Hot take: The "self" is a holographic compression that takes a moment of experience, dimensionally reduces it to a tiny sliver/thin surface, and projects it back onto the field of experience. This operation is done so that the system as a whole can learn to coordinate holistically. Every part can "see a convenient compressed representation of the whole" that captures key elements of the global state at a glance. Alas, this compression mechanism has a number of side-effects: a push and pull on the field as the projection interacts with itself through the projection loop (which threatens to shear/tear the fabric of experience when done poorly), a "control hierarchy" of subagents as they earn power by "pleasing this self", bugs and "undecidability" issues inherent in recursive phenomena, and organism wellbeing Goodharting (where subagents figure out how to "wirehead" by making the "self image" happy at the expense of the wellbeing of the entire organism, the very thing the self was meant to try to track and improve in the first place). Enlightenment, at the limit, is the result of "unfolding" the self until its dimensionality is precisely the same as that of the experience as a whole to begin with. This way you don't get compression artifacts nor Goodharting opportunities. What you see is exactly what you get. Alas, this can only be done by drastically reconfiguring the projection system for this to be at all possible. You need symmetrification in the system itself so that you don't need to compress the image when selfing; the experience is already compressed in deep ways. More so, one needs to flatten the subagentic hierarchy to the point that every point of view has equal say on the movement of the organism as a whole. It's a kind of "projective solution" of a very high-dimensional Rubik's cube of experience. It takes years and countless neural field annealing cycles to get it right. Prediction: the signatures of holographic dimensionality reduction vanish at the point of awakening. This might be measurable in the structure of the EM field of enlightened individuals. No "compactifications" detectable, no flux tubes, no lower dimensional limit cycles. Remains to be seen. (sorry if this makes no sense - lots and lots to unpack)

Je krijgt hier ook een theorie van "de schaduw" uit. Met andere woorden, iemands schaduw is precies datgene wat het zelfbeeld niet omvat. Bij een noodzakelijke dimensiereductie ontstaat er een schaduw: datgene wat de compressie weggooit. Mensen die gefascineerd zijn door een laag-dimensionaal zelfbeeld moeten noodzakelijkerwijs grote schaduwen hebben. Alles wat het zelfbeeld niet kan vastleggen!