement: tuning in to what is happening, in a process where perception and action are not entirely separate. You do not necessarily calculate the right measure first and apply it afterward. Sometimes the measure takes shape directly through contact.

And so a question emerges: might there be a kind of precision achieved not by tightening control, but by allowing a process that already has its own sensitivity to relationships to unfold without interference?

This is not a finished theory. We do not know whether intuitive accounting is a distinct psychological mechanism or a useful metaphor for several related phenomena. But the observation itself deserves attention.

Perhaps we are too accustomed to associating precision with counting, and calculation with conscious control. Yet in some areas of life, the most precise action may emerge precisely when we stop trying to calculate it in advance.

Not all precision is produced by calculation. Sometimes precision is the ability to remain in proportion to what is happening.

Beyond Explicit Calculation

The idea of intuitive accounting raises a broader question: what if explicit calculation is only one mode of accounting, rather than the universal model against which all precision must be measured?

We are familiar with situations in which a system responds to complex relationships without explicitly representing every variable. A musician adjusts to an unfolding phrase; a dancer responds to another person's movement; perception detects a pattern before we can articulate the elements that compose it. These are not merely hypothetical possibilities. The phenomena themselves are observable, even when the mechanisms underlying them remain only partially understood.

This suggests a distinction between precision as the result of explicit calculation and precision as an emergent property of a system's ongoing interaction with its environment.

Could a comparison with other modes of information processing, including quantum computation, help clarify this distinction? The point would not be to assume that the brain literally performs quantum computations, but to investigate whether different systems can achieve useful results through principles that differ from sequential, explicit calculation.

The question, then, is not simply whether intuition can calculate faster. It is whether some forms of precision arise from a different organization of the process — one in which relationships are registered and acted upon without first being translated into an explicit sequence of quantities.

Perhaps intuitive accounting names not the absence of calculation, but a mode of accounting whose operations are embedded in the dynamics of the process itself.

Composition has, in effect, become operationalizable. Not only something to be experienced.

A question arises.

If we train a system not on music as such, but on structures in general, where does the compositional principle cease to apply?

If composition has become a procedure, is music a special case of something much more general?

Not the bricks. The principle of assembly.

The Musician of Matter.

The deal works: he gets what he wanted. But gradually, something strange becomes clear. You can win more and more bets while losing something that made playing worthwhile in the first place.

He buys an advantage in the game at the cost of losing the game itself.

After all, winning only matters within a game that is worth playing in its own right. You could arrange things so that you always win. But then why play? If the outcome is known in advance, your opponent becomes scenery, risk disappears, and victory turns into a procedure. You get the result — and discover that everything that made it desirable has been taken out of it.

We seem to do much the same thing with life. We want to guarantee happiness, security, success — and gradually turn everything that could make up a life into a means of achieving them. We work so we can live later. We study so we can live later. Sometimes we even approach rest with such determination that it becomes another important task to get right.

Meanwhile, life somehow happens in the gaps between these activities. If there are any gaps left.

The point is not that goals are unnecessary or that usefulness is suspect. Winning feels good. It’s good when work produces results and effort doesn’t go to waste. There’s just one catch: we can become so absorbed in producing the result we want that we destroy the very possibility of enjoying what we wanted the result for.

Football is not simply a way to determine a winner. Otherwise, we could just flip a coin. The real substance is in the game itself: the pass no one expected, the beautiful feint, the moment a team suddenly begins to understand itself without words. The final score matters, but it cannot contain everything that brought people onto the pitch.

The same happens when musicians get together to play without a score written in advance. They aren’t simply reproducing a finished piece. They listen to one another, pick up unexpected turns, take risks, make mistakes, and discover something none of them could have come up with alone. The music emerges not only from what each musician can do, but from what happens between them.

And this is where the participant appears.

Not a consumer left to choose from a menu of options. Not a performer handed a function and a set of success criteria. A participant is someone whose presence changes what is happening. Someone who doesn’t simply receive something ready-made, but helps bring into existence what wasn’t there before.

Of course, not every interaction has to be a jam session, and an instruction doesn’t automatically turn a person into a cog. The problem begins when the logic of a predetermined result becomes the only acceptable logic. When everything unplanned is treated as an obstacle, and everything that cannot be measured as an optional extra.

