You are already inside

You cannot step outside the question. You are asking it with a body.

Try to deny the question. Say medicine is something else. Or nothing at all. Or a mistake.

Something has to do the saying. A body does it. A brain reads its own state, takes a position, and writes it down as a thought or a word. The body doing the denying is the body the question is about.

There is no neutral ground. Whoever denies it is a body, running all the time, with a corridor that is either still open or not. You are already inside what this chapter describes.

Five words for the body

Five words carry this chapter and the four after it. Operator. Budget. Corridor. Drift. Exit.

The body is an operator. An operator is a reader who can say no. Your body reads its own state. It notices when something is failing. Then it acts for itself, or it signals to a larger structure that can act for it.

It runs all the time. Heart. Breath. Digestion. The immune system on watch. A million small couplings keep it standing. Energy comes in. Work is done. Waste goes out. The body is kept from decay by renewing itself, without stopping, along the lines its own record has written.

The body has a budget. Energy is finite. Repair is finite. Reserves are finite. The budget decides how much drift the body can absorb before the corridor closes.

The body has a corridor. The book calls it the viability corridor. It is the range of inner states in which the body keeps running. Body temperature has a corridor. So does the acidity of your blood. Blood pressure. Blood sugar. Sleep. Food. Physical load. Emotional regulation. How well you are held among other people.

Most corridors are wider than you would expect. But every one has walls. At the walls, the body begins to fail.

The body has drift. A body is never still. It is kept steady by constant work. Every part cycling. Every system regulating. Every coupling adjusting. Drift inside the corridor is simply what upkeep looks like. Drift toward a wall is what happens when the load, the inputs or the capacity for repair have shifted.

The body has an exit. The corridor is finite. Every body leaves it in the end. The exit is not a failure of the body. It is what the body does when its corridor can no longer be widened again. The last of the five chapters is about the exit. Here it is named as one of the facts every body carries.

Operator, budget, corridor, drift, exit. Every move in this chapter runs on these five. So does every chapter that follows.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 5 — Medicine and the Viability Corridor. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/05-medicine-and-the-viability-corridor/. The film, Level one was never attempted: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-5.1 to APP-5.5.