Terminus fit, ergo sum — Position Note

This is a position note, not a stand-alone paper — an external archive of the author's profile statement on the structural ground from which the EGO, SS, and IPT research axes proceed: the observing subject arising at the edge of given boundaries. As the full content is presented here, downloading the manuscript PDF is not required. EGO1, SS2, IPT3 (abbreviated paper titles) — three independent axes from the same ideational ecology. The ambiguity of meaning in large language models reveals something we tend to overlook: meaning never coincides across observing subjects — a red-apple grower’s “apple” and a green-apple grower’s “apple” may differ, even when the word is the same. Even imagined apples carry the same divergence — facing the same object, the color and form, differences in iris pigmentation and visual function, the very object summoned: none of these coincide across subjects, because qualia are not the input but the configuration the observer constructs upon it. A more fundamental question arises within the field of cognition — what makes an observing subject an observing subject in the first place? Terminus fit, ergo sum. I think the self does not arise from introspection alone. It comes into being through the act of drawing boundaries in the world. Where there is no distinction, there can be no self. Even the cogito presupposes this operation. To recognize thought as thought already requires distinguishing it from what is not thought; to claim a first-person perspective is already to draw a line between self and world. Alongside “I think, therefore I am,” I return to what makes thinking possible in the first place: the self exists because it differentiates. The world becomes articulate only through the lines we draw — perceptual, linguistic, relational. Without those boundaries, both world and self remain undifferentiated. This is the axis my thinking turns on: not the isolated thinking subject, but the self that comes into being at the edge of distinction. I do not ask what subjectivity is, but the structural condition under which it becomes coherent. From here, an architecture follows. An observing subject arises first, at the edge of what is given to it — the boundaries it did not draw, but within which distinction becomes possible. Information flowing in through the senses — visual forms, scenes, sounds, speech, music — unfolds under this subject into a semantic vector space, and intentionality takes shape within it. In monologue, subjective observation and thought articulate the field; in dialogue, intersubjective modeling enters as well, incorporating the other’s speech, expression, and tone, until a causal map of the resulting vectors is drawn. What issues forth as image or text is only one means of conveying this map outward. Language is a medium. Words are nodes within the meaning structure — vectors that gather multiple semantic dimensions, weighted differently across observing subjects — and serve as one efficient channel of input and output. The observing subject always stands in this relation to language: as medium. My position therefore stands apart from linguistic determinism and the structuralist conception of language.