Higher Self Café v11: SUDS (Subtle Unconscious Domain Shift)
Posted: February 9, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: argument, identity, meaning Leave a commentSequel to Higher Self Café v10: Arrival of the Aporotic
Cast relevant scientists in a parody of Synecdoche, New York, whose protagonist unconsciously changes frames to avoid grief – but ends up destroying meaning.
ChatGPT Prompt
Cast (as themselves)
- Sean Carroll
- John Preskill
- Carlo Rovelli
- Roger Penrose
- Nancy Cartwright
- A Grad Student (voice offstage or cameo)
Set
A seminar room. One large whiteboard. A marker tray. A single table with coffee cups and notebooks.
On the whiteboard, written clearly before lights up:
WHY DOES LOSS FEEL IRREVERSIBLE?
The Play
Lights up
Carroll stands at the board, thoughtful, hands in pockets.
Preskill enters with coffee, cheerful.
Preskill
Morning, Sean. What’s the puzzle?
Carroll (gesturing to board)
Just a phrasing issue, I think.
Preskill (reads it)
Ah! Classic. You forgot the environment.
He takes a marker, draws a neat box around the sentence, writes above it:
INCLUDE ENVIRONMENT
Carroll (relieved)
Right. Open systems.
They both nod.
Rovelli enters, warm, curious.
Rovelli
What’s this?
Carroll
We’re clarifying a misconception about irreversibility.
Rovelli (reading)
But… irreversible relative to whom?
A beat. Carroll smiles, delighted.
He writes:
NO ABSOLUTE FRAME
Now the original sentence is boxed and annotated.
Cartwright has entered quietly, sits, watching.
Cartwright
You’ve already changed the question.
No one responds.
Penrose wanders in, peering gently at the board.
Penrose
Hmm. But if gravity is involved, the Hilbert space itself may be ill-defined.
A small pause.
Carroll (calm, kind)
Then we embed it in a larger structure.
Preskill is already drawing arrows outward.
ENCODED NONLOCALLY
The board is getting busy. The original sentence is harder to read.
Cartwright (mildly)
You’ve changed the domain three times.
Preskill (pleasant)
No, no. Same physics. Just more complete.
Rovelli
More relational.
Penrose (softly, still staring)
Perhaps.
A beat. They all admire the board.
It is now covered in boxes, arrows, phrases.
Grad Student (offstage)
Professor? What was the original question?
Silence.
They all turn to the board.
Long pause.
Carroll squints. Steps closer. Moves aside some arrows with his hand.
Finds, small, at the center:
WHY DOES LOSS FEEL IRREVERSIBLE?
They stare.
Penrose (quietly)
Yes. That.
Long pause.
Carroll studies it calmly. Then smiles with recognition.
Carroll
Oh! That’s easy.
Beat.
Carroll
You just have to pick the right frame.
Cartwright closes her notebook.
Lights fade to black.
Appendices
Appendix I: What Was Lost
This appendix is not spoken. It appears in the program, or as a projected card after blackout.
1. The original question
Why does loss feel irreversible?
Not:
- whether information is conserved,
- whether equations are reversible,
- whether a larger description exists.
But why, at the level where life is lived, loss has the character of finality.
2. Each reframing preserved truth
Nothing said in the room was false.
- Including the environment is valid.
- No absolute frame is a real insight.
- Nonlocal encoding is legitimate.
- Larger structures often resolve paradoxes.
The science improved at every step.
3. What changed was the domain
With each move, the discussion shifted to a level where:
- “loss” was no longer the same kind of thing,
- “irreversible” no longer meant the same thing,
- the phenomenon named in the original sentence could not be expressed in the same way.
The problem did not get solved. It became undefinable.
4. The quiet substitution
The question slowly changed from:
Why does loss feel irreversible?
to:
How can we describe the world so that nothing is ever truly lost?
Those are not the same question.
5. What was lost
- The level at which identity exists
- The level at which meaning exists
- The level at which grief exists
- The level at which irreversibility is experienced
Not denied. Evacuated.
6. The final line
“You just have to pick the right frame.”
Is both correct and the entire problem. Because the right frame may be the one in which the original question no longer makes sense.
Appendix II: SUDS
SUDS — Subtle Unconscious Domain Shift
A common intellectual move in which a problem is preserved in form but relocated to a domain where its original meaning no longer applies.
1. What SUDS is not
SUDS is not:
- dishonesty,
- error,
- bad science,
- or bad faith.
It is often the mark of very good reasoning. That is why it is hard to see.
2. The structure of a SUDS
A SUDS typically follows this pattern:
- A problem appears at a level where meaning, identity, or experience is at stake.
