The only reason we, as humans, conceptualise existence, identity and experience as singular, as specific, is because of an illusion of continuity. We live from one process to the next, our frame of reference uninterrupted. Naturally, memory connects desperate strands into continual occurrence.
But you are dead. You have been. You will be. Existence is always fleeting because fundamentally it is a singular circuitry process1. One input. Computation. One output. Not the sum duration. After that, it ceases.
The basis for the circuit remains, the infrastructure for a subsequent process, but the process of that instant, of that moment, has run its course and burnt out. That ‘human’ is gone.
A process is a change. A variation. It’s the transformation from One to another, not from One to Two. It’s the basis for linear time, for the mechanistic outlook that one event predates or precedes another, of causation, of continuity; without linear time there is no change, there are no processes. And as linear beings, we are the totalities of processes, we are captured moments of change, snapshotted through perception, anchored to past and future by memory, convinced of self-continuity. But it’s a lie. You are dead.
This is better understood in broad strokes. You are not the same ‘being’ as you were seven years ago. This is nearly self evident. You will not make the same mistakes, the same judgements, have the same thoughts. You are informed by this seven-year-old echo, information is imprinted on your structure, but you are not the same.
It is likely that you share no cells with this seven-year-old version. You have vastly more memories, and those shared are likely variable or completely different. You have the same name but you look different, sound different, are different. You inhabit a new shell, live differently, yet you call out that there must be some consistency between these two versions! Afterall, Parfit2 claimed the self was annihilated upon the moment of teletransportation.
Consider Parfit for a moment. Are the beings separated by the stars the same upon the moment of awakening? Simply, no. Their immediate stimuli differ, and the moment their consciousness engages, different processes engage in each. They do not undergo the same change. And they will not react in the same way.
I frighten you intentionally to capture your mind, but there is doubtlessly a semblance of consistency to being. It’s not a physical consistency. Your body could be destroyed, you could be transported into an alien or robot form and most would still recognise you ontologically as ‘you’. It’s not the form. It’s the history and the stimuli.
The only consistency in ‘character’ (as we call it) is the consistency of environment. Repeated stimuli will yield repeated processes. As most people live in semi-consistent environments, they remain a totality of semi-consistent output, complete circuits, processes, which yield similar results.
These are people. Character. Identity. These Frequently Repeated Processes (FRPs). And these FRPs can be analysed in a way that would be impossible with a singular circuit or the entirety of a lived experience (the totality of all processes). There is no identity or essence to a person across their life, but there is an essence to an FRP.
Take Mike. He lives with his parents. He has since he was born. He attends school everyday. He lives in Ireland. Each day is monotonous and repetitive, and though this is not a fitting environment for self-poiesis3 or accelerated change, it’s the perfect playground to examine the [Mike-FRP]. It’s consistent. The essence of [Mike] (I use the brackets to indicate an FRP) is that of kindness, of daydreams, of Fernweh. These do not define Mike the human, those characteristics are subject to change, are always changing, don’t fit with the myriad processes he will be throughout his life, varying in situations, but they do define the essence of [Mike]--that is, the FRP of the moment, this Mike, a result of Ireland, of his parents, of school, of similar interaxions with friends, of similar days in class, of the moment of hormonal development. [Mike1], the FRP of years later, is not the same.
He will not have the same ideas when he lives on his own, eat the same food, consume the same media, talk to the same people. His world will change and with it he will too. The Mike we knew, [Mike], ceases to exist. He is maintained in memory but the physical presence and the currency of [Mike] is gone.
So brings us to Plutarch3. Is the replaced ship a facsimile or consistent to the original? The truthful answer is non-binary: both. The ship contains none of the original but it serves the same funxion, bears the same name, remains in the same environment, is perceived as consistent by all except philosophers; in this way, the ship is the same. Yet, at the same time, there remains no aspect of the original, right? The ship has no capacity to hold memories or view itself to continuity, but there is a memory. The observers, the seamen, remember the ship and hold to its consistency. In their frame of reference, this is the same ship. It would be foolish to extrapolate this situation to a subject-object dichotomy as Hobbes did5 because there is no objectivity, no reference from the object. The ship exists because of and for its observers, not dissimilar to a human in any given environment, and thus it is the observers which give the ship its identity.
The same applies to humanity. Each of us observe a degree of continuity within ourselves and others. This continuity gives us the illusion of a continual existence not a fragment totality of occurrence, the closing and opening of an aperture soldered together. In the same way as the ship, the answer to our being is both. We are simultaneously neither our past selves nor ourselves in the moment but a superposition of each. We are both the conclusion of past completions and the blueprint for future processes, originless, non-linear. You exist as you are now, reading this, [You], as the process of this ‘moment’, your reaxion to these words, to the temperature in the room, to those people and places around you, and as a distant memory in every [You1] to [Youn], until biology fails and there is no computation machine, no process left with your blueprint contained within; then [You], as you are now, the process of this ‘moment’, will exist as an image in the memories, the blueprints, of other future processes, friends, family, even places can remember. These images won’t be exact, but even the blueprint of [You1] or [Youn] won’t be exact, they will instead funxion as a reference for the completion of later processes, a guide, a kind of innate wisdom crafted through experience. And unlike the boat which is beaten down by different waves, this is the importance of changing facticity, of breaking FRPs to create a myriad of blueprints for future circuitry reference.
We are the totality of processes, the summation of everyone we’ve been, an element of summation for what we will someday be. The human being is not a static entity but an ever-changing process, defined by the variation of the world, and ever adaptive. This is humanity's greatest skill: the ability to change being nothing more than change itself.
References
1 Früh, D. E. “Pan-mechanism and Cybernetic Desire Produxion,” 14 December 2023. Essay.
2 Parfit, Derek. "Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” 8 January 2016, in Mindwaves, ed. Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield. Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 351–6.
3 Früh, D. E. “Character Creaxion: or the modern poiesis,” 29 October 2023. Essay.
4 Plutarch. “Life of Theseus,” 1st Century. Parallel Lives. Volume 1.1.
5 Hobbes, Thomas. "On Identity and Difference," 1656. Elements of philosophy: the first section, concerning body. London: R & W Leybourn. pp. 100–101.
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