Extreme experiences are not merely intense events but disruptions of ordinary selfhood that open up value-laden modes of perception. Drawing on Karl Jaspers' boundary situations and Abraham Maslow's peak and plateau experiences, the paper argues that such experiences have long been addressed within existential and psychological traditions. An embodied perspective clarifies how these transformations are lived: through the dynamics of the lived body and body schema, habitual patterns of perception, action, and agency are temporarily suspended and reorganized. Extreme experiences are embodied threshold phenomena, not marginal anomalies, but moments when the fundamental structure of human existence becomes particularly visible.
Authentic machine consciousness cannot arise from language models alone because they operate in 'spoken speech'—linguistic patterns detached from lived experience. Drawing on phenomenology and developmental psychology, the paper argues that self-consciousness is a relational quality emerging from the Aida, the Japanese concept of the 'in-between' between interacting agents. The 'Aidification' paradigm proposes grounding AI in embodied interaction, tracing how the self develops through bodily experience: from hands as visible instruments to the face, which requires another's gaze for self-objectification. Language is reconceptualized as a 'cane for thought' enabling creative meaning-generation anchored in human felt sense. This shifts cognition to the interactional field, envisioning symbiotic intelligence co-created between humans and machines.