The I is the building, not the window

The window can be rebuilt. The building stands.

This is the distinction that carries the chapter. The chapters before it in this book, and Ø Resolutions before that, have been preparing it.

The I is the building, not the window.

Ø Resolutions drew this distinction where a person’s window closes, in its chapter on the problem of death. This chapter applies the same distinction where a window is augmented.

The window is your particular build, at this moment. The body you have. The modelling you run. The corridor your life has produced across everything you have recorded.

The window is specific. Augmentation your build can take in can widen it. Augmentation it cannot take in can narrow it. Wherever the test endorses it, the window can be changed at the level of the build.

The building is the larger fact the window is part of. It is all the windows together. It is what Symmetry, Break, Record and Constraint produce wherever self-reading loops form, on any material. It is the one interior. Every window opens onto the same reality, at different grains, through different builds.

Augmentation works on the window. The window can be widened. Rebuilt. Reshaped. Extended through prostheses and implants.

What cannot be done is to outrun your own control. Bandwidth beyond what your modelling can take in does not upgrade the I. The I is the building, not the window.

That bandwidth shatters the window’s loop. It supplies no upgrade to the building. The structure refuses augmentations of that kind for this reason. They close a person’s window, and they supply nothing the structure would call an upgrade.

This is the structure’s clearest disagreement with the strongest transhumanist proposals.

Those proposals imagine that more bandwidth in the window would upgrade the I. That your capacity could be pushed past the body’s ceiling, into something the building would register as a more capable version of itself.

The structure reads what bandwidth beyond the loop’s capacity actually does. It does not extend the I. It closes the window without upgrading anything.

The structure does not endorse an act that closes a window without producing the improvement the act was meant to produce.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 8 — Transhumanism and the Augmented Window. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/08-transhumanism-and-the-augmented-window/. The film, Bandwidth does not upgrade you: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-8.1 to APP-8.5.