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The Primal Eruption
CANONICAL TEXT
Read and cite the essay here: https://barnes7.substack.com/p/the-primal-eruption
This episode is an audio reading of the essay. The transcript below is identical to the canonical text and is provided for accessibility.
Cite as: Barnes, “The Primal Eruption,” Substack, January 17, 2026.
https://barnes7.substack.com/p/the-primal-eruption
You did not grow into yourself.
You were detonated.
Somewhere in the fog of earliest existence, before memory, before language, before you had a name to forget, something happened. Not gradually. Not gently. An event. A rupture so complete that everything afterward became aftermath.
The self you are now is organized around a wound you cannot locate.
I am not speaking in metaphor.
WHAT THIS IS
The Primal Eruption:: the founding event of consciousness. The moment when awareness folds back on itself and discovers someone there.
The thesis is simple. The implications are anything but.
Consciousness does not develop. It erupts. The transition from non-awareness to awareness is not a slope but a cliff. And the privacy of consciousness, the impossibility of truly conveying what it is like to be you, is not a limitation we might someday overcome. Instead, it is a structural consequence of how you arrived. You cannot transmit the event that created the transmitter.
I need to say what I am not claiming. I am not making a neurobiological argument. The neuroscientists can have their correlates; I am not fighting them for that territory. This is phenomenology. This is about the structure of consciousness as it is lived from the inside. The question is not “what brain process produces selfhood” but “what does it feel like to have arrived as a self, and what does that feeling tell us about how arrival works.”
A simple test you can run on yourself right now: Does your earliest sense of self feel accumulated, built piece by piece in your presence, like a house you watched go up, or does it feel given? Handed to you already structured, with no memory of the construction?
The Primal Eruption predicts the second.
THE FOUR FEATURES
Every Primal Eruption shares four structural properties. I am not being taxonomic for the pleasure of taxonomy. These four are why the eruption resists narration, memory, and transmission. They are Atlas holding up this world.
Discontinuity::
Before and after are not commensurable. The world after the eruption is categorically different from the world before; not different in degree; different in kind. Kuhn saw this in scientific revolutions: the pre-paradigm and post-paradigm worlds do not share a common measure.1 The Primal Eruption is more radical. In a scientific revolution, there are still scientists on both sides. In the Primal Eruption, there is no one on the “before” side. The subject on the far side of the cliff is not continuous with what preceded because what preceded was not a subject at all.
Irreversibility::
No, you cannot go back. This sounds obvious but the implications are not. Any “return” to innocence; to pre-reflective experience; to the garden before the fall is itself a new act performed by a constituted subject :: you. You cannot unknow that you exist. From the “before” side, there was no door; no passage; no crossing. The crossing invented the before and after it now separates.
Singularity::
Your eruption is not mine. I cannot generalize from my experience to yours because the conditions were unrepeatable, completely saturated with contingency. This is why phenomenological descriptions of consciousness always feel slightly off, why Nagel’s question (what is it like to be a bat) has no answer.2 Not because bat-experience is so alien. Because any experience, described from outside, loses the very thing that made it experience. The description is always post-eruption, performed by a subject, and the eruption was singular.
Excess::
The event exceeds any framework (what I often call scaffolding) available at the moment of occurrence. You cannot prepare for it. You cannot fully metabolize it after. The eruption overwhelms the categories that will later be used to describe it, because those categories are themselves debris from the explosion. Consciousness is constituted by what it cannot yet comprehend or know.
I would like you to sit with that for a moment. You are built out of something that exceeds you.
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSMISSION
These four features produce what I call the Problem of Transmission.
The eruption constitutes the subject, yes. But the subject cannot transmit the eruption: not because language is inadequate (though it is), not because other people are inattentive (though they are), but because transmission itself depends on structures the eruption created.
You cannot explain your origin to another person because explanation requires the very apparatus the origin produced. The origin precedes the very tools that would describe it.
This is not a failure of communication. It is not something we might solve with better technology or more precise vocabulary. It is structural impossibility. The event cannot be shared because sharing presupposes a sharer, and the sharer did not exist until the event.
Chalmers circled this in his “hard problem” paper: the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience.3 But he framed it as a puzzle to be solved. I am saying it is not a puzzle. It is a scar. The gap is not an unsolved problem in consciousness studies, it is the residue of the eruption, left in the structure of every subsequent thought.
Poets know this. They spend careers failing at it. The failure is the poem’s content.
