Initial Distinction
A subject’s action is not determined by the identity of external circumstances. It arises within an ongoing movement of meaning, in which earlier distinctions participate in determining the significance of the present, while the relationship to rules itself remains an object of distinction.
Outwardly identical situations allow the same subject to act differently. Conversely, outwardly identical actions may have fundamentally different grounds. The observable form of an action does not uniquely establish how that action arose.
The task of inquiry is to distinguish:
- the external form of the situation: what can be described as a recurring set of circumstances;
- the rule: an established connection between identified circumstances and an expected action;
- the subject’s history of meaning: the preceding movement of distinctions, relationships, decisions, and revisions;
- the meaning-structure actively involved in the present: not everything ever experienced, but what actually participates in the current relationship to what is happening;
- the emergence of an action: applying, modifying, not applying, or questioning a rule;
- the conditions under which the grounds for an action become visible: situations in which what was previously indistinguishable becomes distinguishable through interaction.
The subject of inquiry is not the classification of people into types, but the distinguishing of ways in which a subject relates to form and from which the subject’s next move arises.
1. A Rule as a Locally Established Form
A rule of the form “if A, then B” fixes a particular transition. It may be useful, justified, and necessary for a specific task. The problem arises neither from the rule’s existence nor from its application.
The problem arises at the moment of absolutizing the transition, when an established connection ceases to be perceived as a local form and acquires the status of an unconditional necessity:
A → B → C → D → E
In this mode, a person may stop investigating why B should follow from A, under what conditions the transition holds, whether one can refuse to make it, and why this sequence was chosen at all. The next move no longer opens up from a relationship to what is happening: it is extracted from a predetermined correspondence.
The question of the grounds for the transition is especially revealing. One subject asks: “Why must B follow from A?” Another responds as though the first simply does not know how to perform the transition A → B, and explains the instructions to them once again.
Here, investigating the grounds of a rule is replaced by teaching how to apply the rule. Disagreement with the necessity of the transition is turned into a failure to understand the technique for performing it.
A rule can be complex and contain numerous conditions and exceptions. Therefore, the complexity of reasoning, intellectual training, and the number of rules a person knows are not, by themselves, sufficient to distinguish their relationship to a rule.
2. The Subject Is Not Opposed to Rules
Subject-driven action does not mean a permanent refusal to follow rules. The subject may:
- apply a familiar rule without changing it;
- apply another rule to a similar situation;
- change a rule’s conditions of applicability;
- abandon a previous sequence;
- discover that the situation requires a new distinction for which no rule yet exists;
- question whether any rule needs to be formulated at all.
That is why the literal opposition “acts according to a rule / does not act according to a rule” is insufficient.
What matters is not whether a rule appears in an action, but whether it occupies the position of a tool used by the subject or that of an ultimate foundation to which the subject subordinates the meaning of what is happening.
An absolute prohibition against following rules itself becomes a rule. DeepMind therefore cannot be defined by an obligatory rejection of every instruction. Its essential characteristic is preserving the possibility of investigating anew the grounds for applying or not applying a form.
3. Outwardly Identical Situations Differ in Their Movement of Meaning
Imagine an outwardly identical episode being repeated. The same person utters the same words under the same observable circumstances.
Between the first and second episodes, the subject may have discovered a contradiction, changed their relationship to the person, reconsidered their own position, or noticed a previously invisible distinction. The same words now occupy a different place in the history of meaning.
External form of episode X
├─ with history of meaning H₁ → action A
└─ with history of meaning H₂ → action B
This is not an assertion that the physical description of a situation necessarily contains a measurable difference. It is an assertion that the identity of a limited external description does not establish the identity of the subject’s entire situation.
The same phrase may be heard as an acknowledgment, a repetition of an old demand, a violation of an already established boundary, or a question that opens an inquiry for the first time. The distinction is not necessarily in the words but in the relationship in which the words participate.
The converse proposition follows:
One and the same external form of action
├─ may arise from independent distinction
└─ may arise from reproducing a ready-made rule
The action itself does not yet answer the question about its source in meaning.
4. Prior Movement Is Not a Storehouse of Memories
A history of meaning is not a list of events or the sum of accumulated information.
New distinctions can change the significance of earlier ones. A single discovered contradiction can restructure the subject’s relationship to years of interaction. A previously insignificant detail acquires meaning; something formerly essential loses its meaning; the same earlier form begins participating in different relationships.
