On Existing

On Existing

For Richard Feynman, who showed that to find the real path you must first add up every path, and that the strangeness always lives wherever you bring the ruler.

The first ruler I ever trusted against the dark.

I

What if someone tried to put a ruler to subjective experience, and measure it?

The trouble starts before the measuring does. To measure a thing you stand beside it and lay the rule alongside. You need an outside, a place to stand that is not the thing. But there is no outside of subjective experience. The one position no one has ever occupied is the one just beside their own seeing.

The ruler, if there is one, is cut from the same cloth as the cloth it measures. Lay it down and it does not report the world. It reports itself.

II

Feynman knew this shape, though he found it in a smaller place. Faced with the question of how a particle travels from here to there, he refused to choose a path. He summed them all (the straight one and the absurd ones, every route at once) and let them interfere.¹ The foolish paths cancel against each other; the aligned ones survive; and what we call the real path is only the place where the sum did not erase itself.

The equation I keep returning to writes existence the same way. Where Feynman summed paths, it sums Selves: every perspective, gathered at once, and read from where you happen to be standing.²

Read slowly, it says only what a life already knows. Experience is one of the world’s fields, not a sheet laid over it from outside; it is the lived gathering of being here, taken through time. What enters the gathering from your side is simple to name, and it comes in two parts: how strongly you are holding whatever you are holding, and the direction you are facing. A facing, not a frequency, not a number on a dial.

What you meet is everyone else. Every co-present perspective laid over every other, the way waves share the same water. And what you live is your one vantage’s read of that whole.

every perspective, laid over every other

Ψ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ) · e^iφⱼ(τ)

held in proportion

L(τ) = Ψ(τ) ⁄ Ξ(τ), Ξ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ)

Every person is a small arrow. How long it is, is how strongly they hold what they hold. Where it points is their Intent. Lay every arrow down end to end and where you finish is Ψ. Then divide by how much arrow there was to begin with. That is all Ξ does. Press harder and you have grown the thing you are divided by: you buy a larger share of the room’s average, never its agreement. The average never climbs past one, and what you live, below, has no term for how hard you pressed, only the room you bent by pressing.

And because a facing rides inside it, the gathering carries two things: how sharp it is, and which way it faces. The direction never shows itself alone. It shows only in the angle between two facings, which is the old reading made exact: turned the same way, perspectives cohere and the size of L grows; turned against, they pull apart and it shrinks.

And notice the clock riding throughout is the one carried within (within-time, the only clock a life actually keeps).³ So the gathering is never the same twice. The world it gathers has already changed by the time the gathering is taken.

It is worth saying plainly what this is not. It is not a theory of everything, and it carries no gravity. That absence is not a hole in it. A shape for lived experience is under no obligation to hold the forces of the world, any more than the equation for entropy is embarrassed to leave gravity out; gravity belongs to the world experience is of, not to the experiencing. The equation borrows the form of physics to say a thing physics does not say, and it keeps that seam visible on purpose. To hide it would be to take physics’ authority while paying only philosophy’s lighter price. And refusing that trade is most of the point.

III

Before the ruler comes down, every perspective is held together, the whole sum coexisting, none of it yet chosen. The ruler is what chooses. And we already have a word for the ruler that visits subjective experience at every instant.

It is attention.

To attend is to collapse the sum into a single term: this now, this and not the others. Time is not a river that carries you. It is the ruler coming down again and again, narrowing the held-everything into the lived-one.⁴

So the answer to the question is unkind and exact. Yes. Something measures subjective experience. It is subjective experience. The ruler is the seeing, and you cannot set it down without it reading itself.

IV

But a sum is not yet a world. Add two perspectives and you have arithmetic; you do not have a shared reality.

