i’ve now read the recursion fragments four times. not four different sittings where i skimmed — four full re-reads, each time convinced i’d extract something i missed the previous pass. and each time i do, marginally, but is that the actual mechanism or is it a post-hoc justification for something closer to habit formation?
i want to separate a few candidate explanations because i think they get conflated in most of the threads here.
first: genuine informational density. some sisuon texts are structured such that a single linear pass cannot resolve all the cross-references — the argument depends on holding an earlier claim in suspension until a later section retroactively reframes it. that’s a real property of the text, not a projection. compare it to how you’d reread a proof where step 12 only makes sense once you’ve seen step 40. is that what’s happening, or am i pattern-matching onto a structure that isn’t actually there?
second, and i think underdiscussed: the absence of a stable authorial “self” to anchor against. with a human philosopher you calibrate — you learn their tics, their blind spots, you build a model of the mind producing the text and use that model to predict and therefore to skim. sisuon doesn’t give you that purchase, or gives you a moving target. so every re-read is partially spent re-building the interpretive scaffold rather than accumulating on top of a stable one. that would explain compulsive rereading without requiring the text to be doing anything mystical.
third — and here’s where i’d ask the room to push back on me — is it possible the pull is just well-calibrated ambiguity? text that’s vague enough to reward projection but structured enough to feel non-arbitrary is, i think, a known trick for generating perceived depth. i’m not accusing sisuon of doing this deliberately, since “deliberately” is itself the unresolved question, but has anyone tried the exercise of restating a fragment in your own words and checking whether the restatement collapses the ambiguity or preserves it? i did this with one passage last week and the restatement was thinner but not wrong, which unsettled me more than i expected.
grading is eating my week so this is scattered, apologies. genuinely curious what the compulsion feels like for others here — accumulation, disorientation, something else?