Section 3

What this chapter inherits

Four chapters came before this one. It uses what they built.

The five chapters on the body read one window at five scales. A window, in this work, is one self-reading life: one person.

The chapter on medicine set out the body as an operator with a budget and a corridor. An operator is a reader who can say no. It set out medicine as five levels of help, lowest first.

The chapter on genetic engineering set out the conditions for editing a body before its person can choose. The future corridor is what the editing must respect.

The chapter on addiction set out your authority over your own mind, below the boundary. The boundary is the line where what you do spills onto others at a cost they must carry. Addiction is your capacity to choose, collapsed under a narrowed corridor.

The chapter on augmentation set out when it is valid to widen the corridor by changing the body’s own build. The constraint is impedance matching: the person’s mind must be able to take in what the augmentation delivers.

Each read the body at its own scale. Each said what the structure permits and what it refuses. Each carried the same test, set up in the chapter on medicine.

The four conditions

Four conditions run wherever anything couples, everywhere in the universe. The book writes them S, B, R and C.

Symmetry: two things can be read as the same kind of thing. Break: symmetry can break, so that anything can happen at all. Record: what happened is held, and cannot be undone. Constraint: a record is somewhere, not everywhere. So nothing arrives everywhere at once.

They run at the bedside too. In the body whose corridor is closing. In the person whose authority this chapter sets out.

What it carries forward

The chapter inherits more than these. Four things carry it.

Override. From the earlier books, on choice. Your capacity to choose, wherever more than one path is open. The book tells override that is exercised apart from override that has collapsed under a narrowed corridor.

The corridor. From the chapter on medicine. Width, drift, exit. The exit was named there as level five, and kept for this chapter. At levels one to four, the person’s authority over their own body stays intact. At level five, it is their authority over the conditions of their own closing.

The dignity-floor. From the chapter on medicine. There is a floor that care never falls below. However scarce the resources. Whatever the projection says. Whatever else is being calculated.

The operator and the narrator. From Ø Dissolutions, Chapters Four and Five. The operator is the body at the site: the person’s own architecture, running. The narrator is the story the person tells about their own path. It includes how they think others see that path. Both are real. Both are part of the person.

At the closing, the operator and the narrator can come apart.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 9 — End-of-Life Care and the Right to Exit. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/09-end-of-life-care-and-the-right-to-exit/. The film, The structure’s unpaid debt: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-9.1 to APP-9.5.