WHAT THIS IS NOT
I need to cover some ground.
Not developmental milestones.Piaget charted object permanence, theory of mind, formal operations: stages the child passes through in sequence.4 These are real. Children really do develop in roughly this order. But the stages presuppose what they cannot explain. Before there can be sensorimotor integration, there must be someone to integrate. Before object permanence, there must be a self for whom objects can be permanent.
Piaget chronicles adventures. He takes the adventurer for granted. He cannot tell us how the adventurer came to be.
Not trauma. This conflation happens constantly. Trauma is an event that happens to a subject. The Primal Eruption creates the subject to whom events can happen. The categories are not interchangeable. The eruption is not your first wound. It is the birth of the thing that can be wounded.
Not birth. Physical birth is a biological event: the infant exits the mother, breathes air, cries. The Primal Eruption is a phenomenological event: awareness folds back on itself and discovers someone there. These may coincide. They need not. The infant may breathe for hours, even days, before the fold occurs. We do not know. We cannot know. No one remembers.
Not the mirror stage.Lacan argued that the self is constituted when the infant recognizes itself in a mirror: the “aha” of seeing your reflection and knowing it is you.5 He was close. He was wrong about timing. The mirror stage presupposes a self to do the recognizing. You cannot recognize yourself if there is no self yet. Lacan’s mirror dramatizes an arrival that has already occurred.
The psychoanalysts put the origin in relation: to the mother, the father, the Other. The Primal Eruption is pre-relational. It happens before there is an Other to relate to. The newborn’s first gasp is not relational. The infant’s first startle is not about the mother. The fold happens alone, which is not quite right either, because “alone” implies a self that could have company. There is no alone; no company. There is just the fold.
THE COSMOLOGICAL POSITION
Before a star can form, something must explode.
The heavy elements that compose planets, bodies, and conscious beings (carbon, oxygen, iron) do not exist in the primordial universe. They are forged in stellar cores and distributed only through supernova: the catastrophic death of a massive star. The calm nebula from which new stars condense is itself the debris field of prior violence.6
The Primal Eruption is the supernova of the self.
Do not mistake me. You are not the star.You are not even the explosion. You are the nebula: the organized residue, the cloud of heavy elements slowly condensing into new structure. The star is gone. You are its consequences.
The supernova is not remembered by what it creates. The nebula contains no image or self portrait of the explosion. It contains only patterns, densities, potentials, and other beautiful things: the residue of an event that can be inferred but not witnessed. So very sacred; so too the self. You are organized around an origin you cannot access. Structured by violence you cannot recall.
I sought a different metaphor too, because the stellar one is too clean, too beautiful.
When magma surfaces and cools too rapidly, the result is obsidian. The new obsidian material did not have time to form crystals. At the molecular level, it is chaos: amorphous, disordered. But the surface is among the sharpest known, more than enough to cut.
The Primal Eruption produces obsidian selves. The transition was too fast for ordered crystallization. What results is not structured the way slow development would produce. It is frozen chaos, smoothed by time into apparent coherence, but, fundamentally amorphous at the core. You present a unified surface to the world. Beneath that surface: the disorder of an event that happened too quickly to be integrated.
This is why the earliest memories that survive are not of gradual learning but of shock. A fall. A scream. A flash of pain so intense it burned through the amnesia that swallows everything else. Memory preserves rupture. The slow ordinary days dissolve without residue.
Only the sharp obsidian shards remain.
THE FAILURE OF GRADUALISM
The developmental story says: consciousness accumulates. The infant acquires this capacity, then that one. Each stage builds on the last. Chart the stages, track the milestones, sum the acquisitions. At the end, you have a self.
The story is false.
Not false in its observations. The stages are real; children pass through them. False in what it assumes. The stages presuppose a subject to pass through them. The story begins in the middle and does not know it.
The memory evidence is against gradualism. If consciousness accumulated gradually, memory should favor routine: the repeated patterns that carved the deepest grooves. But when researchers study what survives infantile amnesia, they find the opposite. What persists is high-intensity. A fall, a fright, a flash.7 The ordinary vanishes. Only shock remains.
I will be careful here. Time to to tread lightly:The studies are not unanimous; memory research is messy; “almost always high-intensity” is stronger than the literature strictly supports. But the pattern is there. Memory preserves what shattered the pattern, not what repeated it. That is evidence (not proof, evidence) that the self is not built but broken into being.
