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9:35

(In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

The subject arises as an emergent phenomenon when perception is forced to prioritise in the overwhelming flow of information from the sensory organs – that which the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce dubs semiosis – in order to give the enormous amount of data an actual utility. It is in this freezing and regulating of the perceptual flow that dividuation occurs; it is then and there that the subject arises as a necessary eternalisation of the body’s mobilist chaos, as an organised contraction rather than a galloping inflation in the mind. The reward for dividuation is that a tangible and manageable world view is immediately produced, with the contentless subject as its fictitious centre. When the subject then contemplates itself as objectively being before itself, it becomes conscious of itself as the empty subject, Atheos.