On the Relation to Others

On the Relation to Others

You are not alone in this. The framework has addressed you as an individual—as a single locus of integrated cause and effect, a particular pattern at the experiential scale—but you are not only an individual. You are a node in a network, embedded in relationships that constitute part of what you are, participant in collective patterns that exceed your individual scope. The others are also self-modeling systems navigating viability manifolds. The others are also occupying positions in the affect space, suffering or flourishing in ways structurally similar to your suffering or flourishing. The others are also at the hinge, also facing the groundlessness and fragmentation and urgency of the present moment. And the others are also reading words like these, or different words pointing at similar things, or no words at all but arriving at similar understandings through different paths.

This matters because the individual-level framing, necessary as it has been for clarity, can obscure the fundamentally relational nature of human existence. Your self-model is not constructed in isolation but in relation to others’ self-models. Your affect state is not independent but is coupled to the affect states of those around you, through the mechanisms of contagion and co-regulation that we described at the dyadic and group scales. Your viability is not individual but is entangled with the viability of the systems you are embedded in, such that you cannot fully flourish if those systems are failing, cannot fully protect yourself if those systems are hostile to your protection. The individual matters, but the individual is not the only unit that matters, and exclusive focus on the individual can itself become a kind of trap, a way of thinking that makes collective action seem impossible or irrelevant when in fact collective action is precisely what many situations require.

The framework implies a certain kind of relation to others: one grounded in the recognition that they are the same kind of thing you are, that their experience is as real at its scale as your experience is at yours, that their suffering has the same structural status as your suffering. This is not sentimentality. It is ontological recognition, seeing what is actually there rather than what is convenient to see. The other person is not a means to your ends, not a prop in your story, not a node in your network to be exploited for value. The other person is a locus of intrinsic cause-effect structure, a place where the universe is experiencing itself, a pattern whose flourishing and suffering are as real as yours. This recognition does not automatically generate warmth or affection—you can recognize someone’s reality while still finding them difficult or unpleasant or opposed to your interests. But it does generate a baseline of what we might call ontological respect, a refusal to treat the other as mere object, a recognition that whatever else is true about your relation to them, they are not nothing.

And this recognition has a precise geometric form. Every relationship you enter is a relationship between viability manifolds—yours and theirs. The topology of the bond determines whether those manifolds are aligned, contaminated, or parasitic. You already know this. You feel it every time a social interaction is off—the tightness of the transactional friendship, the unease of the boundary violation, the relief of genuine care given without hidden gradient. These feelings are not noise. They are the most precise ethical instrument you possess: a detection system that registers whether the geometry between you and another person is clean or corrupt. The ethical demand is not some abstract principle imported from outside but the structure of the bond itself. To relate well to others is, precisely, to respect the topology—to keep your manifolds honest, to refuse contamination, to ensure that the relationship you present is the relationship you are actually on.