Elastic Boundary of Me: How We "Breathe" Ourselves Every Day
If consciousness is a static object inside your head, why does a dead phone feel like an amputated limb?
Where do you end?
Most people instinctively point to their skin. It’s a convenient, neat, evolutionary boundary. Inside – me, my thoughts, my organs, my private universe. Outside – not-me, the screen, the room, the rest of the world.
This seems absolutely obvious. Biology gave us a spacesuit made of skin, and it’s a very useful heuristic: if a predator attacks, we need to know exactly which meat to save.
But this boundary starts to crack the moment we think about it.
The Act of Vanishing
Do a small experiment right now. Pause for a second and try to find the point inside your head where "you" are. Not the brain tissue, not the skull – but the observer. The entity currently processing these words.
You are looking for a center. But what do you actually find?
Nothing. There is no little homunculus behind your eyes. There is only the process of reading. A flow of concepts, an inner voice, sudden associations. The very moment you try to catch "yourself" in the act of thinking, you realize a strange thing: the thinker and the thought are the same thing.
If consciousness is not a static object you possess, but an active process (a pattern executing itself), then the "boundary of self" is not a wall. It is movable – changing in size, shape, thickness, and permeability. And consciousness adjusts this boundary to its needs.
And to see how it changes, you don't need to sit in silence looking for inner zen. It happens to you every day.
States, not all of them 🙂
1. The boundary becomes impermeable (Tunnel vision)
You're late for a flight, frantically searching for your keys and passport, while someone is talking around you, the TV is blaring, things are falling. You are physically in a room full of stimuli, but your mental boundary has shrunk to a microscopic point.
You hear no one, the system has closed all the hatches to avoid overload. You've curled up in a sealed-off protective cocoon. You exist on the outside, but on the inside, there is no one – except for this single task.
2. The boundary dissolves (Mental clutter)
Friday evening. The week is over, but in your head, three work chats, evening plans, memories of yesterday, and dreams of the weekend are swirling all at once.
At this moment, the boundary loses its shape. It can't hold the perimeter. You are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The process spreads out, the focus vanishes, and you feel like a wobbling mass of jelly because the system has lost its clear contours.
3. The boundary sounds the alarm (Social strike)
You're sitting relaxed, thinking about your own things, and suddenly someone drops an unpleasant phrase or makes a sharp remark about you.
The boundary instantly shrinks to the limits of your body. Shoulders tense up, defenses go up, you clearly perceive your physical "I" against "them". The boundary coincides with the evolutionary one.
4. The boundary merges (Deep empathy / Meeting "your own")
You are listening to a friend who is grieving, or watching your child who fell and is crying. Your boundary stops being impermeable and literally stretches to cover the other person. Their pain is physically felt as yours (tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat).
The boundary no longer outlines one body; it becomes a shared membrane for two. You "let" the other "I" inside your contour. You wrap the other in your "I".
5. The boundary dissolves into the vast (State of awe)
You stand at the edge of a grand canyon, look at the starry sky in a place without light pollution, or listen to an orchestra playing something massive.
Unlike "flow", where the boundary spills into the task, here it spills into the void or the vastness. Your "I" becomes so small compared to what you perceive that the boundary simply surrenders its position. The sense of your own ego, your own boundary, vanishes.
6. The boundary hardens like armor (Dissociation / Apathy)
This is not compression (like when searching for keys), but a complete block. Severe stress, trauma, or prolonged burnout. It's as if you are watching yourself through a thick layer of frosted glass. You are in pain or bored, but you barely feel it.
The boundary doesn't shrink to a point of focus; it turns into an impenetrable bunker. The system turns off the sensors to save the "I" process from total destruction, but at the cost of losing connection with the external (and sometimes even internal) world.
7. The boundary becomes abstract ("Grokking")
You are studying a complex topic and suddenly everything falls into a single picture. You don't see separate facts, but the system. Completely.
