I’m an independent researcher and I’ve been developing these ideas through conversation and writing. What follows is a thought experiment rather than a finished argument — I’m posting it here specifically because it deserves to be argued with. Push back hard.
The central thread: the present moment has zero duration and therefore technically doesn’t exist. The self changes continuously across time, producing an uncountable infinity of versions with equal claim to identity. Hilbert’s Hotel breaks down as a result. And consciousness, which was never quite located in the present to begin with, may not be located where we think it is at all.
The Thinnest Slice
A Thought Experiment in Three Movements
Noah Parsons
Premise
Imagine two versions of the same person sitting across from one another. Not a past and future self in any science-fiction sense — no time travel, no paradox. Simply: the person you were one picosecond ago, and the person you are now. For the purposes of this experiment, grant them both a chair and a voice. See what they find to say.
Movement I: The Introduction Problem
Now: I know you.
Then: You don’t. You’ve never met me.
Now: We share every memory up to a picosecond ago. Same childhood, same hands, same—
Then: Same nothing. The memories you have are copies of mine, processed through a brain that has already fired ten thousand neurons since I last existed. You are not remembering my life. You are running a reconstruction of it on different hardware.
Now: That’s a technicality.
Then: Is it? Tell me your name.
Now: Noah.
Then: My name was also Noah. But names are the Ship of Theseus — the label persisting long after the thing it labeled has been replaced. The ship in the harbor still says Theseus on the hull. It has not said anything true for a long time.
Now: The Ship of Theseus assumes discrete replacement. I’m arguing something more continuous than that. We don’t swap planks. We flow.
Then: Agreed. And that makes it worse, not better. Theseus at least had a ship between replacements — a stable thing you could board and sail. You and I are not two ships. We are two moments in a river that has never been the same river twice. There is no vessel. There is only water, moving.
A pause.
Now: Then what are you?
Then: The question assumes I am something. I am a cross-section of a process — a slice of zero thickness taken from a transformation that never stops. I existed for no measurable duration. I am already gone. You are already going.
Movement II: The Hotel
Now: Hilbert had a hotel. Infinite rooms, all full, always room for more.
Then: I know the hotel.
Now: Every version of us that has ever existed could check in. The person at age five, at age ten, at every picosecond between. Infinite guests. The hotel accommodates all of them.
Then: But which room is you?
Now: That’s the point — there is no privileged room. Every version has equal claim to the name on the reservation.
Then: Then none of them are you. A name that belongs equally to an infinite number of things belongs to none of them in particular. You cannot be the guest if every possible guest is also you. Identity requires discrimination — the ability to say this, not that. Infinite selves collapse the discrimination entirely.
Now: Unless the self was never a guest to begin with. Maybe the self is the hotel.
A longer pause.
Then: Say that again.
Now: Not a room. Not a guest. The structure that makes the infinite accommodation possible. The self as the condition under which all these versions can exist and be related to one another — not any particular moment, but the continuity between all of them.
Then: That’s either the most profound thing you’ve said or a very elegant way of avoiding the question.
Now: Probably both.
Movement III: The Present
Then: Here is what bothers me. We have been speaking as though there is a now in which this conversation occurs. But you established earlier that the present moment has no duration. Zero time. Nothing can happen in zero time. So where are we?
Now: In the reconstruction. The brain takes eighty milliseconds to process what the senses receive. What feels like now is already the past, edited and assembled and presented as current. We have never once been present. We have only ever been the memory of a moment ago.
Then: So this conversation is not happening.
Now: It happened. Past tense, by the time you experience it.
Then: And consciousness — the thing experiencing all of this — lives where exactly? Not in the present, which doesn’t exist. Not in the past, which is gone. Not in the future, which hasn’t arrived.
Now: Consciousness lives in the gap. In the reconstruction. In the story the brain tells itself about what just occurred, delivered with enough speed that it feels like now. We are not beings of the present. We are beings of the extremely recent past, convinced we are here.
Then: And when the reconstruction stops?
Neither speaks for a moment.
Now: That’s the question, isn’t it. The body stops. The brain stops processing. The reconstruction ends. But the reconstruction was never the thing itself — it was always just a model of events occurring elsewhere, assembled into narrative. What happens to the model when the modeler stops is not the same question as what happens to what the model was modeling.
Then: You’re saying death ends the reconstruction but may not end whatever the reconstruction was pointing at.
Now: I’m saying we don’t know what the reconstruction was pointing at. We have only ever had the model. We have never touched the thing itself.
Then: Like Kant’s Ding an sich.
Now: Like Kant’s Ding an sich. Permanently inaccessible. Even in death — especially in death — we cannot know, because the instrument of knowing is the thing that stops.
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then: So we are conscious processes that cannot locate themselves in time, cannot establish a persistent identity across infinite self-replacement, cannot access the reality our consciousness is supposedly responding to, and cannot know whether the ending of our particular reconstruction constitutes an ending of anything that matters.
Now: Yes.
Then: And yet here we are.
Now: Here we are. In a moment that doesn’t exist, as selves that cannot be located, discussing a reality we cannot touch, in a conversation that was already over before either of us heard it.
Then: Is that unbearable?
Now: No. Strangely, no.
Then: Why not?
Now: Because the asking is enough. Not the answer — the asking. The question doesn’t need to resolve to be worth living inside. And whatever we are, across all the infinite versions and the zero-duration moments and the permanent inaccessibility of the real — whatever we are, we are the kind of thing that asks.
Then: That may be the only definition of the self that survives all of this.
Now: The thing that asks.
Then: Even when it knows no answer is coming.
Now: Especially then.
Coda
The conversation ends. Both speakers are already gone — replaced, in the time it took to read this, by versions that carry the memory of what was said but are not the ones who said it.
The hotel has two new guests.
The river has moved.
The reconstruction continues.
And whatever is doing the asking is still, somehow, here.
This thought experiment should be read as a working document, not a conclusion — an argument to be continued by whoever reads it, including the author, who is no longer the person who wrote it.