Re: The Self Is a Category Error
Rani Madhavapeddi
Monarch Caterpillar, 2024
This dialog with a reader may help clarify what I mean by recursive loops. Rather than presenting an argument or a theory, it traces how ordinary questions about selfhood, agency, and clarity arise within lived experience and then quietly dissolve when their underlying category errors are exposed.What follows is not instruction or analysis from a distance. It’s a back-and-forth that shows how recursive patterns operate in real time, including how language itself participates in stabilizing, loosening, and re-stabilizing the sense of a self.
Kate: Robert, After reading your essay on Category Mistakes, I’m not sure how to answer the following question: Is mistaking the self as a fixed entity a category error or ignorance/confusion? It seems it could be either, depending on the context?Robert: If you’re talking about how the sense of self persists and reasserts itself in lived experience, words like “confusion” or “ignorance” can mislead. What’s happening is not an error so much as a functional stabilization: the system maintains a self-model because it supports coordination, memory, and social navigation.
If you’re talking about whether there is such a thing as a fixed self at all, then it’s a category error. A process is treated as an object, and a verb is treated as a noun. That’s not just a lack of information; it’s a misclassification, like asking where the whirlpool goes when the river goes dry.Kate: Thanks, that’s very clear. I appreciate how your response highlights “confusion” and “ignorance” as potentially misleading. It shows me there’s a consistency in my thinking around the sense of a self in lived experience being confusion and/or ignorance, therefore something to oppose and fix. Whereas in loop dynamics it’s functional, it stabilizes. Those are two very different approaches.
Really appreciate the dive into category error. It’s an essay I didn’t know I needed. And again, thanks for the response. So often the Q&A that occurs after you post an essay adds such a valuable dimension. What a gold mine.Robert: Right, Kate—
Once the sense of self is understood as a functional stabilization rather than a mistake, the whole project of opposing it collapses. There’s nothing to fix, only something to recognize. The pressure to improve or eliminate experience dissolves because no error is being diagnosed.
The view that “myself” is an actual entity is where the category error earns its keep. Flagging a category mistake doesn’t invite a better strategy; it removes the problem definition altogether. A process can be described, traced, or even appreciated. It can’t be “repaired” into an entity it never was.
Yes, these exchanges matter. Essays lay out the terrain, but the questions that follow often expose what still needs clarification.Kate: Yes. Agreed wholeheartedly they matter. And yes, the questions that follow often expose what still needs clarification, but I also see that the Q&A exposes where I’m not using language as accurately as possible. I cherish correcting those semantic errors, for lack of a better word, toward deeper and deeper clarity.
What I’m cherishing most right now? Recognizing the collapse of the fixing project I’ve long been working hard at. Thanks for the influence. I’m grateful.Kate: I came across the following quote this morning: “The Ego results in part from the constant attempt to sustain its own coherence and that of the organism harboring it; thereby arises the constant temptation to sacrifice intellectual honesty in favor of emotional well-being.” It’s from The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger.
It strikes me as a solid explanation for when I observe myself using language in a way that can feel “off” or burdened with an agenda. I’m trying to protect coherence and identity, and in doing so, clarity is sacrificed. I’m wondering your thoughts on this, Robert, if you like. Are category and semantic errors potential “language slips” betraying a need for the organism's emotional well-being?Robert: Kate—
Nothing here is chosen. There is no someone deciding to protect identity or to trade clarity for comfort. What’s happening is mechanical.
Any living system must maintain stability in order to function at all. Without sufficient coherence, coordination fails. So whatever supports stability tends to be retained. Whatever threatens it is softened, rephrased, or excluded. That isn’t strategy. It’s persistence.
Language is one of the primary regulators in this process. It doesn’t merely report experience; it helps hold the system together. When conditions are unsettled, language shifts away from precision toward formulations that preserve coherence. Categories blur. Meanings stretch.
This is not dishonesty. It is not ignorance. It is the system doing what systems do.
