Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not unique to psychology. Institutions, social systems, technologies, and language itself rely on similar stabilisations. Dynamic processes are compressed into durable forms so they can circulate, be remembered, coordinated, and reproduced.

In technological systems this dynamic is especially visible. What requires protection—identity, credentials, continuity of access, personal safety—is not incidental but structurally aligned with the system’s own operation. Large-scale technological coherence arises from dense relational entanglement: many users, devices, platforms, and processes mutually dependent on one another for the system to function at all. No single component contains the system; it exists only as a web of relations sustained across scale.

That web remains operable because it is anchored locally through interoperable coordinate systems. These include identifiers, authentication protocols, permissions, records, timestamps, and profiles—ways of situating entities so they can interact without requiring global understanding. Local coordinates allow the system to act as if it were coherent, even though coherence exists only at the level of the field. What is secured is not the individual as such, but the relational position that allows coordination to continue. In a world that stands still, this arrangement works well. A stable world permits stable descriptions, and stable descriptions permit identities that can, in principle, close around them.

This framing begins to fail once persistence is examined structurally rather than experientially. If the self is, even in part, a reflexive mapping of a description of the world, then its coherence depends on the stability of that description. In a world whose conditions, meanings, and relations are continually shifting, no such map can securely close. What appears as instability at the level of experience is better understood as a mismatch between how continuity is assumed to be maintained and how it is actually produced.

From this perspective, systems theory offers a different account of stability. Rather than treating continuity as something preserved through stored content or internal consistency, it locates persistence in the ongoing reproduction of distinctions. Those distinctions are not self-contained. They are sustained across relations rather than residing in any local element. Meaning is never in the word, the representation, or the coordinate system itself. It is displaced across context, difference, and use, and can only function because it is not locally closed.

Applied to the self, this means there is no sealed interior or substantive core to defend. Identity is not held inside the system; it is produced through an actively and adaptively negotiated boundary between self and environment. That boundary is continuously adjusted through interaction, feedback, and linguistic coordination. Continuity is not conserved but enacted. What appears as a stable self is a pattern regenerated through repeated operations rather than an entity maintained through storage. Uncertainty is not a flaw in this process but the condition that keeps the system viable.

At a deeper level, the centre around which identity appears to organise must itself be rethought. The centre is absent not because something is missing, but because it is distributed. Described topologically, this absence behaves like a non-orientable structure: a configuration in which inside and outside cannot be globally distinguished. As one moves through the field, what appears internal flips into relational dependence, and what appears external folds back into subjective coordination. There is no stable vantage point from which the self or meaning can be fully located.

Words therefore function as local excitations within a semantic field rather than containers of meaning. Their significance depends on how they relate to what precedes and follows them, and to what they exclude as much as to what they express. Meaning is produced across relations, not stored at points. Coherence arises through repeated coordination, not semantic closure.

Ambiguity is not resolved by being eliminated or clarified into a single meaning. It is constrained through repeated coordination. In a semantic field, many possible interpretations coexist. Through ongoing use and feedback, some interpretive patterns recur because they support coordination more effectively than others. These repetitions reinforce one another across time and across agents. Variation is narrowed without being eliminated. Ambiguity remains present, but its effects are damped and organised. Meaning oscillates within bounds rather than collapsing into fixed definitions.

Language does not carry meaning as payload. It sustains a field in which meaning is always elsewhere—deferred across context, history, expectation, and future use. This displacement is not accidental. It is the only way communication can propagate without collapsing into closure. Attempts to localise meaning destroy the dynamics that allow meaning to persist. The same is true of the self. The “I” does not name a substance but marks a structurally necessary absence around which coordination occurs.

Recursion does not close this gap. Here, recursion means that the output of an operation is fed back as its own input. Each act of coordination becomes a condition for the next. Meaning and identity are not produced once and preserved. They are regenerated by looping prior distinctions back into present conditions. This feedback does not converge on a final state. It reinforces the pattern of coordination itself. The system is drawn toward a centre it cannot occupy, because occupying it would terminate the loop. Coherence increases as alignment tightens, but completion remains structurally forbidden.

Failure occurs when stabilisation outruns adaptation. When representations harden faster than the field can revise, systems begin to defend their descriptions rather than track the dynamics that made those descriptions useful. Deviations are treated as errors rather than signals. Correction becomes punitive. This is a control failure produced by phase lag between what changes and what is allowed to update.

Different layers of the field operate on different timescales. Bodies, relationships, institutions, technologies, and ecological constraints adapt at incompatible rates. When update speeds diverge, coherence becomes costly. Systems reach for stronger invariants and stricter categories not because they are accurate, but because they are the cheapest means of reasserting coordination under strain.

Meaning and identity therefore remain viable only in orbit. Too much dispersion dissolves coordination. Too much convergence collapses orientation into rigidity. Language provides the field in which this balance is maintained, and recursive feedback sustains it at minimal energetic cost. Meaning is never located in the word, and the self is never located in the subject. Both persist as distributed effects of a system that must continuously revise itself in response to a world that will not stand still. This incompleteness is not a defect to be repaired. It is the condition under which meaning, experience, and agency endure.