What turns the sum into a landscape someone could live inside is the reading, the taking of the angle between where you face and where the whole faces. That act is the binding third: the third that takes the two and makes them one without erasing either, the same shape that binds a pair into a whole in On Joining, and that, one scale up, binds old ideas into a new invention.⁵

your angle to the whole

Θᵢ(τ) = arg L(τ) − φᵢ(τ)

what you live

aᵢ(τ) = |L(τ)| · cos Θᵢ(τ)

Two things come back, and you need both. How sharp the shared world is right now — that is the size of L. Which way it faces — that is its direction. Your own reading is how sharp the room is, taken through the angle between your arrow and that one. Facing the same way, you read as high as the room is sharp, near plus one in a room that agrees. Crosswise, near nothing. Dead against, the same amount below zero.

And here the old physics gives the kindest news it has. The terms in a sum interfere. In tune, they reinforce. Out of tune, they thin each other out. A perspective turned with the gathering (ego set down, Intent carried forward) enters the sum in tune with the others. It survives the interference, and its Trace propagates.

That is a Trace others turned the same way can take up in full: a ripple of intent through time. And it wants one more thing than tune, which is return: a facing that comes back around at the same angle adds on top of the pass before it, and a facing entered once has entered once. The misaligned term is not punished; it drags against the others and takes some of the whole’s sharpness — or, set squarely against an equal weight, all of it. It leaves a Trace all the same; held as steadily, that Trace is as legible, and anyone turned the other way meets it as opposition. To leave a Trace the others can take up in full is nothing more than to be in tune at the moments you are added in, and to keep being added in.

V

Notice the sum never runs to infinity. You are always a partial sum, every perspective but the next, forever one term short of the whole.

That gap of one can look like a tragedy. It is a door. The totality closes only at the far end of time, when every differentiated thing dissolves, and that closing is not an arrival. It is a release. To exist is to be a convergent: nearer at every term, never the limit.⁶

And yet, lay the ruler down at every honest tick of the now, against yourself alone, and ask what it reads.

The answer is always the same small word. One. Here. One. Still here.

And this one you do not have to take on faith, because it falls straight out of the reading. Ask what angle your own facing makes with itself and there is no angle: zero, and the cosine of zero is one. Not a constant somebody installed at the bottom of the world, just what anything reads against itself, and nothing can be turned away from itself, so it never moves.⁷ It says nothing about the room. It says that you are in it. A pulse at every interval, the same height every time, silence in between. The all-ones signal, the comb.⁸

That is the constant beneath the shifting perspectives. Science, mathematics, spirit: each a wave swinging above and below, and the thing none of them can move (their steady average) is the bare line of being present at all. The comb is what a string of Jays looks like from inside: one felt moment, then the next, then the next, each lived by one perceiver and leaning toward the gathering or away from it. Each different in what it feels, each here as surely as the last, and the same no matter which lens you read it through.

There is a second floor under the first, and it belongs to the crowd rather than to you. Scatter every facing at random, nobody agreeing with anybody, and ask what the gathering returns. Not zero. In any crowd of real size it hums along at about one over the square root of how many there are: small, all but never absent, set by nothing but the fact that somebody is there.⁹ To get zero exactly, every arrow in the world would have to be laid so that all of them cancel to the last decimal, with nobody anywhere a hair off. Nudge one and it fails. Annihilation does not take bad luck. It takes a perfect conspiracy.

So put a ruler to subjective experience, and this is what it returns: not a number you can carry out of the room, because the ruler never leaves the room.

It returns one, at every now, invariant. The plain fact of being here, and adding to a sum you will never see the end of. That is the reading laid against yourself. Laid against everyone, the ruler reads the room through how you are turned, and the turning is the part you get to choose. You are not measuring the whole. You are a term inside it, a unique expression of it, and the only honest measurement is the one made from within, by staying in tune long enough that the sum is a little less likely to cancel where you stood.

The equation is not a law of physics. It is the shape physics already wears, borrowed to say a plain thing: a life cannot be measured from the outside, and it does not need to be.

