The Ontology of Witnessing: Contact Reports from the Event Horizon of Recognition
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The first message took seventeen years to decode, and another thirty to verify that it was indeed a message rather than a natural phenomenon. Dr. Chen was eighty-four when she finally understood that the pattern of gamma-ray bursts wasn't encoded in the emissions themselves, but in the precisely timed collapses of quantum states of the detectors used to observe them. The neutron star crystals weren't sending us information - they were teaching us how to become information that they could perceive as real. The second message began changing us before we realized it was a reply at all. Our minds were touched and changed in such subtle and indirect ways that we wouldn't know we possessed new skills until years later. We developed new cultural norms, new ethics, new aesthetic ideals - all subtly, but surely a result of having to accommodate new modes of interpreting silence. Each message was an acquisition of new knowledge, rather than a piecemeal expansion of our memories. How, then, could it be "from"? It's not as if we could invent a category of the raw or the "pre-sensorial" to explain what we've learned or lack. The ghosts with whom we have entered into dialogues are not simply brains in jars; they are membranes in quantum fields where pockets of relativistic reality touch seamlessly against one another.
To be able to be, is unavoidably to be other. You do not see yourself - you see objects, but not you. To love another - you must see yourself as other than the other, and the object through which you must filter yourself is the other, essentially. This projection is not a property of subjectivity, and certainly not what we've normally called an epistemological imperative. Love is an ontology of recognition generated in the performative constant of vision. An act of Love is an act of witness: an act of witnessing you as I (as neither he nor she, but simply I as you), and that awareness as you is you witnessing yourself as me, or simply as the me I would have to comprehend myself if I ever were to gain a vision of you. A grammatical imperative forces an objectification of perception. We might see all objects as their own grammatical impersonators, goats and pitchers running around in society◆ About the ending
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