Death Mode
Definition
Death Mode is the mode in which the dead are experienced as pure absence. In this state, Elicitation no longer reaches the other, and neither Instantiation nor Reciprocal Elicitation is possible. The very possibility of the Loop collapses. This mode also extends to things never regarded as candidates for Instantiation in the first place — such as a landscape or a stone — which are apprehended simply as absence beyond reciprocity.
Features
- Certainty of absence: Unlike Ghost Mode, where response is uncertain yet experienced as if present, Death Mode involves the conviction that “no response will ever come again.” What is at stake here is not ambiguity but a confirmed rupture.
- Ritual confirmation: Funerary practices such as burial or cremation function as communal affirmations of this definitive rupture.
- Memory and persistence: The dead may reappear in Ghost Mode through memory or narrative, but each appearance is ultimately recollected into the recognition that “they are no longer here.”
- Radical impossibility of the Loop: Elicitation may still be directed toward the other, but the possibility of its return as a Loop is, in principle, reduced to zero. This includes not only the dead but also entities that were never regarded in terms of Instantiation at all — such as landscapes, stones, or objects that one does not ordinarily imagine as conscious. In Death Mode, they are apprehended precisely as pure absence, beyond the horizon of possible reciprocity.
Examples
- Funeral: The overwhelming conviction that no reply will ever return.
- Irreversibility of cremation: The physical disappearance of the body confirms the impossibility of response.
- An adult losing a balloon: Unlike a child, an adult does not cry over a lost balloon, since they already know that no Reciprocal Elicitation will ever come from it.
Key Point
Death Mode marks the point at which the framework of Elicitation and Loop within PoC collapses at its root.
- In Ghost Mode, response is absent yet experienced as if it were present.
- In Zombie thought experiments, response appears, but whether Instantiation has truly occurred remains undecidable.
- In Death Mode, however, response is confirmed impossible.
Elicitation becomes isolated, and the possibility of the Loop vanishes. This confirmation of rupture is the essence of the experience of death.