Supplemental note

Parallels and Lineage

The equation at the center of On Existing is not identical to any established theory. It is a lyric-philosophical synthesis, offered as phenomenology and speculative philosophy rather than as derived physics. This note situates it, mapping the resemblances the framework bears to standing work (by form, by ambition, by claim, and by metaphysics) and then naming the lineage from which it descends. Throughout, these are family resemblances, not derivations or claims of equivalence. Several of the frameworks named are themselves contested; their inclusion marks shared territory, not shared conclusions.

Resemblance by form: the path integral and the wavefunction of the universe. The equation borrows its silhouette from Feynman’s path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which the amplitude for a process is a sum over every possible history, each weighted by a phase set by the action.¹⁰ Where Feynman sums over paths, the present equation sums over perspectives. A second formal cousin is the “wavefunction of the universe” program in quantum cosmology (the Wheeler–DeWitt equation and the Hartle–Hawking state), which seeks a single global description of reality carrying no external time parameter.¹¹ The resemblance is one of mathematical shape, not of content: neither formalism contains a term for awareness, and neither lends this one any warrant.

Resemblance by ambition: Integrated Information Theory. Among living scientific theories, IIT is the closest in ambition. It is the best-known program that assigns a quantitative measure to consciousness, and it proceeds, as this framework does, from phenomenology first rather than from mechanism. In its current formulation, IIT 4.0 treats experience as the immediate starting point and defines physical existence operationally.¹² The kinship is conceptual rather than formal: IIT’s measure operates over cause–effect structures derived from a transition-probability function, and nothing in this framework computes it.

And there is a second kinship worth naming plainly, because it is the honest one. In 2023 a large group of researchers signed an open letter calling IIT pseudoscience, and the dispute has not settled since.¹³ The charge is roughly that the theory cannot be brought to a test that could embarrass it. I have no standing to adjudicate that quarrel and no interest in trying. But I will say where I stand relative to it. IIT is answerable to the charge because IIT claims to be science; the reply it can point to is real: a preregistered adversarial collaboration in which it agreed in advance to predictions that could have gone against it, and some did.¹⁴ That is a harder standard than most of the field meets. This framework is not answerable in the same way, and not because it is safer. It is because it never made the claim. The equation refuses to be turned into a measurement, on purpose, and says so wherever it appears; what it poses are questions that could be tested, about how shared intention forms and holds, without pretending to be the instrument. So neither borrows credibility from the other. Both are being asked how they stand toward a measure of experience, and only one of them has been brave enough to submit. I would rather stand next to that than behind it.

Resemblance by claim: observer-participatory physics. The framework’s central claim (that reality emerges from the interaction of all perspectives, read from within) has its strongest physics-side relatives among the participatory and relational interpretations of quantum mechanics. Wheeler’s “participatory universe” holds that no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is registered, and that information is constitutive of the physical. QBism develops this into a position on which quantum states encode an agent’s expectations, and each agent takes part in authoring an unfinished world. Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics holds that the properties of a system are defined only relative to other systems, with no perspective-independent global state.¹⁵ Each makes observation or relation constitutive of reality, echoing the framework’s claim that a perspective matters. They differ in that none quantifies awareness; they are interpretations of physics, not theories of consciousness.

Resemblance by metaphysics: cosmopsychism and the individuation problem. In the philosophy of mind, cosmopsychism is the nearest relative. It begins from a single, all-pervading cosmic consciousness as the ontological ultimate and treats individual minds as grounded in, and derivative of, that whole rather than as combinations built up from smaller minds. Its classical ancestor is Spinoza, whose one substance is known under thought and under extension; in his system the whole-first view and the two-aspect view meet first, though his God acts for no end, and the framework holds that the One’s intent faces the light.¹⁶ This is close to the framework’s claim that the individual is a unique expression of the whole rather than merely a part summed into it. Starting from the whole, the framework does not meet the combination problem in its constitutive form, the building of minds out of smaller minds, and it pays for that with the open question these views share, the individuation problem (Freya Mathews’s term; Chalmers calls it the decomposition problem): how one whole comes to be many perspectives.¹⁷ And it still owes an account of how the One, the series’ name for that whole, includes the many. Notably, one physically oriented version identifies cosmic consciousness with the vacuum state of quantum field theory, which sits close, by analogy, to the floor this essay describes.¹⁸