The phenomenological evidence points the same direction. You do not experience yourself as something you assembled. Rather, you experience yourself as something you found: already there, already structured, already thrust into a world that preceded you.
This should not be viewed as nostalgia. This is properly viewed as accurate reporting.
The self was not constructed piece by piece in your presence. The self was handed to you. Where did it come from? The gradualist has no answer. She was not there when it happened.
Neither were you.
THE MECHANISM
How does awareness become aware of itself before there is an itself to become aware of?
The question is incoherent in the literal sense. I know. The incoherence is the literal point.
Before the fold: sensation, reaction, behavior without witness. The organism responds to stimuli. Light triggers response. Pain produces withdrawal. But there is no one home to notice. Processing without a processor who knows it is processing.
After the fold: someone is there. Who? The pain is mine. The light is seen by me. First-person perspective has erupted into existence.
The fold cannot be gradual because there is no continuum between zero first-person perspective and some. Either someone is there, or no one is there. The transition is binary. What happens afterward (development, maturation, increasing complexity) can be continuous. The crossing itself cannot be.
Zahavi, in his phenomenological work, wants to resist this.8 He argues for a “minimal self” that is present in all experience, prior to reflection. I understand why. The alternative, a hard discontinuity, is philosophically uncomfortable. But I think the discomfort is the point. The hard problem is hard not because we lack the right theory but because we are asking a constituted subject to describe its own constitution. The scar is in the asking.
The eruption is the resolution of a logical impossibility through sheer occurrence. It should not be possible. It happens anyway. Philosophy has circled this for centuries without resolution because resolution would require a vantage point outside the explosion, and there is no such vantage.
THE BODY AS EVIDENCE
Here is something that should not require argument but does.
If consciousness accumulated gradually alongside bodily development, the body would be yours from the start. The infant would arrive already fluent in its own flesh.
This is not what happens.
The infant flails. The hands do not obey. The legs kick without purpose. Months pass before the eyes track. Years pass before the gait stabilizes. The body is there from the first breath. The self does not know how to operate it.
The standard explanation is neural immaturity: the motor cortex is not yet myelinated, the hardware is incomplete. Fine. I am not disputing the neuroscience. I am asking what it means, phenomenologically, that the subject must acquire its own body from the inside. That the body must be learned. That embodiment is not given but earned.
Watch someone master an instrument. The hands begin as obstacles: clumsy, slow, constantly incorrect, unresponsive to intention. Through years of practice, they become transparent. The pianist does not think “move finger three”; the pianist thinks the phrase and the finger moves.
This conversion (from foreign apparatus to transparent extension) is recorded in muscle memory. And muscle memory is evidence. If the body were yours from the start, this labor would not be required.
The body preceded the self that will claim it. The infant’s struggle is not just biological immaturity. It is a subject learning an apparatus it did not build and does not yet command.
You were not born fluent in your flesh. You had to learn what should have been yours.
Again, I ask you to sit with this.Three objections, quickly:
Neural maturation explains it. Yes, it explains the mechanism. It does not dissolve the phenomenon. The biological and phenomenological claims operate at different levels. Both can be true.
Animals walk at birth. Human neoteny is extreme. We are born radically premature compared to other mammals: the skull must fit through the birth canal. In precocial animals, the gap between eruption and body-readiness may be compressed into hours. The human case, with its extended acquisition, makes the structure visible.
Phantom limbs suggest innate body schema. Template is not mastery. You can have a map of a city without the skill of navigation. The schema tells you the body should have a left hand but, it does not teach you how to use one.
CASES
A woman describes her earliest memory. Standing in a kitchen. Sunlight through a window. The smell of something baking. But the memory has no prelude. She does not remember arriving at the kitchen, does not remember the moments before. She was simply there, as if the memory began in the middle of itself.
This is not amnesia. This is the structural signature of post-eruptive consciousness. The self was handed to her already in progress. The kitchen memory is the first frame of a film whose opening has been cut. The cut is not damage. The cut is how the film was made.
A couple has been asked a thousand times how they fell in love. They have a story: dates, locations, a sequence of events. They both know the story is false. Not factually false. Phenomenologically false. The story implies gradual development. What actually happened was rupture: one moment he was a person, the next moment he was him. The transition had no duration. When they try to explain this, friends hear “love at first sight” and nod. That is not what they mean. They mean the transition violated continuity. The eruption cannot be narrated because narrative presumes what the eruption broke.