Clarity is not a corrective. It is simply seeing this function operating, without assigning fault or proposing repair.Kate: Thanks, Robert. Not strategy but persistence. Not a corrective, but seeing without assigning fault. So there’s not really anything to do or to fix, then, because there’s not really an I that can do those things.
Huh. Easy. Huh. Wild.Robert: Kate—
Yes. And notice what just happened.
The thought “there’s nothing to do or fix” is not a conclusion reached by an agent. It’s what shows up when the pressure to manage experience drops. The system relaxes because it no longer has to defend a position, improve itself, or correct an error that was never there.
That can feel “easy” because effort briefly lets up. It can feel “wild” because the familiar orientation point, the one who would normally take over from here, doesn’t.
But even that reaction is just more movement in the same system. No insight escapes the loop. No clarity stands outside it. The only thing that changes is whether the loop is interpreted as a problem or simply seen operating.
Nothing has been resolved. Nothing needs to be.
The machinery keeps running, with or without commentary.Kate: Robert, thank you for pointing that out. I didn’t notice because it just felt ordinary, a pressure release, but ordinary. Like a deep breath out and then a blank. Nowhere to go from there.
So that’s the feeling of no agent. That makes sense. And there was no feeling of “outside the loop” or “from a higher vantage point.” It’s all movement, just with different types of pressures. And on and on it goes.
While typing this there is the feeling of an inner agent and the thought it might work to just tell myself, as often as I can remember, “nothing to resolve,” and that feels like movement with its own pressure too.
Funny. Strange. Thanks.Robert: Kate—
That noticing was accurate.
The thought “I could tell myself ‘nothing to resolve’” isn’t a fix and isn’t a mistake. It’s just another regulatory movement. You felt pressure, not because someone applied pressure, and not because the thought was “trying” to do anything, but because movement in a living system is not neutral. It has intensity, direction, and force. When that movement takes the form of thought, it can be felt as effort, pull, or pressure.
The “blank” isn’t somewhere to stay. It’s what appears when effort pauses. When conditions shift, thoughts, agency-feelings, and self-talk return. That’s not failure. It’s how the system operates.
So there’s nothing to remember and nothing to stop remembering.
Both are just movement.
What changes isn’t the machinery.
Only whether it’s taken to mean something is wrong.Kate: It’s simple.
Would you say what we are is the process we call movement/motion/ebb and flow, a process that can see itself? Or am I grasping at an ungraspable by asking that question?
It seems wanting to know is just more movement.Kate: It’s simple.
Would you say what we are is the process we call movement/motion/ebb and flow, a process that can see itself? Or am I grasping at an ungraspable by asking that question?
It seems wanting to know is just more movement.Robert: Kate—
The starting point is movement. What exists is ongoing activity: sensation, thought, perception, regulation, language, affect. This activity has rhythms, pressures, pauses, ebbs and flows. Nothing about that requires a subject. It is simply what a living system does.
Trouble enters when this movement is redescribed as a process that can see itself. That phrasing introduces a hidden duplication. It implies that, in addition to movement, there is something standing apart from it, monitoring it. A watcher is smuggled in by grammar, not discovered in experience.
There is no process that sees. There is seeing.
Seeing is not an added capacity layered on top of motion. It is one mode of the motion itself, just as digestion, balance, or language are modes. The system does not look at itself from elsewhere. Perception happens within the same dynamics it perceives.
Sometimes this ongoing movement includes thoughts, words, or descriptions about what is happening. The system can generate self-referential language. It can narrate, label, explain, or comment on its own activity. But that does not amount to self-observation in the strong sense people imagine. It is still just more movement, more patterning, more output.
When a thought arises saying “this is happening” or “I am noticing this,” that thought is not evidence of a higher vantage point. It is simply another event in the flow, no different in kind from a sensation or a memory.
So nothing ever steps outside the process to do the seeing. There is no external position, no reflexive subject, no inner observer hovering above the stream. There is only the stream, sometimes including descriptions of itself, and sometimes not.
That is the entire claim.If you liked this post from The Ten Thousand Things, feel free to share it.
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© 2026 Robert Saltzman
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