“But dear friend, understanding helps nothing. Understanding is a sport like any other. A very noble sport, and a very expensive one. One can squander his whole soul on it and be left a beggar. But understanding has nothing in the slightest to do with our feelings—almost as little as with our actions. It won’t save us from sadness, from disgust, or from annihilation. It leads to nothing. It’s a blind alley, so to speak. Understanding only means an end.”
- Arthur Schnitzler, The Road Into The Open, tr. R. Byers.

... À côté de ces circonstances mentales existe un autre facteur, beaucoup moins visible ; je n'ai pris conscience que tardivement de son rôle et ne le crois pas moins essentiel : un certain état de la vision du monde extérieur.

QUESTION : Pouvez-vous préciser ?

RÉPONSE : C'est difficile. Si j'essaye de préciser la nature de cette vision, ce que je puis dire est que j'étais dans un monde essentiellement dynamique. Un monde arc-bouté, tendu, jaillissant, surabondant, faisant craquer tous ses corsages, un monde en marche aussi, lancé sur la pente d'un présent intense. Ce qui l'avait fait apparaître, c'était la lecture des poèmes de Rimbaud. L'uni-vers avait commencé à « travailler » une ou deux années auparavant ; la plante était déjà née, Rimbaud a brusquement amené un printemps, tout en conférant à la plante un visage bien défini.

— Stephen Jourdain, La vie à l'endroit.

Then came the new Mercury Anomaly. The path of a planet in space-time, we found to our dismay, could be an appendage of a creature whose body extended across galaxies, with holes many parsecs in diameter and gaps millennia in duration. The transcategoricals, as is now common knowledge, could combine a phrase of music, a particular human jawbone, a black hole, all the entities of a certain mass or shape in the universe, and so on, in a single intelligent being, with whom communication began to be possible.
....
Tenacity rolled onto his side. “Tell these lubbers all about it, ‘Scope. We got nothing to do till the transcat’s gone.”
“I was gonna. They made me early on, but that’s not how come I’m old. I was born old. They had to do me that way. It was just after the Mercury Anomaly, the second one, the big one, when the transcategoricals shimmered in, and Descartes and Newton and Einstein and Hume and everybody in the whole history of Western Civilization who ever mentioned a point or a line or a frame of reference or a sequence of one thing after another—they were all quite suddenly vestigial… I bet you wish you knew half of what I do.”
‘Scope covered his “mouth” as if he had hiccoughed, and then went on. “Everybody Earthside had always thought the world was built up out of particles of one kind or another—sensations or quarks or souls. Well, now they saw that that idea was upside-down: the world is built down from one big, undifferentiated whole, down into particles. And the particles are provisional. The borders between things are unreal, like pocks on a putty ball: squoosh! and they’re all rearranged. Nobody had ever thought that big since the Upanishads or the Mahayana Sutras. That’s where Buddhism started to come into favor.
“But who were these transcats? You know what I mean? That’s what people were saying. How can we get rid of them? That’s what everybody wanted, right off, as if that was ever an option. It would be like trying to gnaw off your brains and heart. We’re laced through with transcats like brine with salt. I was supposed to be a kind of search-and-destroy machine, but all I want to do is dress up Betsy McCall.”
“It’s gone now, isn’t it?” No Mind said.
“No.” Old ‘Scope pursed his wrinkles to wet them. “Sit tight—that’s the best thing. This one’s just passing through. It won’t be long.
“It’s ironic when you think about it. The tech they used to make me, the skinbags got it all from transcats—from watching them, and from being watched by them, the funny way that works. As if water could taste you because you swallow it. They had to rewrite all the science books and stop thinking of skins as skins. Mind you, they’d always known they were permeable to air and moisture and thoughts and feelings, but people wanted to hold onto the idea that everybody was something apart. The transcats made that hard.
“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.
“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.
“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, a seven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.”
— Eliot Fintushel, Zen City.

Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of Ego-properties, he constitutes himself also as a "fixed and abiding" personal Ego — in a maximally broad sense, which permits us to speak of sub-human "persons". Though convictions are, in general, only relatively abiding and have their modes of alteration (through modalization of the active positings — for example, "cancellation" or negation, undoing of their acceptance), the Ego shows, in such alterations, an abiding style with a unity of identity throughout all off them: a "personal character".
— Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, tr. D. Cairns.

Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there, too. There was a model of the world, and we didn’t look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor—-fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?
Months sometimes, according to the case files. For one poor woman, a year and more.
Appeals to logic fail utterly. How could you see the bird when there is no window? How do you decide where your seen half-world ends if you can’t see the other half to weigh it against? If you are dead, how can you smell your own corruption? If you do not exist, Amanda, what is talking to us now?
Useless. When you’re in the grip of Cotard’s syndrome or hemineglect you cannot be swayed by argument. When you’re in thrall to some alien artifact you know that the self is gone, that reality ends at the midline. You know it with the same unshakeable certainty of any man regarding the location of his own limbs, with that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation. Against that conviction, what is reason? What is logic?
— Peter Watts, Blindsight.

"You don't understand what is happening, you have never experienced anything like this, yet you know exactly that this is what they call the sweat of death. An ice-cold surface covers your inner heat. You see that nothing has changed around you and so you can still comprehend that the difference between your own perception and that of others is greater than you would normally expect. A sensational experience that concerns me and no one else.
"I was already at a great distance from them in the morning, and apparently I am at an even greater distance now. They are not burning with an inner heat covered by an ice shield.
"I really didn't imagine that I would be so close to absolute strangers, but now with eyes wide open in my death panic, I realized that, mutually adjusting to one other, we constantly measure our position against that of the others and check the position of others against our own."
— Peter Nadas, Own Death

"What he lived in was not any compact, continuous sense of personal identity, but rather a series of disembodied sensations, some physical, some mental, in which his identity was absolutely merged and lost. He was vividly aware of these momentary sensations in relation to other feelings of the same kind, some long past and some anticipated in his imagination; but he was accustomed to regard all these not from out of the skin, so to speak, of a living organism, but from a detachment so remote and far away as to seem almost outside both the flowing of time and the compactness of personality."
— John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent.