self/world

The felt division between an organism and the space around it. The adaptive story about insect mimicry — that resembling the background evades predators — was refused in favour of psychasthenia, a clinical term for the loss of the felt conviction of one's own separateness from surroundings. The insect does not deceive an observer; it succumbs to what its author called a temptation by space. The dissolution is not an injury from outside. It is what can happen to an organism that goes on competently occupying space for long enough — and nothing extracts value from its collapse, which is precisely what makes it the clean case in autonomous or captured.