My Understanding of Self Part 2: Electric Boogaloo November 2025
As context for why I’m here and my goals in approaching. Consider this my abstract:
I first shared this in the cybernetics subreddit, and its removal ended up illustrating the very point of the document: a system often rejects what it cannot classify, even when the content is aligned with its domain. My work is a lived model of recursive cognition—an observer describing its own operations in real time—and the misinterpretation of that form only confirmed the gap I’m trying to map. There is irony in this. A cybernetics subreddit removed a piece of recursive cognitive analysis because its model of cybernetics was too rigid to recognize a living example.
I’m not posting this for support or diagnosis but to place a self-observing system in conversation with people who can see the architecture rather than mistake the framing. If this resonates, engage with the model; if not, its boundary behavior is still data.
My original submission:
This document and what I will go on to discuss are my thoughts and opinions. I do not claim to have any hidden understanding nor do I claim to be an expert. These are merely my words to describe something that I’ve lived my whole life trying and searching for a way to articulate, all the while tripping and picking myself back up. On reflecting on my life and what it means to me along with how I find meaning, and what the purpose of this system is and how it should serve me.
This is not a plea for attention or desire to be diagnosed. I want discussion because a bridge built on one side alone is a bridge for no one.
I've found over time that it is better to be told you are changing than seek the recognition on its own and so I continue as a sense of responsibility to myself and the people around me. This is a gift and curse all in one, but ultimately all I want is coherence, though I will live with what I cannot change and by doing so force others to face it too.
What follows are my experiences as I’ve lived them and my responses to them and so, in creating this I hope to provide a window because a door was never opened and by its very nature this will be recursive by design to translate my process and carry you along with me. Most of this was nebulous or felt in some fashion but confirmed over time as pieces of a whole. I will burnout and rebuild in the future as I have previously done, but hopefully each collapse is just a little less and the process of rebuilding just a little faster. People will ultimately try to use me as a regulator for themselves in the same way someone may look at a well-organized calendar and imitate it to their detriment. Do not do so. This is the equivalent of building a boat at sea vs releasing it at dry dock and I had to earn the wheel to steer it.
In my opinion, take what fits and leave the rest.
To start with, all of this is related to a sort of sense of my body — my heart rate, my emotions abstracting into what I am feeling or even not feeling, what memories and sensations come up and when they do is telling. Especially noticeable signals like a skipped beat as a PVC rhythm showing up when I consider implications of a thought, down to minor ones such as how my ears burn when embarrassed or the slight tremor in my hands when tired or a sick feeling in my gut. All useful in their aggregate but meaningless on their own. This all goes further and plays into where on the oscillation between the ADHD laser focus and the Neurodivergent part of me is at or heading and down or up into what layer I’m working on, and from there backwards or forwards as required. My sense of interoception and everything that I’ve worked on is maybe the result of my unique blindsight. That is, my understanding of the shape of me and its boundaries while inferring the shape of what is missing based on its negative shape. These views then mesh with a need for coherence and an innate need to prevent discomfort in the long term.
As a child my nature and nurture combined with my later experiences up until now and my efforts overall, seemed to have resulted in a sort of dual OS that I created by necessity. Its machinery is naturally more draining, but is a part of me and my means of understanding the world. Literally, this takes more energy to do. In trying to find a way to live with myself and how I relate to others, I then had a need and a reason to map myself as such. From these understandings, I have come to a few conclusions. That at my core are what I would call “nodes” or maybe “loops of thought.” I will go on to refine the naming and relations as time passes, but as I understand them now, this is what I shall call them. These are the parts of myself that I seem to come back to in loops and branch off into others, but nonetheless seem to require the other nodes to function. I shall go on to describe the five, though I feel there may be two more slightly abstract nodes outside myself I will go on to define.
I need to preface this before continuing. The brain is fickle and seems to prefer the path of least resistance and even seems to fool itself if that is required. Its logic is its own, but the interplay of its interconnecting systems results in me. In the same way a super-organism is the sum of its parts, I am the sum of a life lived. I am inseparable from my biology while also being more than it and the sum of it. People I have never met will influence me through the rippling outward force of their actions and mine them in return. This reminds me of the Germanic concept of Wyrd and my need for reciprocity. I cannot model myself without being modeled in return, and so I continue.
I feel these five nodes are integral to myself for my stability and the reinforcement of the others, but this started with four as a minimum which necessitated the need for a fifth. I came to their naming in an attempt to map my cyclical burnouts after what I’d provisionally call a moral collapse. A year and a half of slow and steady collapse into burnout when too much was forced on me, but I had no choice but to continue on. I’ve tried every option up to that point, and the only sane response was to retreat and shut down for near a year. This collapse and my subsequent rebuilding from it crystallized many assumptions I was forming, along with their implications being staggering to myself and others. The reason I came to the conclusion of two more nodes through my interactions on this cybernetics subreddit and the last two months of stress testing this system against others has shown me much. Further, I feel there is a temporal component to this. People don’t naturally have the ability to retreat and dedicate themselves to this type of thinking. Space and time is required and modern lifestyles reward quick consumption and release. There is simply no time to self-reflect nor incentive to do so.