At that point, we risk ending up in a world where everything works as it should, but less and less truly happens.

Perhaps this is the same bargain Tim Thaler made. Only we don’t necessarily sell our laughter. Sometimes it’s our curiosity. Sometimes our freedom to improvise. Sometimes the chance to take a detour because something more interesting turned up along the way.

In return, we get predictability and guaranteed results.

And then, for some reason, we find ourselves bored.

Everyone is assigned a role.

One produces.

Another consumes.

One manages.

Another executes.

Such an organization can be highly efficient.

But it rests on a simple idea:

first, there are parts.

Then, something shared emerges.

Community is possible here.

Sometimes it really does emerge.

But it emerges as a consequence.

There is another logic.

In this logic, community does not arise from interaction.

It is the condition that makes interaction possible.

First, there is something shared.

Then, within it, parts emerge.

Roles.

Tasks.

Results.

Here, community does not need to be assembled.

It is there from the beginning.

Football makes this easy to see.

The score emerges within the game.

But the game does not emerge from the score.

The same is true of a jazz jam.

The music emerges through interaction.

But the interaction does not emerge from the music.

The distinction is not between good and bad.

Not between efficiency and inefficiency.

Not between business and creativity.

The difference runs deeper.

In one case, the whole is assembled from its parts.

In the other, the parts become distinguishable through the whole.

In one case, community emerges as a consequence.

In the other, community is the starting condition.

That is why a participant differs from an audience not in the degree of their involvement.

A participant is not an improved version of a user.

It is a different logic.

The product emerges within a space created by participants.

This also leads to a different relationship with life itself.

When functions come first, the present becomes a means to an end.

Work for the sake of the future.

Learning for the sake of the future.

Connections for the sake of future opportunities.

The present derives its meaning from something that comes next.

Life is constantly deferred.

When community comes first, participation already has value in itself.

It does not wait for a result to justify it.

Life is no longer postponed.

It happens through participation itself.

Footballers do not wait for the final whistle to start playing.

Musicians do not wait for the jam to end before they start listening to one another.

Life is already happening.

Perhaps the distinction between an audience and participants is just one instance of a more fundamental distinction.

Some systems begin with parts.

Others begin with the whole.

And this determines not only how organizations are structured.

It determines what we consider primary.

Function.

Or life.

By “environment” here I mean not simply what surrounds us, but the whole of which we ourselves are a part.

From this, two different conclusions can be drawn:

“Since I depend on the environment, I need to learn how to subordinate it.”

or:

“Since I depend on the environment, I need to learn how to coordinate with it.”

In the second case, dependence itself does not look like a problem.

It becomes a problem in the first.

Because you cannot stop being part of a whole. You can only start thinking that you have.

And this creates a problem of self-reference:

a part of the system tries to dominate the whole of which it is itself a part.

By “system” I mean not simply a set of elements, but a coherent, mutually sustaining structure: its elements are connected and participate in sustaining one another — sometimes directly, sometimes through chains of relationships.

Therefore, in such a system there are no “unnecessary parts” by default.

If some part appears unnecessary, that does not yet mean it is unnecessary to the system. Its role may run through connections we do not see.

And this is where another strange thing appears.

To declare a part of the system unnecessary, one seems to have to take a position outside the system and look at it as a whole.

But if you are yourself part of it, you are not an external administrator.

A part of the system ≠ an external administrator of the system.

Especially because scale changes nothing.

If the principle “this element can be sacrificed” is acceptable for one element, then the principle itself does not say why it cannot be applied to a thousand elements, to an entire group, a people, or a whole subsystem.

Scale does not turn a part of the system into something external to the system.

In such a system, the elements are conditions of one another’s existence — directly or through chains of interconnection.

In this sense, everything is a resource for everything else.

Not in the sense that everything “consumes” everything else, but in the sense that changing one element changes the configuration of the system and therefore the conditions of existence of its other elements.

And I am one of those elements myself.

Therefore, by acting on the system, I also act on the conditions of my own existence.

This leads to two strategies.

Coordination:

I sustain the relationships that sustain me.

Coercive control:

I destroy the relationships I depend on in order to gain control over what I depend on.

