Theory of Precedence

[PolyPeter]

Since I died about half a year ago, when I took dmt, I’ve been trying to articulate several things that became clear from that event.

This essay is one of them.

It’s called Theory of Precedence.

The basic idea is that whatever appears depends on something that precedes its appearance, but that “something” cannot itself be fully contained as an object inside what appears.

 

The essay separates three levels:

object,
representation,
presentation.

An object is what is being referred to. A representation is the model, symbol, code, description, or map of it. Presentation is the regime of availability that makes that representation count as a representation at all: interpretation, execution, attention, evaluation, consciousness, etc.

The core thesis is that representation depends on presentation.

 

A system can model itself, inspect itself, improve itself, represent previous layers of its own operation, and even build meta-frameworks. But it cannot fully capture the current presentation that makes those representations available without generating a new layer or collapsing the distinction between representation and presentation.

So this is not an attempt to “prove God” through formalism.

It is more precise than that: it tries to show the structural wall that any representational framework hits when it tries to contain the condition of its own appearing.

 

Metashifting is the operation where a framework turns its own horizon into an object of a wider horizon. You can keep climbing levels like this, and you can even define formal limits of the chain. But the limit of the chain is not Omega.

Omega is not the final level.

Omega is the precedence from which the whole chain appears as a chain.

In short:

every representation of presentation appears under a presentation.

That is the wall the essay is trying to formalize.

 

Check it out!

https://pedrocrohare.com/precedence/en/

Edited 21 hours ago by PolyPeter

[PolyPeter]

What the essay can't say

The essay draws the wall as precisely as I could.

But the wall wasn't discovered by thinking.

I didn't arrive at "presentation can't be fully captured as representation" by working through the argument. The argument came after. What came first was an event where the whole structure that believes itself to be a separate entity inside a larger, indifferent universe was obliterated. Not paused. Gone.

And what remained when it went wasn't nothing. It was the only thing that was ever actually there. The Subject. Not a "human" who survived the event, but the condition that the human had been standing on top of the whole time, finally with nothing on top of it.

That is what the essay is trying to point at from the inside.

This is the thing formalism can gesture toward but never contain: the wall exists because of what's on the other side of it. The essay shows the shape of the wall. It can't show what made it necessary to map it.

The connection

Every serious contemplative tradition lands on something like this: there is a condition that makes experience possible, and that condition cannot be found as an object within experience. You can see everything that appears. You cannot see what makes appearing possible. Not because it's hidden, because it's not the kind of thing that appears. It's what every appearance is happening to.

What the framework adds is precision about why that is, structurally. Not as a mystical claim, as a property of any system that tries to fully contain the condition of its own operation.

A system can model itself with extraordinary depth. It can represent every previous version of what it was, inspect its own rules, build meta-frameworks about its own meta-frameworks. There is no ceiling to that climbing. But it can never turn around and catch the thing doing the representing right now, because that thing is not one more representation it can hold. It is what every representation is currently appearing to. The moment you try to make it an object, you have already generated a new layer doing the looking, and that new layer is now the uncatchable one.

That regress is not a bug in the method. It is the structural signature of the fact that the one looking was never inside the picture. It was the condition for there being a picture at all.