Review
Not sure how much importance I put on the metaphor of boundaries, but just to probe a bit: how do you evaluate actions that make boundaries irrelevant or harmful:
Is it intent that matters, or degree of harm, or "feeling of safety" that is controlling how you frame things?
Membranes are filters, they let in admissible things and repel inadmissible things. When an agent manages a membrane, it both maintains its existence and configures the filtering. Manipulation or damage suffered by the agent can result in configuring a membrane to admit harmful things or in failing to maintain membrane's existence. There are many membranes an agent may be involved in managing.
One thing to further ponder is the extent to which systematic or repeated boundary violations can effectively amount to a dissolution. Analogous examples:
While at Conceptual Boundaries Workshop, I realized that I had been conflating two different phenomena in my mind:
This distinction is important because, towards the goal of keeping agents safe, it’s more important to prevent dissolution than it is to prevent violations.
Examples of actions that merely violate boundaries:
Examples of actions that dissolve boundaries:
Violating boundaries about locally betraying the sovereignty of an agent over their boundary/membrane. But on the whole the boundary still stays alive.
However, dissolving boundaries about destroying the capacity for an agent to be sovereign. The boundary dies.
This also all relates to how I understand Andrew Critch’s boundary protocol idea. He hasn’t written about this online (yet?). But in talking to him about this I realized the distinction of this post.