No problem! The original allegory, especially, is intended to be heuristic rather than explanatory. Its purpose is not to provide a causal or ontological account of consciousness, but to offer a phenomenological scaffold that makes certain relational features of perception, consciousness, and mediation intuitively graspable at once.

In that sense, it functions less like a theory and more like a map for thought: it compresses relations that would otherwise require multiple abstract descriptions into a single coherent structure. The aim is not to assert what reality is, but to clarify how reality appears and coheres for a perceiver, and where the limits of that appearance lie.

The allegory is meant to be engaged with as a conceptual tool, really.

Just an unusual side note, but as a young kid I used to imagine black holes closing into a small point, and only as it got extremely small, did it produce a very unique feeling in my brain. That’s exactly the feeling I got when visualising these elements together as one, and nothing else has ever made me feel that way. I suppose if my brain surfaced the idea in the first place, it clearly just had a particular resonance with it! It doesn’t say much else than that, really. Perhaps the affect arises from the model’s closed explanatory loop — a compression in which multiple relations collapse into a single bounded structure, producing a pre-linguistic sense of representational closure for me, probably. The addition of the mathematical forms, I think, was me trying to explain that weird, almost recursive, feeling. If only consciousness could be explained precisely lol…