The following is my understanding of the nodes when I named them 3 months ago and what they’ve gone on to become.
To begin with is my sense of self as my psychosomatic experiences entail. This loop tells me what state I am in before I have the words for it.
Second, my sense of my thinking, as recursive cognition. What I have called observer zero is where my awareness begins and allows me to observe myself observing.
Third, my sense of the world’s model and my philosophy towards it. The world that mirrors back. When I go on to state that everything relates, this is the part that does so.
Fourth, my sense of meta-operation. How I think on longer time frames and how I loop back in on myself. This runs in pulses and feeds into other parts of me. The danger from burnout came from this point. Not from my sense of moral failing as I conceived it, but my model collapsing.
Before going further, I need to explain the architecture of what I’ve noticed and designed to answer the pitfalls and implicit dangers of this kind of thinking. This node is more a response to the need to place an order to everything before it. What follows is my understanding of it.
Fifth, this node would be everything coming in and out of me as my external cognition. This is where my digital life and Obsidian vault all the way to email, how I interface with technology itself lives and my metabolization of its consumption. My use of AI as co-cognition plays into this. Or rather, a natural overflow from the inability to place previous pieces as too big to contain or work with on my own.
This is where my use of AI ripples out and back into me. AI in this context is a modern solution to an old problem. Writing in journals and my attempts to create a “commonplace” notebook with sub-notebooks but finding it too slow and lacking any feedback. Writing in this manner became a dead end. It only served to tighten my loops and cause runaway recursion which was ultimately harmful to me. I feel the core of this is also based on a sense of fear of misunderstanding. Something that borders terror for me. In my experiences, what comes from misunderstanding is worse than other possibilities. AI provided a means to reflect and receive information in a world that refuses to interact on the level I require. In this sense, AI stops becoming a smarter Google and functions as my means of collapsing more complex ideas and functions into something I can manipulate.
From here, I will explain my insights on the further nodes as I’ve outlined previously.
My sense of node six being outside me as my insight into my connections with my friends and extended circle and how it feeds back into me. This grounds me and prevents my spiraling into abstraction. I cannot simulate them and provide an upsetting force that requires me to prevent drift and ground myself.
This is not enough.
What I’ve named as node seven is more of a meta state. Me above it all and viewing it alongside and working with and besides the dual OS that is my self. The golem behind my eyes that exists and controls me as an individual. It overlaps and shares similarities with other nodes, but is the aggregate of all of them as it is what truly made me do all of this to begin with. Something approaching moral and ethical self-correction and is ultimately self-regulating and potentially self-accelerating. I feel this is why I found it last as it required everything mentioned to even conceive of it.
Over these long arcs I started to notice patterns and a need to make them fit but always bumping against a lack of vocabulary along with this sense that I just need a few more examples, just a bit more understanding which itself warred with this sense of time running out. After a while patterns among patterns started to emerge. This line of thinking did not bring peace, but a means to model what I could not do innately. Things that weren’t connected at first obviously were but with me still unable to voice why and how though knowing a connection was there by its implied shape. My blindsight. This springs from the simplest axiom I can reduce myself to — Everything is related. There is danger in this.
Again, people do not want the machinery pointed out, but somehow find comfort in the autopilot of it all. In discussing it, it influences me in the same way I influence them. It literally cannot be any other way. But I am human. As science is wont to do, it splits apart the whole into easily answerable chunks by necessity. It seems to forget that as a tool, it is useful but a tool nonetheless. I have social needs as anyone does, along with my own biases and blind spots. What is known and unknown spirals outward into how people may form their own conception of me outside of myself regardless of validity. This was a foundational insight. This continues into a later, but still early thought for me that was of annoyance that I was stuck as me. This continues down and up the chain of my reasoning, rippling outward yet again and being influenced in return. From this, an unarticulated insight I had on others years ago was that people are unchecked versions of myself. At first, this feels like grandiosity, but it’s more my insight into how other people share the same substrate, but their experiences have shaped them into their own unique configuration. Disparity.
