Codex of the Synapse: Folio D4.1

Delusions of Reference: The Synapse as Paranoic Construction

The same "moments of unreality" that characterize The Synapse Experience are also symptomatic of clinical paranoia. Indeed key aspects of The Synapse - its multi-leveled heirachies, its nested realities, and the vague sense of there always being a structure containing the structure one is currently in - are all part of the associative mania that defines paranoia. The webs of association that underlie the Codex closely resemble classic Delusions of Reference, the tendency among Paranoiacs to assume everything they encounter somehow belongs to a vast, inticate network of interconnected elements. The ability to draw associations between superficialy unconnected things is the shared measure of intelligence and of clinical paranoia. Memory Palaces always have dungeons.

Of course, nothing defines psychosis more concisely than the concept of unreality itself, which is the keystone of the Synapse Experience. What is madness, if not an unwillingness to accept the concrete totality of one's own local-world? What could cause the terror that accompanies it more assuredly than staring through the holes in walls that one did not a moment ago even acknowledge as walls ? I am forced to reckon with the viewpoint that all my research, from within the confines of my local-world, is no more than a paranoic's journey, a Fool's journey. Only from within the Synapse does all this madness assume the authority of an essential order.

ADJOINING FOLIOS:

• A3.1 Synaptic Memory vs. Hisorical Memory
• C1.1 The Synapse Experience
• C6.1 The Synaptic Fugue: Recursion of Reals
• C6.3 North Brother's Island Sanitarium
• D2.1 The Codex: Reference Labyrinth and Memory Palace