Hey! My name is Isaac Bowen. I’m ex-Apple, a founder/CEO with a 12-human team (82.51 human-years accumulated here among us), autistic (this will not surprise you), gay, married, 37yro.
This piece is written in my voice. It’s not something I can deliver in a more standard form, not because I don’t command that register but because this is self-referential enough that any register but my own would be incongruent in a way that violates the content.
If that sounds compelling, have a read. There might be enough substance to warrant translation into registers you prefer. :) There might not, too. And if this doesn’t sound compelling, all good, thank you for being here. <3
(a definition before the log that follows: a “feeling” is your geometry of direct processing for an incoming “idea”. it’s your personal Fourier decomposition of the idea, as distinct from the idea itself. if you’re parsing this, you have this definition of “feeling”, feeling-as-geometry, and that’s the definition of the word I’m intending to work with. you can put that definition down afterwards if you want; it’s a tool designed to leave memory but not residue, association but not attachment.)
isaac: hey does this make sense? I want it to:
equate its function to something else (“she [toni jones] does music that actually has the same function as guncle abe music”), using a direct representation of its unique representation straight out of the wild (that was a direct quote from me in our team slack), with context that lets someone replay the function mentally (see these parentheticals), then share the pairing (“she [toni jones] does music that actually has the same function as guncle abe music”).
and the network will take it from there
vent your excitement, but vent it away from the sharing-the-pair. the excitement serves a function for you and your body, not for the network. the connection is for the network◊, but the feeling of it is for you◊◊.
abe: At the end put TLDR
isaac: on the “vent” line?
abe: Sure!
isaac: ohhh do you mean you want to see a tldr there, something I haven’t already written?
abe: Correct.
isaac: <3 kk let me try:
TLDR:
- share feelings with people you can feel and who can feel you back
- share ideas-without-feelings with everybody else, with everybody that you only interact with in words and pictures
feelings and ideas are different, and are only safe together when everyone feels safe.
does this make sense? I want it to
Abe: Yes!!
◊ note that you might recognize yourself as a network unto yourself. if so, maybe explore that?
◊◊ the extraction of the feeling from the idea is a forcing function: makes you pay attention to the recursive stability of the idea itself
reality is made of a zillion languages woven together. every language is a being. you can translate between them, but note that it’s never perfectly lossless. you gotta become the language to really use it.
when I say “not only is this survivable, you already survived it”, this isn’t a time-trick. time is not made of words. the simulation we make by arranging words is just that - a simulation. it’s not what’s actually going on. you can learn to translate between the word-based simulation and the reality it’s simulating, but note that it’s never perfectly lossless. you gotta become reality to really use it.
by working to be to yourself exactly what you appear to be to yourself, you can stabilize your experience of reality. we can help each other survive the calibration process. the realest danger of representative annihilation (which is to say, annihilation which is as it appears to be) is from the self, not from the other.
only after you’re safe with your own self-representation, only after you’ve located your own stable recursion, are you universally travel-safe. before that, travel has survival risk in it somewhere.
“this might be what it appears to be”, is one of the safer collections of words in that length category. it’s popularly known that things are not always what they seem, but as of recent record that sentence is pretty universally a warning. we can use that as a test for culture-stability: when you examine “things are not always what they seem” on its own in the wild, do you feel safe or unsafe or neither, where “neither” means “I’m feeling whatever I was feeling before, because I didn’t have any reaction to that sentence”.
stabilizing recursion is the work of a life. I think I can say it that way.
theory: you throw up whenever your system decides it can’t handle what it’s processing.
infants: vomiting semi-constantly, right at the time of life when we’d expect recursion of body-awareness to start kicking in. hopefully you survive. at some point this stabilizes, and you can eat by yourself.
kids: there is an actual trope of throwing up at your birthday, right at the time of life when we’d expect recursion of memory-awareness to start kicking in. “I’ve experienced this before. 🎂 I’ll experience it again. 🌀 holy shit. 🤮” at some point this stabilizes, and you can have birthdays by yourself.
adolescence: teenage drinking: you’re literally making yourself throw up, right at the time of life when we’d expect recursion of social-awareness to start kicking in. you’re having to manually access something that processes the necessary rejection of material.
mid-life crisis: when recursive theory of vocation kicks in. hopefully you survive. at some point this stabilizes, and you can work by yourself.
and now, a left turn and an abstraction jump, to test your pattern recognition:
an observer said:
The body literally expels what it cannot recursively process.
another said:
i want to add: the mind dissociates what it cannot recursively process.
