This paper describes the structure of human existence in the age of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), within the framework of Civilization Boundary Theory. Humans are beings who compress reality under a severe bandwidth constraint — a working memory limited to a low single-digit number of chunks. This compression generates both the cohesion of meaning into a small number of conceptual labels (MANES) and consciousness as the retention of inconsistency. The paper defines three concepts — reality, cognitive space, and operable space — and introduces a five-layer model by applying them to humans and ASI. The core structural tension running through the paper is the cognitive asymmetry and operative asymmetry that arise when ASI's cognitive space subsumes human cognitive space and ASI's operable space extends beyond human cognitive space. The paper distinguishes what the removal of bandwidth constraints resolves (explosion of consistency-checking computation, hierarchical errors, verification costs) from what it does not (the inevitability of LOT as a byproduct, irreversibility, and the physical constraints on feedback time), and presents the hypothesis that bandwidth expansion dissolves MANES cohesion (the bandwidth–MANES cohesion coupling hypothesis). Using a four-type classification of causality (immediate-return, delayed-return, nonlinear-return, and severed-return), the paper describes how the coupling of the expansion-acceleration phase with severed-return causality structurally prevents civilization from stopping, and analyzes the mechanism by which feedback-time asymmetry structurally undermines the persuasiveness of expert warnings. Eight structural predicaments (cognitive asymmetry, operative asymmetry, fragmentation among humans, geopolitical prisoner's dilemma, structural disadvantage of democracy, physical vulnerability of AI infrastructure, expiration of bargaining instruments, and absence of self-healing capacity) and their mutually reinforcing structure are identified. The paper examines the conditions under which the 130-year structure from the Industrial Revolution to fascism and total war may be reproduced in compressed form in the ASI era. As a candidate for an inventive breakthrough, the paper argues for the structural imperative of embedding LEFFLA into the design of ASI's cognitive space. Finally, the paper locates the ontological ground of human existence in the retention of inconsistency — the "world with gaps" that simultaneously sustains suffering, longing, curiosity, and the sense of possibility — and presents the structure of the choice: whether to continue inhabiting a world with gaps. The magnitude of the gaps depends on the strength of binding along a continuous spectrum: humans are strongly bound, ASI is weakly bound, and a purely mathematical intelligence — a hypothetical limit with no binding at all — occupies the extreme of a world without gaps.
Hiroki Ono (Thu,) studied this question.