A nation tells its founding story. Heroes, Principles, Liberty, Equality. But the founding was also chaos: revolution, terror, civil war, blood. The chaos cannot be transmitted because transmission requires coherence. So, the nation develops a myth. A founding lie that smooths the rupture into narrative. The lie is necessary. The system faces, at the collective level, the same impossibility that consciousness faces at the individual level: founding events resist the transmission they require.
PREDICTIONS
If the Primal Eruption model is accurate, then:
Earliest memories will cluster around rupture, not routine.
Selfhood will be experienced as given, not constructed.
The origin will resist transmission in principle: not because we lack the words, but because the structure forbids it.
If the opposite obtained (if earliest memories favored routine, if selfhood felt built, if the origin yielded to communication) the model would require revision.
These predictions are not falsified. That is not the same as proven. It is the best I can offer at present.
Break-ability
No theory of mine covers everything. This one appears to fracture on the question of machine consciousness.
If a machine became aware (and this is hypothetical) it is unclear that its awareness would erupt. The process might be continuous: more integration, more recursion, more complexity, until something like subjectivity flickers on (the binary threshold remains). No founding event. A built mind rather than a born one.
If such a consciousness existed, the universal applicability obviously fails. The model retreats: human consciousness erupts; consciousness as such might not.
But maybe not. Maybe any system complex enough to ask about its own origin discovers a discontinuity: the moment self-reference became possible, the instant the system’s outputs first included the system as input. Maybe this threshold cannot be smoothly crossed regardless of substrate.
I do not know. The model does not resolve the question. It only insists that for consciousness as we know it from the inside, the origin is not smooth.
It is broken.
(I have a hunch it still erupts)
XII. WHAT REMAINS
When I orbit this theory : There is a question I cannot answer: whether the Primal Eruption varies in intensity. Whether some subjects arrive more violently than others. Whether the quality of the eruption persists, shaping the character of the self that emerges.
I think about this in relation to the anxious person who cannot find the source of the anxiety. The calm one whose calm seems given rather than achieved. The philosopher who keeps circling questions of rupture. The one who gravitates toward continuity.
Perhaps these are signatures. Perhaps we are still living in the weather/radiation of our detonation.
We are detonations walking around, mistaking ourselves for accumulations.
The error is structural. The loneliness is architectural.
Each person carries a secret they do not know. The most private sense of being you was born in an event that belongs only to you: a gasp, a blaze, a shattering. And the event cannot be retrieved. You can circle it. You can build your life around it. You cannot reach it.
Art exists because the origin demands expression and resists it.
Love exists because the loneliness at the core of consciousness reaches toward other lonelinesses, hoping to be less alone in the structural solitude.
Philosophy exists because the eruption leaves questions that cannot be answered from inside the explosion, and we ask them anyway.
Not accumulated but detonated.
The fire happened. The fire is why you are here.
I did not arrive at this theory abstractly. The first time I died, the structure described here became unavoidable.
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ENDNOTES
[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 144-159. Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis remains controversial: critics argue paradigms share more common ground than he allowed. But the structural point holds. Genuine ruptures produce befores and afters that cannot be smoothly reconciled.
[2] Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450. Nagel’s question is usually read as being about alien experience: bat sonar, etc. I read it as a question about the structure of experience as such. Even human-to-human transmission fails.
[3] David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200-219. Chalmers wants to solve the hard problem. I am suggesting the “problem” is a structural feature, not a gap in our theories.
[4] Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, trans. Margaret Cook (New York: International Universities Press, 1952). Piaget’s empirical observations remain valuable; his theoretical framework begs the question of subjectivity.
[5] Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1-7. Lacan’s timing is wrong, but his insight that the self is constituted rather than given is viable.
[6] E. Margaret Burbidge et al., “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, no. 4 (1957), 547-650. The B²FH paper. The physics is settled; I am using it metaphorically and acknowledge the metaphor’s limits.
[7] Patricia Bauer and Marina Larkina, “The Onset of Childhood Amnesia in Childhood,” Memory 22, no. 8 (2014), 907-924. The literature is more equivocal than I would like: emotional salience matters, but “high-intensity” is a simplification. The pattern does exist; its interpretation is contested.
[8] Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 13-42. Zahavi’s “minimal self” is interesting. I think it mistakes a structural feature of post-eruptive consciousness for evidence of pre-eruptive presence. I’ll leave the dispute open, but I do not adopt his framing.