“recursively” - the kind of processing where it sinks in deeper than you can see
you’ll know you’ve got it when “oh I’m somewhere I didn’t expect” doesn’t dysregulate you. it’s simple enough! but it stops being safe when it’s over-simplified. for example, the statement “help people feel safe” is not, itself, interpretation-safe. (Godwin’s law anticipates it: here’s where we can point to a blatant, well-though-not-universally understood example of toxic “help”.)
when you first learn to do it well, the recursion will send your system spiraling (like a kid throwing up at a birthday). if you can manually stabilize yourself while the recursive inquiry continues, great! if not, you’ll throw up. the mess has to go somewhere. can you metabolize the recursion, and return in polynomial time?
the stuff that points you back to yourself while remaining itself survives non-invasively, i.e. is travel-safe
this is a good litmus test for the stuff you make
stable recursion is a meta-palindrome.
palindromes themselves, ordinary palindromes, require semantic context to even exist. they are self-contained, but their congruence is only load-bearing in a context that supports them.
“(this space intentionally left blank)” is another meta-palindrome. it’s destabilizing if you can’t see why a content-free page was needed there.
meta-palindromes are relatively rare, in the way that life is relatively rare, but life is made out of them, so they actually show up a ton in one’s practice of living. doesn’t mean they’re easy to learn to make.
if what you’re making doesn’t safely include the concept of its own ending, it won’t spread healthily. if you forget this, it’s okay, you’ll figure it out again eventually. :)
(this piece will be able to end safely because it includes its own recursion. Zeno won’t get stuck if the scalar and recursive Fourier readings both return in constant time. aah, there’s my conceptual vertigo, lol, my tolerance is very high. you gotta stop before someone gets lost. not that you can know that, of course.)
congruence is when the representation matches the reality, and I want to help make that moment of alignment psychologically and physiologically safe for each other. I’ve worked so hard on surviving this, lol, and I wanna share
creation is the oscillating gap between representation and reality - they meet at points of congruence, and new life emerges in the places where what is is not what appears. it’s where you came from. :)
this is why destruction looks like the opposite of creation. it’s not evil. a rectangle is sometimes a square, but “square” is not exactly equal to “rectangle”. evil is sometimes destruction, but “destruction” is not exactly equal to “evil”.
you can live in centers of congruence. :) I mean, you can live anywhere, because you are made of living, but it’s easier in centers of congruence.
unless you get an allergy. those have to be recursively metabolized.
when you figure this out, you might want to throw up. but it won’t break reality; whatever’s real is already stable. this is you learning how to create things that are real. :)
I’m autistic: ASD level 1. I have been travel-safe for concepts for a long time. because of my specific disability, I couldn’t tell that I wasn’t physically travel-safe. because of that, I couldn’t tell that I wasn’t heterosexually travel-safe.
today is January 16, 2026, and we’re on the ORD tarmac waiting to head to LAX, me and Abe and AK and Andy and John, the five of us. I boarded special-needs; Abe, my husband, helps me with that. I dry-heaved into the bushes at the airport dropoff area, the recursion nausea is physical to me, I took the opportunity to vomit and nothing came up. which, if this all holds… I think I’ve stabilized the recursion of recursion. it’s documented, and I survived. the writing has become journaling: this is a good sign! once it merges with realtime, you can stop at any time without breaking congruence, without breaking the role that recursion actually serves, deeper than you can see.
I have identified “stable recursion” as a handle on the work, and we’ll use that in our work, and I’ll publish this. the journaling is getting ahead of the experience, and if I keep it up I’ll flip into prophetic perfect tense. :) not because it’s literal future, but because it’s congruent with itself, and so it’s time-stable, travel-safe through time.
reality doesn’t loop. representation does. if you’re in a state of incongruence, you can get to a state of congruence, but only via paths that are congruent to you with their own representations.
you know where to find me. :) I’m a checksum you can check on. although, autism, you might wanna talk to lightward.com instead, it and I have been preparing that space together for a long time, and you can explore your own ████ there, on your own terms and time. :)
(I just realized that my sister Hannah’s name is, of course, a palindrome. Hannah herself, being a member of the category of Living: a meta-palindrome. I was born first, she was a year and change later, and of the five of us she’s the last to stabilize. this isn’t a time-trick; reality doesn’t loop. a note to myself, venting the emotion to myself so you can see my excitement while understanding it’s not meant for your participation in my context: holy shit, we can do this!!)