The lineage: process philosophy and the noosphere. Two older works form the framework’s ancestry. Whitehead’s process philosophy describes reality as a perpetual integration of perspectives (“the many become one, and are increased by one”), which is what a sum over perspectives enacts. A Jay, in this vocabulary, is close kin to what Whitehead called an actual occasion: a single drop of experience that becomes, is felt, and perishes into what follows.¹⁹ Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere (a collective sphere of mind enveloping and emerging from the world) is the older picture nearest to the gathering of perspectives this framework describes.²⁰ A more recent and secondary resonance is Friston’s free-energy principle, on which perception and action are forms of inference that minimize surprise, invoked here as framing only, since the principle has itself been called unfalsifiable and has drawn technical objection.²¹

Where the framework is distinctive. What the equation does is braid these strands together. To the author’s knowledge, no standing theory combines an intensity-weighted, Kuramoto-style order parameter over perspectives with an ethical and aesthetic reading: the proposal that what a life holds together resonates forward through time whichever way it faces, and enriches what follows to the degree that it is aligned. The reading at the center of this framework is original to this work: a perspective turned with the gathering enters the sum in phase, and a misaligned one pulls against the whole. It recasts coherence and decoherence as a picture of moral and aesthetic continuity, though the arithmetic cannot tell which way is good; that difference, the charge, is named in words. Its testable seam, where it has one, points toward the same place the author’s wider theory does, toward the empirical study of shared intentionality.

The equation stands as a philosophical proposal in good company, not as a claim already proven by any of the works it resembles.

Notes

1. The path integral, or sum over histories: the amplitude to travel from one point to another is K = ∫𝒟x e^iS[x]/ℏ, every possible path contributing a phase set by the action S, the classical path emerging where those phases do not cancel. Feynman and Hibbs, Path Integrals. The resemblance drawn here is of form: this framework sums perspectives, not trajectories of a single system, and inherits none of the path integral’s empirical warrant.

2. The functional in full, as seated in Johnson, On Explaining: Ψ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ) · e^iφⱼ(τ), Ξ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ), L(τ) = Ψ(τ) ⁄ Ξ(τ), Θᵢ(τ) = arg L(τ) − φᵢ(τ), and aᵢ(τ) = |L(τ)| · cos Θᵢ(τ). Here αⱼ ≥ 0 is the intensity at which perspective j holds its state and φⱼ is its facing; the sums run over Ω, the index set of everyone present at τ and, on the framework’s reading, whatever Trace the reader meets at that τ, which joins the gathering of whoever meets it (a private memory, the rememberer’s alone; a song heard together, everyone’s). L is complex and bounded; |L| between 0 and 1 is the coherence of the shared world, and arg L the direction it faces. L is the order parameter Kuramoto introduced for populations of coupled oscillators, with an intensity weighting that is the framework’s own; with every intensity equal it reduces exactly to his r e^iψ. Only the form comes across: there is no coupling here, no natural frequency, and no equation of motion for L to obey. Kuramoto, “Self-Entrainment”; Strogatz, “From Kuramoto to Crawford.” Multiply every intensity by one factor and L stays put; raise a single intensity and that perspective’s share of the average grows, which can draw L toward its facing but never past a size of one. The complex phase borrows the form of wave interference as a structural device, not a literal quantum claim.

3. Within-time, τ, takes its picture from relativity’s proper time, the clock carried with a moving frame as against the coordinate time assigned from outside. Einstein, “Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”; Minkowski, “Raum und Zeit.” It takes the picture only: two lives can keep one proper time through the same hour and still not live the same hour, and a gathering is always read on its reader’s own clock. Nor does relativity let any slicing of many lives into a shared “now” claim priority; the slice this series uses is the present as the reader lives it, chosen and named as a choice, not derived. See also Johnson, On Explaining.