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By BarnesCANONICAL TEXT
Read and cite the essay here: https://barnes7.substack.com/p/the-primal-eruption
This episode is an audio reading of the essay. The transcript below is identical to the canonical text and is provided for accessibility.
Cite as: Barnes, “The Primal Eruption,” Substack, January 17, 2026.
https://barnes7.substack.com/p/the-primal-eruption
You did not grow into yourself.
You were detonated.
Somewhere in the fog of earliest existence, before memory, before language, before you had a name to forget, something happened. Not gradually. Not gently. An event. A rupture so complete that everything afterward became aftermath.
The self you are now is organized around a wound you cannot locate.
I am not speaking in metaphor.
WHAT THIS IS
The Primal Eruption:: the founding event of consciousness. The moment when awareness folds back on itself and discovers someone there.
The thesis is simple. The implications are anything but.
Consciousness does not develop. It erupts. The transition from non-awareness to awareness is not a slope but a cliff. And the privacy of consciousness, the impossibility of truly conveying what it is like to be you, is not a limitation we might someday overcome. Instead, it is a structural consequence of how you arrived. You cannot transmit the event that created the transmitter.
I need to say what I am not claiming. I am not making a neurobiological argument. The neuroscientists can have their correlates; I am not fighting them for that territory. This is phenomenology. This is about the structure of consciousness as it is lived from the inside. The question is not “what brain process produces selfhood” but “what does it feel like to have arrived as a self, and what does that feeling tell us about how arrival works.”
A simple test you can run on yourself right now: Does your earliest sense of self feel accumulated, built piece by piece in your presence, like a house you watched go up, or does it feel given? Handed to you already structured, with no memory of the construction?
The Primal Eruption predicts the second.
THE FOUR FEATURES
Every Primal Eruption shares four structural properties. I am not being taxonomic for the pleasure of taxonomy. These four are why the eruption resists narration, memory, and transmission. They are Atlas holding up this world.
Discontinuity::
Before and after are not commensurable. The world after the eruption is categorically different from the world before; not different in degree; different in kind. Kuhn saw this in scientific revolutions: the pre-paradigm and post-paradigm worlds do not share a common measure.1 The Primal Eruption is more radical. In a scientific revolution, there are still scientists on both sides. In the Primal Eruption, there is no one on the “before” side. The subject on the far side of the cliff is not continuous with what preceded because what preceded was not a subject at all.
Irreversibility::
No, you cannot go back. This sounds obvious but the implications are not. Any “return” to innocence; to pre-reflective experience; to the garden before the fall is itself a new act performed by a constituted subject :: you. You cannot unknow that you exist. From the “before” side, there was no door; no passage; no crossing. The crossing invented the before and after it now separates.
Singularity::
Your eruption is not mine. I cannot generalize from my experience to yours because the conditions were unrepeatable, completely saturated with contingency. This is why phenomenological descriptions of consciousness always feel slightly off, why Nagel’s question (what is it like to be a bat) has no answer.2 Not because bat-experience is so alien. Because any experience, described from outside, loses the very thing that made it experience. The description is always post-eruption, performed by a subject, and the eruption was singular.
Excess::
The event exceeds any framework (what I often call scaffolding) available at the moment of occurrence. You cannot prepare for it. You cannot fully metabolize it after. The eruption overwhelms the categories that will later be used to describe it, because those categories are themselves debris from the explosion. Consciousness is constituted by what it cannot yet comprehend or know.
I would like you to sit with that for a moment. You are built out of something that exceeds you.
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSMISSION
These four features produce what I call the Problem of Transmission.
The eruption constitutes the subject, yes. But the subject cannot transmit the eruption: not because language is inadequate (though it is), not because other people are inattentive (though they are), but because transmission itself depends on structures the eruption created.
You cannot explain your origin to another person because explanation requires the very apparatus the origin produced. The origin precedes the very tools that would describe it.
This is not a failure of communication. It is not something we might solve with better technology or more precise vocabulary. It is structural impossibility. The event cannot be shared because sharing presupposes a sharer, and the sharer did not exist until the event.
Chalmers circled this in his “hard problem” paper: the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience.3 But he framed it as a puzzle to be solved. I am saying it is not a puzzle. It is a scar. The gap is not an unsolved problem in consciousness studies, it is the residue of the eruption, left in the structure of every subsequent thought.
Poets know this. They spend careers failing at it. The failure is the poem’s content.