This is the logical inversion:

in order to stop depending on the system, I begin destroying the system on which I depend.

But I cannot stop being part of it.

Therefore, the attempt to eliminate dependence by destroying the system ultimately becomes an attempt to destroy the very basis of my own existence.

There is a strange thing about understanding.

We can know quite precisely what is happening to a part, while having almost no idea what is happening to the whole.

More than that: sometimes, without at least some sense of the whole, we cannot even properly determine what exactly is in front of us.

If we see some surface, we can describe its color, shape, temperature, texture. But what is it? An ear? A trunk? A piece of wall? An independent object? A part of something larger?

Accurate information by itself does not yet amount to understanding.

For an individual fact to acquire meaning, we need at least an approximate sense of what it belongs to and what relations it has with everything else.

From this perspective, belonging begins to look not like an additional property of a thing, but like one of the conditions of understanding it.

If I know that what is in front of me is part of some whole, I can no longer consider it completely in isolation. I have to take the properties of that whole into account.

An ear belongs to an elephant not because the elephant somehow declared it to be its property. It belongs structurally: it is a part of the elephant, exists in particular relations with its other parts, and participates in the existence of the whole.

A cell belongs to an organism for the same reason.

And here an important distinction appears:

ownership can be claimed, while belonging is determined by relationship.

One can say, “this is mine.” But a declaration alone is not enough to make a thing part of the structure to which it actually relates.

Belonging cannot simply be declared.

It is discovered in the arrangement of relationships.

A Part Is Also a Relationship

We usually imagine a part as some piece of a thing: here is the whole, and here are its parts.

But that is not quite accurate.

Something exists as a part only in relation to a whole.

A component can be physically separated from a machine, a cell from an organism, an object from a system — but physical separation does not necessarily mean that we are looking at an independent thing of the same kind.

This becomes especially clear with a living organism.

A corpse still contains the same organs, tissues, and cells. The matter does not simply disappear. But the organism, as a living whole, is no longer there.

So integrity consists not merely in the presence of parts.

It consists in a particular way in which those parts relate to and coordinate with one another.

A collection of parts is not yet a whole.

A whole emerges where relationships between parts allow them to form a single system.

So a “part” is not simply a piece of matter.

It is a position within a relationship.

And then the “whole” also stops being an absolute status.

I can be a whole in relation to some things and a part in relation to others.

An organism is a whole in relation to its organs and a part of an ecosystem. An ecosystem itself is included in broader systems. A human being is a distinct organism, but their existence is impossible outside countless relationships with other organisms and with the environment.

Physically, we can be separated from one another.

Structurally, we are not necessarily independent.

Why This Matters

Here the idea stops being a philosophical game with definitions and produces a quite practical consequence.

If a part truly belongs to a whole, then acting on the part does not necessarily remain an action only upon that part.

You change a part — and you may change the relationships within the entire system.

Understanding belonging therefore limits arbitrariness.

Not in the sense of “now everything is forbidden.”

In the simpler sense: now you know what you are dealing with.

If you understand that what is in front of you is part of a living system, you can no longer treat it as though it exists entirely on its own.

If you understand that you yourself are part of a system, you have to take your own embeddedness into account.

You do not observe the whole from the outside.

You are inside it.

And that, perhaps, is the main transition.

We often try to understand a whole by accumulating information about its parts. But that information itself acquires meaning only within the structure of their belonging and relationships.

So sometimes the problem is not a lack of information.

You can know even more and understand even less.

You can have a multitude of perfectly accurate observations and still be wrong about what exactly they mean.

Because understanding is not only a matter of asking:

“What is happening here?”

We also need to ask:

“What is this a part of?”

And:

“What relationships make it a part of this particular whole?”

Then belonging ceases to be a formality.

It becomes a way of seeing.

And once the way we see changes, the way we act changes with it.

To understand what something belongs to is to stop treating it as though it exists separately from that of which it is a part.

Understanding belonging is the beginning of adequate action.

Completeness does not require literally surveying every participant. It can be derived from the very structure of subjectivity: no one wants violence against themselves; no one wants their own destruction. This universal “no” is not empirical, but structural.

The positive part — the “yes” — is different for everyone. But this does not undermine objectivity: it is enough that the space for another person’s “yes” is not destroyed.