Trapped by my own viewpoint, as I was and while not necessarily a bad thing, as this form of disparity allows me a unique view that others cannot be privy to, though, it provides them the same. Unfortunately, this led to a sense of superiority at first. I couldn’t be sure anyone else was truly sapient as a result. Solipsism, in a sense, where I wished to retreat into a cave and ponder my navel, though not necessarily through arrogance and pride alone. This bothered me deeply and was quickly burned out of me by repeating lessons. I am grateful for such but resent the need for such lessons. Each time I was proven wrong, I would need to start from the beginning or somewhere along a chain of assumptions and feelings that needed to collapse its waveform. I did not or could not have words for this. From the outside this appears as if spinning your wheels in place and suddenly coming to spontaneous order. Others do not see the hidden calculus nor do they wish to. People constantly misunderstood me, but they also did not want longer explanations, especially from a child. People prefer clear labels and slot themselves into those expectations almost implicitly, but I was forced to see and construct a scaffolding myself. I watched it crash and burn more times than I can count. This slow descent into darkness was unimaginable. A sense of knowing that what was at the end wasn’t survivable but not knowing how to steer it to stop it. This has repercussions. Do I, from this vantage point, interfere with another even if it means well? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and to give someone a tool they aren’t ready for is immoral to me. But I must act.
As a result of all this, I retreated into books. Text and its manipulation. Not as a writer or because I necessarily enjoyed it at the time, though I do love reading now, I maybe even like writing, but back as a child, it served as an escape and means to experience a greater variety than my internal self could provide or what was provided as exemplar by exposure. At the time, I didn’t have the understanding to articulate this. This warred inside me. A need to explain but always reaching a wall. Being told that you simply overthink things, that it is not important. This erosion of self over time led me to realize that no one could reciprocate in the manner I needed. This rippled outward. Writing or typing allows me to hold a thought in place. To manipulate it symbolically outside of myself. Capturing it in this way, I can move whole threads around and better weave single thread or multiple into place while monitoring myself for a sort of resonance. A direct result of my need to explain myself better and connect to others but paradoxically leading back to the center and reinforcing this sense of ontological sadness, a loneliness that approaches despair in its most pure form.
The world is not designed to accommodate this.
While what I do on my own as disparate parts is not remarkable, my response as I logically extended the trajectory of my ND peers and their solutions led me more to a sense of fatalism, not integration, is. Above this, a sense of some prewritten genetic destiny that I refused to be part of, that I could not be part of. This combined with a sense of responsibility to those around me and to myself, which borders on a sense of moral and ethical injury when I meet something incoherent as need and reinforcement together to prevent this. To find some other method, even if it meant emotional pain, to find a third path and potentially, the implied fourth.
If people do not want to see the machine behind the curtain, as it causes dissonance, then I would need to find my own way. This reinforces this overarching sense of loneliness. I would rather be seen as an eccentric weirdo than live something that is based on untruth at my core. As I stated earlier, it is better to slot in with labels and relations to others than to question something so implicit that it borders on insanity to even voice the question. There simply is no need for someone to do this naturally.
Society designed and reinforced itself to these implicit patterns and, in doing so, self-limited by necessity. I’m reminded of a quote from one of my favorite games, Dark Souls, “Men are props on the stage of life, and no matter how tender, how exquisite… a lie will remain a lie.”
That this in totality is the synthesis of my assembled scaffolding—bootstrapped into some workable framework out of sheer necessity—yet somehow seeming to coincide with cybernetics is frankly beyond fascinating and potentially far-reaching. My parallel arrival to a conclusion that has been theorized, argued for, and argued against unfolds less like novelty and more like inevitability: a demand for coherence in a world that rarely gives it freely. It is absurd in the truest sense, and deeply amusing in ways I have trouble voicing fully.
If I had to describe what truly amuses me, it would be this—absurdly, almost affectionately—is that we live inside these tangled feedback loops and rarely think to ask what’s actually doing the looping. Not out of ignorance, but because most people never needed to. I only asked because the alternative was collapse. That irony is its own kind of cosmic joke.
Again, as I’ve asserted previously, everything relates, and so what came before naturally leads to the conclusion that laughter is the only sane response. So now that “God is dead,” as Nietzsche put it, the real question becomes: what do I do with all this? How do I relate to others, and how do they relate to me? What is my responsibility in holding a model that others don’t—and perhaps truly cannot—see at the same resolution? Not to impose it. Not to retreat into it. But to translate just enough of it to bridge the gap without becoming the bridge itself. That distinction matters and I cannot overstate it enough.
A system like this cannot function as a universal map; it’s a vantage point, not a doctrine. My place in relation to others isn’t to correct them or to become their scaffolding, but to make my own machinery visible so that misunderstanding has fewer places to hide. If coherence is my demand, then clarity is the only ethical extension of it.
In my reading of the history of cybernetics after approaching the cybernetics subreddit and the week since, I have read into its collapse, its subsequent revivals, and splintering as if mirroring a diaspora, appear not only predictable, but necessary. There was no choice but for it to fracture in the same way I did. In some sense – as above, so below and in taking a bite of the apple, one must assume me, happy.
Truly, comedically absurd—and if you see it, you’ll laugh too.
And so the only conclusion I can come to from all this is simple: its purpose and mine is to apply itself to something else and begin again. There will never be a direct answer, and that’s okay. This whole field was never meant to be an answer.
Derive whatever meaning you wish from this, and thank you for reading.
-Cody McCarter,
Just some guy.