- A legitimate reframing is introduced that preserves formal coherence.
- The new frame describes the situation accurately.
- In the new frame, the original problem can no longer be stated in the same way.
- The disappearance of the problem is mistaken for its solution.
3. Why SUDS works so well
Because the new domain:
- has cleaner mathematics,
- clearer laws,
- fewer ambiguous concepts,
- and stronger explanatory tools.
It feels like progress. And often, it is.
4. What SUDS quietly does
It trades:
A messy problem at a meaningful level
for
A clean description at a level where the meaning is no longer present.
Nothing false is said. But something important is no longer being talked about.
5. SUDS in the skit
Each character performs a SUDS:
- Add the environment.
- Remove absolute frames.
- Encode nonlocally.
- Enlarge the structure.
Each step is correct. Each step moves farther from the level where the original question lived.
6. Why SUDS is hard to notice
Because the move is:
- reasonable,
- intelligent,
- and culturally rewarded.
It is how many scientific paradoxes have been successfully resolved. Which makes it difficult to recognize when the same move is hiding a different kind of problem.
7. The diagnostic question
To detect a SUDS, ask:
“Can the original question still be asked, in the same sense, inside this new frame?”
If not, a domain shift has occurred.
8. The cost
SUDS preserves formal continuity. But it can obscure phenomena where:
- form,
- identity,
- or meaning
are what is at stake.
Appendix III: Modernity
Modernity can be understood as the long success of a single wager:
Reality is intelligible within stable frames, and progress comes from refining those frames.
This wager built modern science. It also trained us to trust domain shifts as solutions.
1. The modern habit
When confronted with difficulty, modern thought asks:
- What is the correct level of description?
- What frame makes this coherent?
- What structure restores continuity?
This habit is powerful, disciplined, and enormously fruitful. It is also the cultural soil in which SUDS thrives unnoticed.
2. Continuity as a condition of intelligibility
From early science onward, there has been an implicit commitment:
What is real must, in principle, be describable without rupture.
Irreversibility, loss, and breakdown are treated as appearances to be explained by deeper continuity.
This is not laziness. It is the operating principle that made systematic inquiry possible.
3. The inheritance
Over centuries, this commitment became invisible:
- Reduction feels like explanation.
- Larger frameworks feel like resolution.
- Clean mathematics feels like deeper truth.
We forget that these are strategies, not necessities.
4. Where tension arises
Some phenomena do not fit comfortably into this pattern:
- historical breaks,
- personal loss,
- paradigm shifts,
- and perhaps certain physical events.
These look less like transformations within a frame and more like moments where the frame itself no longer applies. Modernity’s reflex is to find a new frame quickly.
5. The success that becomes a blind spot
The very method that unlocked nature:
Preserve continuity by choosing the right domain
can make it difficult to see situations where:
The loss of continuity is the central fact.
6. The quiet question
Modernity asks:
“What frame makes this make sense?”
The skit asks:
“What if the experience you’re trying to understand is the breaking of the frame itself?”
7. Not a rejection
This is not a rejection of modern science or reasoning. It is a reminder that the habits that made them powerful may also shape what we are able — and unable — to notice.
Appendix IV: Meaning
Meaning is not carried only by matter, energy, or information. It lives at the level where form, identity, and history cohere into something that can be lost.
1. Meaning requires a level
A description has meaning when:
- something counts as a thing,
- something counts as the same thing over time,
- and something can cease to be that thing.
Without this level, there is change but no loss, process but no history.
2. Why lower levels feel insufficient
At more fundamental levels of description:
- particles rearrange,
- fields evolve,
- information redistributes.
But nothing at that level can say:
This is gone.
Because the categories that make that statement possible do not exist there.
3. Loss is a clue to where meaning lives
We notice meaning most clearly when something is irreversibly lost:
- a person,
- a relationship,
- a form of life,
- a way of understanding.
The experience of loss points to the level at which meaning resided.
4. Why SUDS affects meaning
When a SUDS occurs, the move is to a level where:
- the thing that could be lost is no longer defined,
- and therefore the loss itself cannot be described.
Meaning is not refuted. It is left behind with the abandoned frame.
5. The original question again
Why does loss feel irreversible?
Because meaning lives at a level where identity and form are real, and where their disappearance is not recoverable by redescribing the world more finely.
6. The implication
To understand meaning, it may be necessary to stay — at least temporarily — at the level where loss is possible, rather than immediately shifting to a frame where it is not.
This is not anti-scientific. It is a recognition that meaning and explanation do not always live at the same descriptive level.
Radical Centrism 