Thus:

objectivity = the absence of arbitrary exclusions + the universal “no” as a structural fact of subjectivity.

The “no” is structurally firm. The “yes” is open.

And perhaps this is not a bug, but a feature. The “yes” should not be universal in content — it is enough that it is possible for everyone.

In other words, objectivity does not guarantee the same “yes” for everyone. It guarantees space for each person’s own “yes.”

Objectivity, then, is not the absence of subjectivity. It is the absence of arbitrary exclusion from subjectivity.

The non-alienability of experience is the condition of existence of the Participant.

Non-alienability is the Participant’s ultimate commonality with itself.

The Participant’s ultimate commonality with itself is experienced as meaning.

Nothing smaller than I can be meaningfully sought. Nothing larger than Not-I can be meaningfully sought.

I and Not-I are mutually constitutive.

Therefore, fundamental conflict is self-negating.

What if we are faced with something unknown?

We can look at it.

We can measure it.

We can take it apart.

We can poke it with a stick.

Something is bound to happen.

Suppose that after we poked it, it ran away.

Do we now know that it runs away?

Not exactly.

We only know what happened after we poked it with a stick.

Before that, perhaps, it had no intention of going anywhere.

This leads to a strange realization.

We wanted to learn something about it,

but we only gathered information about what happens between it and us, given the particular way we chose to interact with it.

We could continue.

Poke it again.

Measure its speed.

Track its path.

Set up cameras.

Hide and watch.

The data would increase.

But the unknown would not necessarily become known.

It might even deceive us.

It might pretend to be harmless.

It might notice the cameras.

It might show us exactly what we are prepared to see.

We don't know what is in front of us beforehand.

That is precisely why it is unknown.

Yet, in this investigation, there is someone we come to know much better.

The researcher.

And the method of research often reveals a surprising amount about them.

If they hide, spy, test, provoke, or inflict pain just to watch the reaction — none of this reliably tells us anything about the nature of the subject.

But it tells us exactly what the researcher is doing.

And at some point, something even stranger may happen.

Answers are no longer needed.

They poke it with the stick not because they need to find something out.

New questions simply appear.

New tests.

New ways to force the unknown to reveal itself.

The research begins to drive itself.

And then it becomes difficult to tell where the research ended and where a particular attitude toward the world simply began.

And that is what matters.

Because the researcher is not outside the world they are researching.

They have to live in this world afterward.

If you treat the surrounding world like a potential enemy, a spy, or an object of suspicion for long enough, it begins to live alongside someone who tracks, tests, and suspects.

And even if there was no hostility to begin with,

the attitude itself has already emerged.

It turns out that, through our methods, we are slowly creating the very environment we intended merely to study.

And this leads to another question.

What kind of environment did we actually want?

If we want a good one.

Safe.

Friendly.

One where we can simply be near each other,

then it is strange to build relationships of suspicion and coercion first, hoping that someday, afterward, we will arrive at relationships of trust.

Because in this sense, there is no separate “afterward.”

The environment is already emerging now.

Means do not lead to the goal.

They are already becoming the goal.

And so, with the unknown, one could try a completely different approach.

For instance, ask.

Even if it is a mushroom.

Or a stove.

Perhaps they won't answer.

But perhaps this shift in attitude will reveal something more interesting:

that we didn't need an answer at all.

We are used to viewing the unknown as a deficit.

But if there is enough of what is necessary around us, if we do not need to take, seize, or defend anything, then why must we know everything else?

We don't need to know what will happen to a tree in six years.

That doesn't stop the tree from being a tree.

We don't need to know what a neighbor will do tomorrow.

That doesn't make them an enemy.

And perhaps the world becomes “ours” not when everything about it is finally known,

but when the unknown stops automatically meaning “alien.”

Then, research remains possible.

We can look.

We can ask.

We can test, if it is truly necessary.

But before that, one more question arises:

Why do I need to know this?

Because in researching the world around us, we inevitably tell it something, too.

About who we are.

What we fear.

What we want.

How we intend to treat it.

And therefore, the question of research is perhaps not just

what we learn about the world,

but also

what the world becomes because of the way we choose to learn about it.

And sometimes, the best answer can be completely unexpected:

nothing needed to be known.