The foundation · theory two · what we are bound to
Connections
Four live lines, one per channel. They are not what you are tied to. They are how you are in reality at all.
What it rules out
a connection is a relationship — chemistry between people, a network link
Set that down. A connection is a live line between you and something, through one of the channels you have — simply what one of your channels is currently holding.
the four are a list of things you happen to be tied to
Set that down. Nothing reaches you off them. They are not an inventory of attachments; they are the whole of your contact with anything.
How it is built
Four channels, one per type, and the count is not a survey — it falls out of what a person is. Three of a person’s lines point inward. The fourth points out and is the plainest of them: your location in time and space. You hold all four at every instant.
There is no state of being connected to nothing, which is why the theory is stated as a floor rather than as an achievement.
Where it meets the others
Theory Two has one term of its own and is load-bearing in three other theories. It is the only one of the five that is more visible in the others’ definitions than in its own:
- Threeis defined entirely in its terms — a moment is your four connections in their exact current arrangement, held.
- Fiveis defined as its output — the self reads its four connections and responds; that response is the state you live inside.
- Onesupplies the reader: the governor is the thing reading what the four lines deliver.
So the thinness of this page is not the thinness of the theory. Two is the floor the other theories stand on, and the cover’s claim that the five were built independently and found to connect is most visible here — three of the other four cannot be stated without it.
Where the ground is unwalked
Nothing is marked open here, and that is worth saying rather than hiding. Of the twenty-seven questions the site marks unwalked, none foots to this theory. A theory with no marked edge is either finished or under-examined, and the site does not currently say which.
The edge of this page. The count is the claim, and the count is what this page carries. Why there are four and not three or five is an argument, and the argument is in the sealed work.
Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence is drawn from what is already published here — the front page, the glossary, the questions and the Reports. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say. The argument is in the sealed work.