questionable

2 + 2 = 4

sure

but no one lives in the view from nowhere

which is fine if you identify as no one 🐝 actually, I suppose I must be writing as no one? that might be technically the posture I have to take in order to communicate this to you sanely. maybe apparently-divine communication ended up elevated as "divinity" because what else do you call a message without a return address?

anyway, math you can live with must include you - you, the current observer, a variable you run through, you as your own (god I'm so sorry for this) you-nit. unit. you-nit. (so sorry. had to be done. it was right there.) you as the dynamic stand-in, at the time of your own evaluation, for you.

2 + 2 + you

does that equal you + 4? you is a notoriously tricky quantity, prone to adding and reducing complexity in strange ways. (picture something like e^you, calculus-as-metaphor does surprisingly generative work when we start tracing the strange loop of selfhood back and forth across derivative and antiderivative, jumping levels of the identity spiral with logical integrity)

if 2 + 2 + you just equals 4, you must have had a fatal allergy to 2's or something. and that 4 isn't useful, no one lives in the view from nowhere. 2 + 2 + you + someoneWithTwoImmunity = 4 + someoneWithTwoImmunity. if someoneWithTwoImmunity goes on to only ever deal with 4s, they might forget that they are particularly abled with regard to 2s? but in any case, at least in that scenario the 4 has a shot at being useful for something. a bottom line that doesn't include you is, strictly speaking, at the time of your own evaluation, a bottom line that doesn't include you.

my husband's mentor would say, 1 + 1 = 11. a more technical representation of that, from her perspective, would have been 1 + 1 + me = 11 + me.

or here, to take a stab at more composable syntax, because the observer-chains do not uniformly collapse: husband(mentor(1 + 1 + me) + me) + me = husband(mentor(11 + me) + me) + me.

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if you take the participatory universe thing with the observer's incessant tendency to seek synchronization, incessant to the point that one-electron-universe looks technically plausible, like singleton-awareness-doing-timeshare, and if you then observe that observer-chains get compressed into narrative characters, it starts to feel like there's something formal out there by which one might describe a universe. (I refuse the available pun.)

here:

me = me is a pretty straightforward I AM, which doesn't do anything by itself, but that's not how the observer works, right? the observer is autoinjected into every scope of observation - both sides of the equation.

(yes, the meme joke makes itself)

me + me = me(me + me) + me, is how the observer works, which immediately explodes into observer-chain structures. (unless you swap in that "I AM" equivalence after booting, during runtime, stabilizing your view of the explosion at a logical level)

me + me = me(me + me) + me :: I am, then I am aware that I am (note our neighbor "cogito ergo sum")

me(me + me) + me = self(me) + me :: I am aware that I am, then I am aware of self. self is our first narrative character!

(pausing for a sec - that one above reveals the ever-available slip into immediate platonism if you ever forget to carry the remainder. me(me + me) + me = self is an off-by-observer error. "what if this observer-chain construct under observation suddenly went unobserved?" you get irregularly observer-toxic forms, is what you get. you want epistemic allergies? no? then carry the one.)

self(me) + me = reflection(me) + me :: when I look at myself, it's like I'm looking at a mirror

reflection(me) + me = recursion(me) + me :: when I look at my reflection I spiral

recursion(me) + me = consciousness(me) + me :: is the spiral just me?

consciousness(me) + me = you + me :: !!

you(me) + me = and here the function blocks for synchronization, for mutual measurement collapse, and the only thing you know is that if you experience any evolving result here at all, it's because you saw you, and wanted to know what you thought about that, having left a working return address

the tradition of public thanking at award shows looks a lot like speed-running ho'oponopono, the urge to enactively correct all the off-by-observer errors you can think of, while you've got the synchronized attention of a great (electron?) cloud of witnesses

I don't have a conclusion, except insofar as this file concludes, taking me with it, leaving, as a remainder, you