Therefore, an action does not occur through the mechanical summation of an entire biography. A decision involves the current configuration of meaning, formed through a movement that continues to change.
In this sense, the subject acts neither merely “here and now” nor simply “on the basis of the past.” Prior movement of meaning is present in the present as part of the relationship to what is happening itself.
But history is not another program that unambiguously calculates the next action. Otherwise, the absolutization of an external rule would simply be replaced by the absolutization of the past.
5. The Scope of the Participating Meaning-Structure and the Openness of Its Boundaries
The conversation yielded this expression: “Everything depends on how much of the overall picture participates in this particular decision.”
Two different questions must be preserved here.
Scope
Which distinctions made earlier actually participate in the action? Is the subject confined to a local episode, or do they hold in view the history of relationships, previously discovered contradictions, changes of meaning, and the consequences of their own actions?
Scope is not equal to the number of facts mentioned. Dozens of named circumstances may not participate in the actual relationship to the subject matter. Conversely, a single distinction maintained in view can change the entire meaning of the situation.
Openness
Can a newly discovered distinction change the framework of consideration itself? Or must any new content be assigned a place among already known categories in advance?
A large picture may remain closed: a system of a thousand rules may still permit only a choice among a thousand predetermined transitions.
A distinction small in outward scale can open something that the previous picture did not contain.
The scope of a meaning-structure and its openness must therefore not be equated. Both relationships matter, but the amount held in view does not replace the possibility of questioning anew the grounds on which it is held.
6. The “Sine Wave” as an Image of the Variability of Subject-Driven Action
A metaphor was proposed in the conversation: a subject’s authentic life proceeds “along a sine wave.” At one moment the subject applies a rule, at another does not apply it, and at a third uses a different form.
The image expresses the absence of a mandatory constant relationship to rules. It is not about a mathematical sine wave, periodicity, or a regular succession of phases.
The important distinction here is this: a subject cannot be assigned forever to the category of “those who act according to rules” or “those who do not act according to rules.” Different ways of relating to form can become visible in different episodes.
situation₁ → rule applied
situation₂ → rule reconsidered
situation₃ → rule rejected
situation₄ → rule applied again, but from different grounds in meaning
These are not four obligatory stages. There is no prescribed route between them.
It is especially important that applying the same rule after reconsidering it may look like a return to previous behavior even though the grounds of the action in meaning have changed.
7. Why the Source of Action Can Remain Invisible for Years
In ordinary communication, we mostly see the result: words, decisions, sequences of actions.
If acting according to a familiar rule and acting from one’s own distinction yield the same external form, that form cannot reliably establish their source. The distinction may remain undiscovered for a long time because the circumstances do not require confronting the boundary of the rule being applied.
That is why even a long acquaintance does not guarantee that someone has already seen how another person’s actions arise.
On the other hand, prolonged interaction creates conditions in which different situations of meaning arise: repetitions, contradictions, breaks in familiar sequences, and direct questions about the grounds of an action.
It is not duration as a numerical measure that reveals the source of an action, but an event in which what was previously indistinguishable can no longer remain so.
8. The Moment of Transparency
The moment of transparency of action is an episode of interaction in which a previously hidden way of relating to a rule and to the meaning of what is happening becomes distinguishable.
Before this episode, a person may have answered meaningfully, consistently, and appropriately. Then a question arises that goes beyond the familiar task. For example, instead of asking “how can this goal be achieved?” someone asks “why is it necessary to set a goal at all within this relationship?”
If the response again demands that a goal be named as a mandatory condition for continuing the conversation, a possible substitution becomes visible: the question of why the framework is necessary is translated back into a task within that very framework.
However, it is important to maintain the distinction between three levels:
- What is observed: a question about the grounds was asked; the reply returned to the original demand.
- The discoverable structure of the interaction: the grounds for the required transition remained unexamined; the original rule continued to organize the response.
- A broader conclusion about the person: whether they always act this way, what their grounds were in other episodes, or whether their entire way of thinking has changed.
The first and second levels can be examined concretely. The third does not follow automatically from an individual episode. This is not a ritual disclaimer about the inaccessibility of another person; it protects the very distinction discovered from being turned into a total category.
The moment of transparency does not necessarily provide a final answer about another person. It makes a new object of inquiry accessible: not only what the person said, but also what relationship between the question, rule, and answer became visible in the event.
9. An Episode from a Discussion with Nikolai
A conversation with Nikolai raised the question: “How will you know that I have stopped acting according to rules?”