The boundary stops being tied to physical space or even a specific tool. It encompasses pure abstraction. You literally think in the contours of this system; it becomes a temporary home for you. Unlike flow, where the body disappears, here the intermediary of understanding disappears: you no longer translate the system into your language, you already think in it – and it stays.
8. Phantom boundary (Digital amputation)
Your phone suddenly dies. Or the internet goes out. You feel physical discomfort, as if a limb was cut off. You keep reaching into your pocket to check for messages that aren't there.
This state perfectly illustrates the idea of the "extended self". Your boundary has long since included the phone and messengers as its sensory organs. When the gadget disconnects, your cognitive boundary receives "phantom pain" from an amputated part of yourself.
9. The boundary vanishes through the disappearance of the not-I (Flow state)
You are writing code with inspiration, crafting something with your hands, playing a complex game, or having a heated argument. At this moment, you don't feel your body. Your attention is completely focused on the task. Nothing else exists.
When you are deep in thought, are you locked inside the skull? Not at all. You are the process itself. When you write with a pen, after a few minutes you stop feeling the plastic. The pen becomes an extension of the hand. The IDE or the mental model of the interlocutor becomes part of your extended thinking contour.
If someone suddenly shouts your name at this second, you will literally jump out of your skin. Why? Because there was no boundary just a moment ago. And there was nothing on the outside at all. Unlike grokking, there is no "aha" moment here – there is nothing coming together into a picture. There is only continuous execution, with no observer left to evaluate it.
An Attempt at Classification
These nine states mentioned are not rules, but symptoms. However, if we consider this boundary as a surface in cognitive space, we can attempt to classify them based on the very concept of a boundary.
The key point to understand is that this is not a fixed geometry. A boundary is an active process of regulation that changes dynamically on demand, in accordance with the system’s needs. And it does so on (at least) two levels: topology and surface properties.
First, topology. Where there is a boundary, there is an inside and an outside. This is, conventionally speaking, the normal state in which the examples mentioned above exist: constriction, blurring, anxiety, dissociation – all these are variations of one and the same dual-faced surface, simply in different modes. There are situations where we ignore the exterior – the flow, where everything that is not the ‘I’ ceases to exist. There are situations where we ignore the internal – awe, where the ‘I’ becomes so small that it yields to the immense.
And theoretically, there is a fourth option: Klein’s bottle – a surface on which the very distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ ceases to make sense. Where something can be both self and not-self at the same time, without a side. None of the nine states listed above actually reaches that point. Empathy comes closest – the boundary stretches, becoming transparent and flexible – but the sides do not disappear: you are still you, the other is still the other; it’s just that right now there is no barrier between you. The true Klein remains an empty cell in the list – a question, not an example.
Secondly, the properties of the surface itself, regardless of its topology. The space it defines – whether it contracts or expands. Transparency – whether it allows things through or blocks them. Density – whether it is soft or hard. Thickness. All these are tools with which consciousness adapts the boundary to the current need in real time.
This list of properties is hardly exhaustive, and Klein’s bottle seems to be waiting for someone to suggest what to actually put inside it.
From the perspective of such a classification, it would be interesting to examine the results of Metzinger’s research into the transparency of the self-model. (Maybe someone reading this will write to him about it?)
The Illusion of the Container
We are used to thinking of ourselves as an immutable object in space. A stone in a leather bag.
But thought doesn't care about your skin. When your thoughts are scattered across a notebook, a conversation, a cloud server, or a philosophical system you are building, your "I" scatters along with them. You are a pattern. And a pattern has no skin. It only has a zone of coverage.
Consciousness is not a stone. It is a process that breathes. You are not where your skin ends. You are how far or how close your boundary reaches right now.
Next time someone asks you: "Where are you?" – don't look at a map and don't point a finger at your chest.
Look at what you are working with right now. That is your boundary.
If you want to participate, please contact rozum.framework {at} gmail.com