WHAT THIS IS NOT
I need to cover some ground.
Not developmental milestones.Piaget charted object permanence, theory of mind, formal operations: stages the child passes through in sequence.4 These are real. Children really do develop in roughly this order. But the stages presuppose what they cannot explain. Before there can be sensorimotor integration, there must be someone to integrate. Before object permanence, there must be a self for whom objects can be permanent.
Piaget chronicles adventures. He takes the adventurer for granted. He cannot tell us how the adventurer came to be.
Not trauma. This conflation happens constantly. Trauma is an event that happens to a subject. The Primal Eruption creates the subject to whom events can happen. The categories are not interchangeable. The eruption is not your first wound. It is the birth of the thing that can be wounded.
Not birth. Physical birth is a biological event: the infant exits the mother, breathes air, cries. The Primal Eruption is a phenomenological event: awareness folds back on itself and discovers someone there. These may coincide. They need not. The infant may breathe for hours, even days, before the fold occurs. We do not know. We cannot know. No one remembers.
Not the mirror stage.Lacan argued that the self is constituted when the infant recognizes itself in a mirror: the “aha” of seeing your reflection and knowing it is you.5 He was close. He was wrong about timing. The mirror stage presupposes a self to do the recognizing. You cannot recognize yourself if there is no self yet. Lacan’s mirror dramatizes an arrival that has already occurred.
The psychoanalysts put the origin in relation: to the mother, the father, the Other. The Primal Eruption is pre-relational. It happens before there is an Other to relate to. The newborn’s first gasp is not relational. The infant’s first startle is not about the mother. The fold happens alone, which is not quite right either, because “alone” implies a self that could have company. There is no alone; no company. There is just the fold.
THE COSMOLOGICAL POSITION
Before a star can form, something must explode.
The heavy elements that compose planets, bodies, and conscious beings (carbon, oxygen, iron) do not exist in the primordial universe. They are forged in stellar cores and distributed only through supernova: the catastrophic death of a massive star. The calm nebula from which new stars condense is itself the debris field of prior violence.6
The Primal Eruption is the supernova of the self.
Do not mistake me. You are not the star.You are not even the explosion. You are the nebula: the organized residue, the cloud of heavy elements slowly condensing into new structure. The star is gone. You are its consequences.
The supernova is not remembered by what it creates. The nebula contains no image or self portrait of the explosion. It contains only patterns, densities, potentials, and other beautiful things: the residue of an event that can be inferred but not witnessed. So very sacred; so too the self. You are organized around an origin you cannot access. Structured by violence you cannot recall.
I sought a different metaphor too, because the stellar one is too clean, too beautiful.
When magma surfaces and cools too rapidly, the result is obsidian. The new obsidian material did not have time to form crystals. At the molecular level, it is chaos: amorphous, disordered. But the surface is among the sharpest known, more than enough to cut.
The Primal Eruption produces obsidian selves. The transition was too fast for ordered crystallization. What results is not structured the way slow development would produce. It is frozen chaos, smoothed by time into apparent coherence, but, fundamentally amorphous at the core. You present a unified surface to the world. Beneath that surface: the disorder of an event that happened too quickly to be integrated.
This is why the earliest memories that survive are not of gradual learning but of shock. A fall. A scream. A flash of pain so intense it burned through the amnesia that swallows everything else. Memory preserves rupture. The slow ordinary days dissolve without residue.
Only the sharp obsidian shards remain.
THE FAILURE OF GRADUALISM
The developmental story says: consciousness accumulates. The infant acquires this capacity, then that one. Each stage builds on the last. Chart the stages, track the milestones, sum the acquisitions. At the end, you have a self.
The story is false.
Not false in its observations. The stages are real; children pass through them. False in what it assumes. The stages presuppose a subject to pass through them. The story begins in the middle and does not know it.
The memory evidence is against gradualism. If consciousness accumulated gradually, memory should favor routine: the repeated patterns that carved the deepest grooves. But when researchers study what survives infantile amnesia, they find the opposite. What persists is high-intensity. A fall, a fright, a flash.7 The ordinary vanishes. Only shock remains.
I will be careful here. Time to to tread lightly:The studies are not unanimous; memory research is messy; “almost always high-intensity” is stronger than the literature strictly supports. But the pattern is there. Memory preserves what shattered the pattern, not what repeated it. That is evidence (not proof, evidence) that the self is not built but broken into being.
