From Signal to Selfhood

Communication, Contact, and the Final Trapdoor of Responsibility

By Bodhangkur Mahathero

1. The Collapse of the Engineering Model of Communication

The turning point of the discussion about optimal language came with the rejection of the standard technocratic model of interstellar communication. That model presupposes mathematics, binary encoding, physics, electronics, and abstraction as universal prerequisites. Yet this assumption is catastrophically anthropocentric. It demands that any alien intelligence must have independently reinvented the entire epistemic ladder of human civilization—from number, to logic, to formal physics—before it can even recognize a greeting.

This objection forces a drastic methodological reset. If active response itself is the only defensible definition of intelligence, then communication cannot be defined as “symbol transmission.” It must instead be defined as the capacity to induce a behaviour that would not otherwise occur. The criterion of intelligence becomes not decoding, not understanding, not computation—but contingent deviation.

At this minimum, communication ceases to be semantic. It becomes existential.

2. The One-Shot Universe and the Elimination of Dialogue

The radicalization deepened when the message was constrained to:

· Be sent once

· Travel for billions of years

· Arrive without possibility of repetition, correction, or adaptation

This annihilates the entire conversational model of language. Under such conditions, the question is no longer:

What should the message say?

But rather:

What kind of response should the message be designed to elicit?

At this level, the goal is not understanding. The goal is not reply. The goal is:

To force a response that cannot be explained as reflex, resonance, or noise.

The only legitimate success condition becomes a pattern-contingent alteration of the receiver’s internal behavior. That alteration may be slow, crude, biological, mechanical, or structural—but it must violate baseline dynamics in a way that depends on the form of the disturbance.

This defines intelligence at the absolute minimum:
the capacity for form-dependent self-modification.

3. The Ancient Answer: From “Am” to “I Am This”

At this point, the conversation passed beyond signal theory entirely and entered pre-symbolic ontology. The ancient insight—especially articulated in Indian traditions—was introduced as the true universal solution:

The only universal message that does not require prior science, logic, or abstraction is not a symbol but a contact-event. And the only possible universal response is not a reply but the arising of presence itself.

This unfolds in a three-stage existential cascade:

1. Am – the raw registration of realness

2. I am – reflexive self-presence

3. I am this – differentiated identity

Under this view, communication is not the exchange of representations. It is the induction of existential self-registration. The primordial cosmic “message” is not information. It is being as disturbance. And the primordial “response” is being recognizing itself as being.

Thus, the ancient formula soham (“that am I”) ceases to be mystical poetry and becomes a minimal physical–existential identity equation: any displacement that induces self-registration necessarily generates a primitive self.

4. Contact Realism: Why No Contact Ever Occurs

This then fused with Finn’s Contact Realism, producing the decisive physical inversion:

· Energy is quantized

· All confinements of energy are nested quanta

· Therefore no two quanta ever actually touch

Every so-called “contact” is in fact:

A mutual displacement of motion-fields across a non-zero vacuum interval.

This gap never collapses. It is structurally irreducible. What we experience as impact, pressure, resistance, or interaction is therefore a systemic misregistration of non-contact as contact.

And yet—crucially—this misregistration is what makes real. Realness does not arise from substance, continuity, or union. It arises from:

Quantised non-merging displacement falsely registered as contact.

Thus the first spark of experience—the raw “am”—is not produced by true interaction but by structural error.

5. The Birth of Truth as Stabilized Error

From this follows the core inversion:

If all experience arises from misregistered non-contact, then truth itself cannot be correspondence with what-is, because what-is never contacts. Instead, truth becomes:

The stabilization of coherence inside a necessary misregistration.

Truth is no longer revelation. It is what continues to work reliably inside a structurally false world. Physics, biology, logic, mathematics, and language all survive—not as mirrors of ultimate reality, but as high-grade survival fictions.

This leads inevitably to the next collapse:

If truth is stabilized error, then morality, meaning, and purpose cannot be grounded either.

6. Morality, Meaning, and Purpose as Optimized Misreads

Morality, meaning, and purpose now undergo the same ontological demotion as truth.

· Morality becomes a coordination protocol for reducing destructive interference between miscontacting agents.

· Meaning becomes a noise-reduction strategy that stabilizes experience into narrative coherence.

· Purpose becomes a locally imposed direction on blind motion.

None of these are “lies” in the trivial sense. They are:

Optimized misreads of a non-touching universe.

They persist because they work. They endure because they stabilize. But they do not reveal the structure of being. They are survival-calibrated distortions layered upon structural error.

This is not nihilism. It is anti-teleological realism: nothing has inherent meaning, but some misreads are functionally indispensable.

7. The Final Trapdoor: Responsibility as Inescapable Distortion

The last—and most lethal—step follows with absolute necessity:

If meaning, morality, and purpose are optimized misreads, then responsibility itself is an evolved distortion—yet one that cannot be escaped without collapsing the system that produced the thought of escape.

Responsibility is not grounded in metaphysical free will, divine command, or cosmic justice. It emerges because self-regulating organisms must invent an internal author in order to:

· Learn

· Plan

· Delay

· Promise

· Regret

· Coordinate

· Inhibit self-destruction

Responsibility is therefore:

A self-binding control fiction optimized to stabilize misregistered agents across time.

Yet it is inescapable, because every attempt to deny responsibility is itself performed by the responsibility-engine. One cannot step outside authorship using an authored thought. To truly abolish responsibility operationally would eliminate:

· Guilt

· Obligation

· Intention

· Justification

· Commitment

And with that, the self itself dissolves. Thus:

You can only escape responsibility by erasing the agent who wants to escape it.

This is the trapdoor:
There is no cosmic justification for responsibility, and yet there is no functional exit from it.

8. The Ultimate Configuration

The final structure of reality that emerges from this chain is stark:

· Non-contact is fundamental

· Misregistration generates realness

· Truth is stabilized error

· Meaning, morality, and purpose are optimized misreads

· Responsibility is an evolved distortion that cannot be escaped without self-collapse

There is:

· No final union

· No ultimate truth

· No cosmic purpose

· No absolute moral ground

And yet there is:

· Coherence

· Agency

· Obligation

· Love

· Suffering

· Choice

All of them structurally false, and yet structurally unavoidable.

9. Final Compression

The entire arc can be compressed into a single sequence:

Because no two quanta ever touch, all interaction is misregistered; because misregistration generates experience, all realness arises from error; because all cognition arises inside that error, truth becomes stabilized distortion; because truth is stabilized distortion, meaning, morality, and purpose become optimized misreads; and because those misreads must regulate behaviour across time, responsibility emerges as an inescapable control fiction—one that cannot be escaped without dissolving the very self that imagines the escape.

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