Phenomenological Collapse

Canonical definition

Phenomenological Collapse is the indistinguishability of source at the level of experience: a motivational output is accurately described phenomenologically, the felt wanting, urgency or fear, while its source is misidentified. The collapse operates on the Individual whose output it is and on any observer of that output, and for the same reason in both cases. Integration strips the source-tags before the Scalar reaches awareness, so the Individual holds no phenomenological property by which M-urgency could be told from A-urgency; an observer working from that Individual's report inherits the same undifferentiated evidence, and reads the source from conduct only by inference that requires the M-Hypothesis. The first-person and third-person cases are one result rather than two, because neither party can read a source off an experience that does not carry one. The observation "people want to be mad" (Emily Writes) is the third-person case: accurate about the output, wrong about the source (autonomous preference rather than Preconscious Transmission), precisely because Source Opacity and the Vocabulary Gap foreclose, respectively, introspective and inferential source-discrimination. Fear of an unmanaged Object in the field is the load-bearing case: the Observer and the Thinker trigger the phenomenological effect, including its physiological components, and the output is experienced as a desire emanating from the body itself; the Body Manager does not issue the signal (Chapter 4, Section 4.4.2; Chapter 8, Section 8.2.5).