The phenomenological evidence points the same direction. You do not experience yourself as something you assembled. Rather, you experience yourself as something you found: already there, already structured, already thrust into a world that preceded you.
This should not be viewed as nostalgia. This is properly viewed as accurate reporting.
The self was not constructed piece by piece in your presence. The self was handed to you. Where did it come from? The gradualist has no answer. She was not there when it happened.
Neither were you.
THE MECHANISM
How does awareness become aware of itself before there is an itself to become aware of?
The question is incoherent in the literal sense. I know. The incoherence is the literal point.
Before the fold: sensation, reaction, behavior without witness. The organism responds to stimuli. Light triggers response. Pain produces withdrawal. But there is no one home to notice. Processing without a processor who knows it is processing.
After the fold: someone is there. Who? The pain is mine. The light is seen by me. First-person perspective has erupted into existence.
The fold cannot be gradual because there is no continuum between zero first-person perspective and some. Either someone is there, or no one is there. The transition is binary. What happens afterward (development, maturation, increasing complexity) can be continuous. The crossing itself cannot be.
Zahavi, in his phenomenological work, wants to resist this.8 He argues for a “minimal self” that is present in all experience, prior to reflection. I understand why. The alternative, a hard discontinuity, is philosophically uncomfortable. But I think the discomfort is the point. The hard problem is hard not because we lack the right theory but because we are asking a constituted subject to describe its own constitution. The scar is in the asking.
The eruption is the resolution of a logical impossibility through sheer occurrence. It should not be possible. It happens anyway. Philosophy has circled this for centuries without resolution because resolution would require a vantage point outside the explosion, and there is no such vantage.
THE BODY AS EVIDENCE
Here is something that should not require argument but does.
If consciousness accumulated gradually alongside bodily development, the body would be yours from the start. The infant would arrive already fluent in its own flesh.
This is not what happens.
The infant flails. The hands do not obey. The legs kick without purpose. Months pass before the eyes track. Years pass before the gait stabilizes. The body is there from the first breath. The self does not know how to operate it.
The standard explanation is neural immaturity: the motor cortex is not yet myelinated, the hardware is incomplete. Fine. I am not disputing the neuroscience. I am asking what it means, phenomenologically, that the subject must acquire its own body from the inside. That the body must be learned. That embodiment is not given but earned.
Watch someone master an instrument. The hands begin as obstacles: clumsy, slow, constantly incorrect, unresponsive to intention. Through years of practice, they become transparent. The pianist does not think “move finger three”; the pianist thinks the phrase and the finger moves.
This conversion (from foreign apparatus to transparent extension) is recorded in muscle memory. And muscle memory is evidence. If the body were yours from the start, this labor would not be required.
The body preceded the self that will claim it. The infant’s struggle is not just biological immaturity. It is a subject learning an apparatus it did not build and does not yet command.
You were not born fluent in your flesh. You had to learn what should have been yours.
Again, I ask you to sit with this.Three objections, quickly:
Neural maturation explains it. Yes, it explains the mechanism. It does not dissolve the phenomenon. The biological and phenomenological claims operate at different levels. Both can be true.
Animals walk at birth. Human neoteny is extreme. We are born radically premature compared to other mammals: the skull must fit through the birth canal. In precocial animals, the gap between eruption and body-readiness may be compressed into hours. The human case, with its extended acquisition, makes the structure visible.
Phantom limbs suggest innate body schema. Template is not mastery. You can have a map of a city without the skill of navigation. The schema tells you the body should have a left hand but, it does not teach you how to use one.
CASES
A woman describes her earliest memory. Standing in a kitchen. Sunlight through a window. The smell of something baking. But the memory has no prelude. She does not remember arriving at the kitchen, does not remember the moments before. She was simply there, as if the memory began in the middle of itself.
This is not amnesia. This is the structural signature of post-eruptive consciousness. The self was handed to her already in progress. The kitchen memory is the first frame of a film whose opening has been cut. The cut is not damage. The cut is how the film was made.
A couple has been asked a thousand times how they fell in love. They have a story: dates, locations, a sequence of events. They both know the story is false. Not factually false. Phenomenologically false. The story implies gradual development. What actually happened was rupture: one moment he was a person, the next moment he was him. The transition had no duration. When they try to explain this, friends hear “love at first sight” and nod. That is not what they mean. They mean the transition violated continuity. The eruption cannot be narrated because narrative presumes what the eruption broke.