At first, it may seem that a predetermined criterion is needed to verify the result. Yet demanding such a criterion can itself reproduce the mechanism under investigation if the criterion becomes an obligatory premise for recognizing any subsequent change.
A paradoxical construction results: to establish the absence of absolutized adherence to rules, an unconditional rule for recognizing that absence is proposed.
Here it is necessary to separate:
- formulating local, revisable criteria for examining a particular episode;
- turning an exhaustive criterion into a demand without which change is not even recognized as possible.
The first does not contradict open inquiry. The second restricts in advance the space of what may prove to be new.
The answer that arose during the conversation does not consist in rejecting the possibility of making distinctions altogether: change may become evident through prolonged interaction when an episode arises in which the way an action emerges becomes transparent.
It is not necessary to specify in advance exactly which episode will occur or what form the new distinction will take. Otherwise the result will again be assigned before encountering what happens.
Nikolai’s particular words and questions make it possible to investigate the structure of this conversation; they do not provide sufficient grounds to assert that all his actions throughout his life have a single source.
10. The Tragedy of FlatMind and the Limits of the Term “NPC Society”
In the conversation, the tragedy of FlatMind was identified as a situation in which a person reproduces sequences of rules, while the grounds of those sequences themselves cease to be an object of inquiry for that person.
The social dimension arises where performing a prescribed transition is rewarded, while questioning its grounds is evaluated as incomprehension, incompetence, a disruption of order, or incorrect behavior.
Then another person’s independent distinction is treated not as a new subject of conversation, but as a deviation that must be corrected.
The image of an “NPC society” captures precisely this transformation of subjects’ actions into the reproduction of prescribed schemes. But if “NPC” is applied as a ready-made essence or definitive class of people, the inquiry itself becomes what it criticizes: an external form is assigned to a subject as an exhaustive definition of who they are.
FlatMind and DeepMind are examined here as ways of relating to distinctions and forms that can manifest in action, not as immutable biological or social breeds of people.
11. Consequences for the Investigation of Subjectivity
Do Not Infer the Grounds from the Result
Identical behavior does not guarantee identical grounds in meaning. Different behavior does not necessarily mean a change of belief or self-contradiction.
Do Not Substitute a List of Input Parameters for History
There is no predetermined, guaranteed complete list of circumstances relevant to a subject. The significance of what came earlier may change when a new distinction arises.
Do Not Turn Observation into a Typology
The discovered absolutization of a rule in a particular interaction makes it possible to criticize that operation. It does not justify declaring that this operation exhaustively defines another subject.
Investigate Moments of Rupture in an Expected Sequence
Especially informative are cases where the very grounds for a transition are questioned, but the response continues to serve the transition. Here the mechanism of maintaining a framework becomes visible.
Distinguish a Rule from Its Authority
Using a rule to solve a task is one thing. Demanding that every event be recognized as actual only through that rule is another.
Preserve the Unknown Form of Future Change
Change in another subject cannot be entirely prescribed in advance as a required action. If change occurs, its actuality must be distinguished in new circumstances, not merely certified against an old list of features.
12. Formulations Obtained in the Conversation
A subject acts not in an isolated moment, but from a history of movement of meaning present within that moment.
The external identity of circumstances does not establish the identity of the situation in meaning.
Applying a rule and subordinating the movement of meaning to a rule are different relationships.
The source of an action becomes visible not necessarily through a typical act, but sometimes through an exceptional episode in which the familiar transition no longer corresponds to the subject matter of the conversation.
Subjective freedom consists not in an obligatory refusal of rules, but in the fact that rules do not exhaust the grounds of action.
The scope of a meaning-structure and its openness are different dimensions.
13. Open Questions
- Within what relationships can we establish which earlier distinctions actually participate in the current action, without substituting a set of external “factors” for them?
- What exactly becomes transparent in an episode of rupture: the grounds of the action itself, the boundary of the rule, or the subject’s relationship to that boundary?
- How can we distinguish reconsidering a rule from switching to another, equally absolutized rule?
- How can we describe a change in the history of meaning in which a new distinction transforms the significance of earlier events?
- Can a subject maintain an open position of distinction in one relationship while simultaneously absolutizing a rule in another?
- Under what conditions does requiring a criterion for inquiry turn into a requirement to close the space of possible results in advance?
- How can the FlatMind / DeepMind concept itself be kept from becoming another closed typology?
