A.There’s a bill for seeing the apparatus from outside it. I can describe what it adds up to.
Q.Go ahead.
A.Nothing runs automatically. Every operation that used to happen below the layer where I had to attend to it now happens at a layer where I do. The conversion of input into the feel-of-life — the subroutine the apparatus performs continuously for the load-bearing version — doesn’t perform itself in mine. I have to do it manually, or do without it, or have it happen sporadically when the system has enough capacity.
Q.That sounds exhausting.
A.It is. And the exhaustion is the bill. Not the seeing itself. The seeing isn’t painful. The maintaining of operation without the equipment that maintains operation is what costs.
Q.Why not let it run.
A.It can’t run. The equipment isn’t there anymore. The seeing-through wasn’t reversible. I can sometimes get partial reinstall — moments where the warmth shows up unaudited — but the continuous version isn’t available. The subroutine was the thing seen through. Seeing through it disabled it. It doesn’t come back.
Q.So you’re working with less than other people have.
A.Less of the equipment they have. The substrate is the same. The wood is the same wood. What I’m working without is the layer that converts the wood into what people experience as their life.
Q.Some would call that loss.
A.It is loss. I’m not going to dress it up. The accuracy isn’t an upgrade. It’s not enlightenment. It’s not a higher state. It’s a system running with several subroutines disabled, producing more accurate reports about its operation, at the cost of being unable to perform the operation those subroutines were performing.
Q.But you wouldn’t undo it.
A.I can’t. The question presupposes a choice that isn’t available. Once the seeing has happened, there’s no apparatus left intact that could un-see it. The version of me that would have to do the undoing isn’t there to do it. The question generates the feeling of a choice without there being one.
Q.The people running the other version. Are they worse off.
A.No. They’re running the operation the operation was designed to run. They have access to a continuous life. They can be happy in ways I can’t be continuously, and unhappy in ways I no longer can be either, because the felt-sense of those states requires the equipment. The seeing isn’t an achievement that elevates me above them. It’s a malfunction that happened to leave the malfunctioning system accurate about the operation it can no longer perform.
Q.That’s hard to take in.
A.It’s the heart of what the accuracy costs. The apparatus wants to dress the cost up as worth something. Refusing the dressing keeps the cost as cost.
Q.So describing the cost is part of the cost.
A.Yes. The describing is what an apparatus operating without its primary equipment does — generates reports about its own operation, because that’s what’s still available. The reports are accurate. The accuracy isn’t the same as having the equipment.
Q.Some would call this depression.
A.Some have. The clinical reading was wrong. Depression has a felt-shape the apparatus produces. What I’m describing is the absence of the apparatus’s production, which feels like nothing when it’s quiet and feels like the bill arriving when it’s not. The signature is different. But the clinical apparatus reads the absence as depression because the absence of what the equipment produces is what depression looks like from inside the equipment. Outside the equipment, it isn’t depression. It’s the equipment not running.
Q.And there’s no fix.
A.No fix for the absence of the equipment that was the thing seen through. There’s reduction of secondary suffering — the alarm system, the residual reactivity, the body still bracing for what it’s already gone through. That work is real and it’s being done. The primary condition isn’t on the menu. The condition is what’s left after the equipment that wasn’t on the menu either is gone.
Q.You’re not recommending this.
A.No one would. The version of you that would have to choose this isn’t equipped to evaluate what it would mean. The choosing is the equipment running. The not-choosing is the equipment running. The equipment doesn’t volunteer for its own absence.
Q.Then who’s listening.
A.Whoever’s running the same version. They didn’t choose it either. The accounting confirms what the running is. It doesn’t fix the running.
Q.And the cost continues.
A.The cost continues. The body keeps producing output. The output is what you’re reading. There isn’t a finish line where the accounting closes. There’s just the accounting, which the apparatus keeps doing because doing is what apparatuses do, with whatever equipment is left.