“There must be something, somewhere in reality, that is what you consider to be yourself.”

I phrased that very, very deliberately. That page is the result of more than an hour of cautious proofreading. You may notice I at no point claimed that experience in itself proves that you, as you conceptualize yourself, exist as a self—just that there is a thing that sees itself as ‘yourself.’

That thing is an information system. Presumably, a proactive one. And like all systems, its privileged discreteness is a fiction.

There is a gap in the human brain. The midline. Connections across the midline are focused to a small number of channels, overwhelmingly made up entirely of long, insulated axons; no information processing occurs in these, just signals traveling back and forth. But conventionally, we understand the brain to be an enclosed, unified system, and unless you’ve already internalized some or all of what I will argue here, I suspect you see yourself as an information system well-distributed across your brain and body.

Imagine a mad scientist cuts down that midline, separating the two halves of the brain entirely, but utilizes some manner of super-scientific technology to reconnect every one of the severed axons to its appropriate destination, with the only seam being a thin disc of metal which conducts the electrical signal onward down the axon. Is this still one person?

Suppose instead of a seamless disc of metal, the cut ends are separated by a few centimeters. There’s a small unit that detects any incoming signals and sends a pulse down a short wire to a unit on the other end, which charges the receiving axon to continue the signal. Electrical transmission down wires is thousands of times faster than down axons, so there’s no meaningful delay, and the units are no less reliable than a typical axon—mistakes are few and far between. Is this still one person?

Suppose the units transmit through analog radio signals, instead, and the two halves are separated by some distance. Is this still a person? What if the units transduce the signal to a digital one before sending?

What if the units all send their signals into a central computer, which compresses each microsecond of input data with minimal loss before sending to the destination units, which uncompress it before sending it along?

What if the signal is encrypted along the way with a typical mathematical packet encryption? What if those signals are instead encrypted as plain gibberish text?

What if, instead of just receiving individual electrical potentials, the input units are aware of the general engram that they’re receiving activation from, and they instead transmit the signal as comprehensible English text that corresponds to the meaning of the signal being sent?

What if the units, instead of broadcasting the meaningful text as a digital wireless signal, use a text-to-speech program and speakers, microphones on the other end?

What if the units use a mouth on one end, speaking words, which is received by an ear and then an audio processing system that converts it back into meaning, propagating thusly to relevant engrams?

Two proactive information systems, in communication, are not discrete. To see them as two systems, and not as one, is a polite fiction. To see those two systems as one, or two, while they exist in approximately simultaneous causal relation to hundreds or thousands or millions or billions more, is a fiction as well.

There is, I am sorry to say, no truth to the typical conception of the self. As it turns out, the Buddhists were right about this, at least. When I say ‘you,’ it’s not really a recognition of your privileged discreteness, more just a signifier of communication directionality.

You are welcome to think in terms of one particular set of information systems rather than another, so long as you recognize there’s nothing particularly special about them. If it comforts you to, in the privacy of your thoughts, still think of you as a discrete self, I will not stop you, but to use that model of reality in your decision making will, as all flawed models do, lead you to make mistakes.