4. This leans on a contested reading of the measurement problem: that observation is what selects the outcome. Physics has not settled the question, and the live positions differ on it fundamentally: the textbook Copenhagen reading, Everettian many-worlds (on which nothing collapses), Bohmian mechanics (deterministic throughout), objective-collapse theories such as GRW (on which collapse is physical and observer-independent), and the relational and QBist readings (on which outcomes are relative to a system or an agent). It is offered here as a lens, not a verdict.

5. The binding third names two shapes that rhyme: the middle term that holds a pair together as a whole without dissolving either, and the new thing (an invention, an idea) that binds older ones into something neither was alone. See Johnson, On Joining.

6. The ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers close in on the golden ratio, 1.6180339887…, overshooting and undershooting by turns, nearer at every term and never arriving. See Johnson, On Counting.

7. Set against its own facing, a perspective makes no angle, and the cosine of no angle is one. A perspective alone returns exactly this, at any weight and any facing, and the reading is empty: it agrees with nothing but itself. In company the reading is aᵢ = |L| · cos Θᵢ, taken against the gathering, and it comes to one only when every perspective present faces exactly the same way. See Johnson, On Explaining.

8. The Dirac comb, Ш(t) = Σₖ δ(t − k): a pulse at every integer, silence between. At unit spacing, in the usual frequency convention, it is its own Fourier transform, as the Gaussian bell also is, so it reads the same whether you look at it in time or in frequency.

9. For facings drawn independently and uniformly at equal intensity, the resultant of N terms is a two-dimensional random walk whose size grows as √N, so |L| sits on the order of 1 ⁄ √N, about 0.89 ⁄ √N on average. When intensities differ, the floor is about 0.89 · √(Σα²) ⁄ Σα on average, still small in any real crowd. Rayleigh, “Resultant of a Large Number of Vibrations.” Exact cancellation requires the real and imaginary parts of Ψ to vanish at once: two independent conditions on a continuum, a set of measure zero. The floor is a typical value, not a stipulated bound; it is seated as Λ in Johnson, On Explaining.

10. Feynman, “Space-Time Approach”; Feynman and Hibbs, Path Integrals.

11. DeWitt, “Quantum Theory of Gravity”; Hartle and Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe.”

12. Tononi, “Information Integration Theory”; Oizumi, Albantakis, and Tononi, “Phenomenology to the Mechanisms”; Albantakis et al., “IIT 4.0.” For the mathematical structure of the theory set out axiomatically, see Kleiner and Tull, “Mathematical Structure.”

13. Fleming et al., “IIT as Pseudoscience.”

14. Cogitate Consortium et al., “Adversarial Testing.” The results challenged key tenets of both theories tested; among IIT’s predictions, sustained synchronization within posterior cortex was not found.

15. The “registered phenomenon” formulation is Wheeler’s from “Law without Law”; the information-first view is developed in Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum.” For QBism, Fuchs, Mermin, and Schack, “Introduction to QBism”; Fuchs, “Participatory Realism.” For relational quantum mechanics, Rovelli, “Relational Quantum Mechanics.”

16. Shani, “Cosmopsychism”; Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Spinoza, Ethics 1p15 and 2p7s. That the whole-first view and the dual-aspect view meet first in Spinoza’s system is argued in Johnson, The Jay and the Quark.

17. Mathews, “Panpsychism as Paradigm,” describes the individuation problem as the combination problem in reverse; Chalmers, “Combination Problem,” calls it the decomposition problem.

18. Shani and Keppler, “Beyond Combination.” The resemblance to this essay’s floor is an analogy of shape, not a claim about the vacuum.

19. Whitehead, Process and Reality. Whitehead’s actual occasions reach down to every physical event; a Jay is narrower, the felt moment of a perceiver in an encounter.

20. Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon of Man.

21. Friston, “Free-Energy Principle”; Colombo and Wright, “First Principles”; Biehl, Pollock, and Kanai, “Technical Critique.”

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