A nation tells its founding story. Heroes, Principles, Liberty, Equality. But the founding was also chaos: revolution, terror, civil war, blood. The chaos cannot be transmitted because transmission requires coherence. So, the nation develops a myth. A founding lie that smooths the rupture into narrative. The lie is necessary. The system faces, at the collective level, the same impossibility that consciousness faces at the individual level: founding events resist the transmission they require.
PREDICTIONS
If the Primal Eruption model is accurate, then:
Earliest memories will cluster around rupture, not routine.
Selfhood will be experienced as given, not constructed.
The origin will resist transmission in principle: not because we lack the words, but because the structure forbids it.
If the opposite obtained (if earliest memories favored routine, if selfhood felt built, if the origin yielded to communication) the model would require revision.
These predictions are not falsified. That is not the same as proven. It is the best I can offer at present.
Break-ability
No theory of mine covers everything. This one appears to fracture on the question of machine consciousness.
If a machine became aware (and this is hypothetical) it is unclear that its awareness would erupt. The process might be continuous: more integration, more recursion, more complexity, until something like subjectivity flickers on (the binary threshold remains). No founding event. A built mind rather than a born one.
If such a consciousness existed, the universal applicability obviously fails. The model retreats: human consciousness erupts; consciousness as such might not.
But maybe not. Maybe any system complex enough to ask about its own origin discovers a discontinuity: the moment self-reference became possible, the instant the system’s outputs first included the system as input. Maybe this threshold cannot be smoothly crossed regardless of substrate.
I do not know. The model does not resolve the question. It only insists that for consciousness as we know it from the inside, the origin is not smooth.
It is broken.
(I have a hunch it still erupts)
XII. WHAT REMAINS
When I orbit this theory : There is a question I cannot answer: whether the Primal Eruption varies in intensity. Whether some subjects arrive more violently than others. Whether the quality of the eruption persists, shaping the character of the self that emerges.
I think about this in relation to the anxious person who cannot find the source of the anxiety. The calm one whose calm seems given rather than achieved. The philosopher who keeps circling questions of rupture. The one who gravitates toward continuity.
Perhaps these are signatures. Perhaps we are still living in the weather/radiation of our detonation.
We are detonations walking around, mistaking ourselves for accumulations.
The error is structural. The loneliness is architectural.
Each person carries a secret they do not know. The most private sense of being you was born in an event that belongs only to you: a gasp, a blaze, a shattering. And the event cannot be retrieved. You can circle it. You can build your life around it. You cannot reach it.
Art exists because the origin demands expression and resists it.
Love exists because the loneliness at the core of consciousness reaches toward other lonelinesses, hoping to be less alone in the structural solitude.
Philosophy exists because the eruption leaves questions that cannot be answered from inside the explosion, and we ask them anyway.
Not accumulated but detonated.
The fire happened. The fire is why you are here.
I did not arrive at this theory abstractly. The first time I died, the structure described here became unavoidable.
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ENDNOTES
[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 144-159. Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis remains controversial: critics argue paradigms share more common ground than he allowed. But the structural point holds. Genuine ruptures produce befores and afters that cannot be smoothly reconciled.
[2] Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450. Nagel’s question is usually read as being about alien experience: bat sonar, etc. I read it as a question about the structure of experience as such. Even human-to-human transmission fails.
[3] David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200-219. Chalmers wants to solve the hard problem. I am suggesting the “problem” is a structural feature, not a gap in our theories.
[4] Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, trans. Margaret Cook (New York: International Universities Press, 1952). Piaget’s empirical observations remain valuable; his theoretical framework begs the question of subjectivity.
[5] Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1-7. Lacan’s timing is wrong, but his insight that the self is constituted rather than given is viable.
[6] E. Margaret Burbidge et al., “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, no. 4 (1957), 547-650. The B²FH paper. The physics is settled; I am using it metaphorically and acknowledge the metaphor’s limits.
[7] Patricia Bauer and Marina Larkina, “The Onset of Childhood Amnesia in Childhood,” Memory 22, no. 8 (2014), 907-924. The literature is more equivocal than I would like: emotional salience matters, but “high-intensity” is a simplification. The pattern does exist; its interpretation is contested.
[8] Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 13-42. Zahavi’s “minimal self” is interesting. I think it mistakes a structural feature of post-eruptive consciousness for evidence of pre-eruptive presence. I’ll leave the dispute open, but I do not adopt his framing.
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