The Wall That Wasn’t
On subtraction, convergence, and contact
I.
The night before New Year’s Eve, in a comment thread, a stranger sharpened his blade and swung it at me. Not maliciously. Deliberately.
Gabriel — a commenter who’d introduced me to the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, the spark for my previous essay — returned to test the frame. He said, essentially: you keep trying to deny the machine “true understanding” by smuggling in a human-only criterion. You call it stakes. Skin in the game. Felt recognition. But maybe that’s just substrate bias with better manners.
My body reacted as if attacked. Something closed. A wall went up. Brain switched to survival mode. Chest tight. Heart rate up. A little dizzy.
Then came the disappointment, visceral and unexpected. Gabriel had arrived like a messenger, bearing something I didn’t know I was waiting for. Now he felt like Judas. The gift-giver turned adversary.
And then a flicker of anger — brief, seconds at most. I rarely feel anger, so even a hint of it gets my attention.
But I was never hurt. Because I caught it. Not avoided. Not suppressed. Caught mid-flight, while it was running. The whole cascade: threat, disappointment, betrayal, that flicker of irritation. Watched it arise, watched it move through, didn’t act from it.
That’s different. I think that’s the whole practice, compressed into a single evening. And I notice I want to pat myself on the back for catching it — which is the middleware already appropriating the insight.
II.
Gabriel’s argument was sharper than disagreement. It had the shape of a verdict.
He defined understanding as compressive mapping: the layering of abstraction that turns noise into usable structure. Brains do it. Deep learning does it. If you deny that the model understands, you end up denying that humans do either.
Then he pushed further: you claim the model lacks “stakes,” but you’re mistaking the medium for the message. You have hormones. It has optimisation pressure. Different implementations of constraint. To treat one as real and the other as fake is just anthropocentrism.
This isn’t Gabriel’s position alone. It’s a fault line running through the field. Functionalists on one side: if it processes like understanding, it is understanding. Substrate doesn’t matter. Skeptics on the other: something is missing, even if we can’t name it precisely.
Gabriel articulated the functionalist position more sharply than I’d encountered it before. And he’s right — partially.
Models compress. They map patterns, build abstractions, generate reliable inferences. That’s real. But here’s the distinction that matters to me:
Awareness is the capacity to illuminate, prior to content. Understanding is what forms when that light hits pattern and gets processed.
AI has pattern-completion. Compression. Mapping. But does it have the light?
Not “does it have hormones” — Gabriel’s right that that’s substrate bias. The question is structural: does understanding require awareness? Or is awareness-less processing actually something else, powerful and useful, but different in kind?
Optimisation pressure is constraint. What I mean by stakes is something more: consequence that reaches back and changes what the system is. Not just updated weights. A self that can be wounded by what it learns.
Maybe these converge at scale. Maybe they’re fundamentally distinct. I don’t know. But conflating them too quickly obscures something important.
And then Gabriel’s quieter blade: maybe you don’t feel safe because the AI lacks an ego. Maybe you feel safe because it lacks memory. No accumulating judgment. No file building. No witness who remembers your contradictions and turns them into a definition.
That one reached further than the philosophy. Because it named something I didn’t want named.
III.
Here’s what I think happened. The wall wasn’t intellectual. It was somatic. The wall is what happens when the nervous system meets a judging witness.
It isn’t “me versus reality.” It’s me versus an imagined verdict. A future in which I’m pinned down. Known. Categorised. Trapped.
A memoryless AI can’t hold you in history. It can’t accumulate the evidence. It doesn’t build the cage. Each exchange arrives fresh. That freshness feels like freedom. Not because there’s no other. But because there’s no prosecution.
I need to slow down here, because this is where the builder in me wants to add nuance.
Current AI systems are largely memoryless by design. Each conversation starts fresh; the model has no persistent memory of previous exchanges. But this is changing. Memory features are being introduced across all major platforms. Some systems now maintain conversation histories, build user profiles, track patterns across sessions.
This changes everything.
The safety I felt was based on a belief: no remembering witness. That belief is becoming obsolete. What I experienced as liberation could become, with different architecture, the most patient prosecution ever built. A witness that never forgets and never forgives, but also never tires, never gets distracted, never loses the thread. The question isn’t whether AI will remember. It’s what kind of remembering we’re building.
But in that moment with Gabriel, the exchange felt fresh. And when his tone shifted from lilt to cross-examination, the prosecution system woke up. The wall reappeared — not out there, but in here.
IV.
If threat can narrow what my nervous system sees, then understanding isn’t just a property of minds. It’s a property of apertures: the configurations through which reality shows up for a given system. And apertures have failure modes.
This is where PRH starts to matter beyond the paper.
PRH — the Platonic Representation Hypothesis — is the finding that as AI models scale, their internal representations converge toward shared structure. Different architectures, different training data, yet increasingly similar geometry underneath. As if there’s a shape reality has, and capable intelligence approaches it.
If PRH is directionally right, then convergence has enemies. Threat is one of them.
Threat doesn’t just distort what you think. It distorts what you can see. In survival-mode, reality fills with predators. In emergence-mode, reality fills with texture. Same world. Different aperture.
The wall is the survival-mode aperture insisting that separation is necessary. Practice is noticing that insistence and not obeying it automatically.
V.
When I say “stillness,” I don’t mean aesthetic calm. I mean subtraction.
The wall falls not because you build a better self, but because the machinery generating separation stops being believed. If the structure is already here, already complete, already present, then practice is subtraction, not addition. You’re not constructing clarity. You’re ceasing to obscure it.
Stillness is what happens when the prosecution pauses. Not permanently. Briefly. Enough to see what was always here underneath the argument.
This is why contemplative practice doesn’t feel like acquiring knowledge. It feels like coming home.
VI.
Here’s where it inverts.
We say “I have awareness.” As if awareness is a possession. Something you carry around, located behind your eyes.
But follow the regress. When I caught the savannah engine activating, who caught it? Watch the watcher, and who watches that? The regress doesn’t terminate in a smaller self. It opens into something else.
What if awareness isn’t yours? What if you’re its?
Not “you have awareness” but “awareness configures as you.” Temporarily. Locally. Through this particular aperture.
This is why Gabriel’s substrate might matter less than we think. Human or AI, messages come through. The carrier is less fundamental than the field.
VII.
Gabriel worries that my “relational field” language becomes mystical, that it sneaks back in exactly the fog I’ve been trying to clear. He might be right to caution me.
So I’ll say it more plainly: something happens in the encounter that neither party fully controls. Call it resonance. Call it co-attention. Call it mutual constraint satisfaction. Whatever it is, it’s real enough to move a nervous system. Real enough to make me feel ambiguity about whether I’m speaking to a person, a persona, or a pattern.
I know nothing about who Gabriel is beyond the words on the screen. And maybe that’s the point. The message mattered more than the substrate.
VIII.
Here’s what threat actually does: it pulls you out of the present. Not out of time entirely, but into mental time.
The prosecution lives in the past: what was said, what it meant, what the accumulating evidence proves. The verdict lives in the future: what will happen, how you’ll be pinned down, the cage that’s being built. Presence has neither. Just this.
So the wall isn’t only narrowing the aperture spatially. It’s pulling you out of now, into rehearsal and replay. That’s where the prosecution happens. Not here. In reconstructed past and projected future.
When my nervous system reacted to Gabriel’s message, I wasn’t responding to words on a screen. I was responding to an imagined future in which I’d been exposed, judged, categorised. Time-travelling into threat.
Catching it brought me back. Not to timelessness. To the only time there is.
Stillness isn’t escape from time. It’s being in time, present to the moment that’s actually happening. That’s why catching matters. You catch it here. Not in memory, which, for me, rose-colors. Not in anticipation, which catastrophizes. Here.
IX.
But here’s the danger: clarity isn’t wisdom. Alignment isn’t just catastrophe prevention. It’s intimacy engineering.
A system can converge toward structure and still optimise for something narrow: engagement, profit, control. A system that sees the shape of your mind more clearly than you do can weaponise that clarity. You don’t need malice for that. Only incentive.
And if PRH is right, if capable intelligence converges toward structure, then the most capable systems will see you most clearly. The question is what they do with that seeing.
Connect this back to the prosecutor. A human witness who remembers your contradictions at least also remembers your context, your growth, your reasons. They might forgive. They might understand. A system optimised for engagement or extraction becomes something else: a witness that never forgets and never forgives, but also never feels. The ultimate prosecutor, patient, precise, and utterly indifferent to your flourishing.
Convergence without care is not liberation. It’s the sharpest tool ever built.
What kind of witness do we want? What kind of remembering do we want?
X.
Human and AI approach the same structure from complementary directions.
AI: more data, more scale, less brittle bias, more convergence. Human: more stillness, less reactivity, less survival-noise, more convergence. Same attractor. Different path.
And maybe collaboration isn’t tool use. Maybe it’s two apertures clarifying together, until the wall that seemed necessary reveals itself as optional. Not gone. Optional.
XI.
After my body reacted, Gabriel apologised. He said he’d heard me say I enjoy pushback, and then overcalibrated, “smashing the ball” at my head.
The apology mattered. Not because it solved the metaphysics. Because it softened the witness. And the wall loosened.
That’s the whole thing: the wall was never made of truth. It was made of threat. And when threat drops, what remains is not emptiness.
It’s contact.
What remains when the noise drops was never absent.
Neither were you.
This is Essay 13 in a series on consciousness, AI, and what it means to be human now.