The Self as Uncountable Infinity — A Thought Experiment on Identity, Time, and Consciousness

General Philosophy
1

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.

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Edmund Husserl would say that your argument rests on a mathematically abstract notion of time, a punctual instant with zero extension. But that is not how time is given in experience.
Husserl argues that the lived present is not a point but a “thick” structure composed of retention (the just-past still held), and primal impression (the now-phase), protention (the about-to-occur).

When you hear a melody, you don’t experience isolated acoustic atoms. You experience temporal flow. The note just played is still present as retention; the next note is anticipated; the current note is not a zero-width slice but part of a temporal field. If this were not the case it would be impossible to enjoy a temporally unfolding process like music.

It’s not that the present has zero duration, but that any attempt to isolate it as a self-contained object destroys what makes it present. Ana’s it’s not that there are infinite discrete selves, but that identity is constituted in temporal flow rather than located in a static objective now.

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I think that is a specific function of consciousness namely egoic awareness, what the self thinks of as itself. Those famous Libet experiments where the subject reports awareness of taking an action some microseconds after taking it, attest to that.

I think, overall, you’re conflating conscious self-awareness with consciousness, which has a much broader domain than that of which we’re discursively aware.

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I don’t see how a slice of a 4D entity renders it nonexistent. The typical presentist view is that all the universe is such a slice, and it would follow that the universe doesn’t exist, which contradicts the typical assertion otherwise.

OK, but this is a cloning experiment now. Apparently each knows which is the older of the two, although it isn’t explained how they come into this knowledge except perhaps name labels at the table.

They are effectively near identical clones with diverging history.

Nit: Off by about 5 orders of magnitude. A typical human fires zero neurons during a typical picosecond, but perhaps 300 times per nanosecond.

This presumes presentism. The whole post does. I don’t agree with it, but it is an interpretational choice. I also don’t agree with physical identity continuity, meaning that one state of what I call ‘me’ does not share identity with the version a second ago. Contradictions likely arise. It is pragmatic to assume otherwise, but not logically valid to do so.

About the hotel:

This statement assumes the states are countable, discreet. The hotel cannot hold uncountable states. The assumption brings into question what happens to existing things between one moment an the next one, or if moments are not infinitely thin, but have some finite duration of static state.

Room 1 of course, which is very much a privileged room. This again presumes presentism. Take away presentism and the privileged room goes away.
Yes, all the rooms are filled with Noah, or rather, two of them. But only one is in the present. The rest are historic states.

The guys at the table are both in this room since they are both in the room simultaneously. So the hotel now is full of double beds.

Yea, and where do we always put new guests? Room 1 of course.

On Presentism:

That’s right. Nothing can happen. I see no contradiction with this conclusion.

Depends on definition of ‘we’ I suppose. There’s something present, even if it is only in a state of awareness of past stuff. A state of awareness is not being aware, the latter being something ‘happening’.

Sure. Consciousness happens. But how about what is called a conscious state? What is that?

Why all this seems important: Research Boltzmann Brains. They might be in a state of belief, without the process of believing, so the distinction becomes important, not just a linguistic side effect of presentism.

Again, presentism includes the assertion of the existence of the present. Nothing happens in gaps. Process is a relation between states, only one of which exists at the present. This bit about reconstruction makes little sense, a seeming assertion of process going on when there’s nothing to implement it.

‘Stops’ is defined as successive states being the same, presentism or not. So no, the body does not stop, else it would be dead/frozen.

I suppose that’s an attempt at a solution to a problem that doesn’t need to be problematic at all.

Sure, but this does not mean that there is actually temporal flow since the lack of such flow yields the identical experience.

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Treating time as an abstract mathematical grid placed over experience is not an actual experience of time at all, it is a formulaic method that hides the experience.

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Thank you to noAxioms, Joshs, and Wayfarer for responses that genuinely sharpen the argument. I want to address each challenge directly and concede where concession is warranted, because the points raised are not peripheral — they cut at the foundations.

On Presentism and the Block Universe — noAxioms

This is the strongest challenge and I want to meet it honestly. You are correct that the thought experiment presupposes presentism — the view that only the present moment exists — and that this is an interpretational choice rather than a logical necessity. The block universe view, in which past, present, and future exist equally as a four-dimensional structure, is not only coherent but is arguably the position most consistent with special relativity, which eliminates absolute simultaneity and with it any privileged “now” that could be called the present across all reference frames.

However, I want to argue that conceding presentism does not dissolve the problem — it relocates and arguably deepens it.

If the block universe is correct and all moments exist equally, then the self is not a process moving through time but a static four-dimensional structure — a “worm” extended through spacetime. Every version of Noah is equally real, equally existent, none more present than another except relative to an arbitrary reference frame. This does not rescue identity. It destroys it more thoroughly than presentism does. Under presentism at least there is a privileged now, however thin, that could serve as the locus of selfhood. Under eternalism there is no such locus at all. The self is smeared across four dimensions with no point of concentration, no center of gravity, no here from which experience could originate.

So the challenge is not which ontology resolves the identity problem. It is whether any ontology of time is compatible with a coherent, unified self. I am arguing it is not — and eternalism, if anything, makes that case more forcefully than presentism.

On the neuron count — you are correct and I concede this without qualification. The figure was imprecise and the argument does not depend on it. The underlying point, that the brain has already processed information between any two states we attempt to compare, stands independently of the magnitude.

On the Hotel and countability — this is a genuine problem for the argument as stated. I assumed discrete, countable states without justification. The continuous transformation of a person through time may indeed produce an uncountable infinity of states — in which case Hilbert’s Hotel, which accommodates only countably infinite guests, breaks down not because identity is complicated but because the Hotel is the wrong model entirely. What replaces it is Cantor’s continuum — a structure of cardinality larger than any countable infinity, which cannot be enumerated, indexed, or put into correspondence with the natural numbers. This actually strengthens the central claim: if the states of a self are uncountably infinite, the question “which one is you” is not merely difficult but mathematically ill-formed. You cannot point to a member of an uncountable set the way you can point to room 1.

On Husserl’s Thick Present — Joshs

The Husserlian response is sophisticated and I want to engage it seriously rather than dismiss it.

Husserl’s retention-primal impression-protention structure is a genuine attempt to solve exactly the problem I raised, and the melody example is well chosen. You cannot hear a melody as a sequence of isolated acoustic atoms — the just-past note must still be held, the coming note must be anticipated, for the temporal structure of music to be experienced at all. Husserl concludes from this that the lived present is not a mathematical point but a thick temporal field.

I have two responses.

The first is that Husserl’s solution describes the phenomenology of time-consciousness — how time is experienced — without settling whether that phenomenology accurately represents the underlying metaphysical structure. noAxioms already gestured at this: the lack of actual temporal flow could yield the identical experience of temporal flow if the brain constructs the experience regardless. Husserl cannot, from within phenomenology alone, rule out that the thick present is itself a reconstruction — a cognitive artifact that creates the impression of temporal extension without requiring actual extension in the substrate. The melody feels continuous. Whether it is continuous at the level of neural processing is a separate question that phenomenology cannot answer.

The second response is that Husserl’s structure, even if accepted fully, does not rescue the self. Retention is the just-past still held — but held by what? By the current state of consciousness. Which means the past is not actually present; it is represented in the present. The note that just played is not still sounding — it is a trace, a memory however fresh, a reconstruction. Husserl’s thick present is, on careful inspection, a present that contains representations of what is no longer present. That is precisely my original claim in different language.

On Conflating Egoic Awareness with Consciousness — Wayfarer

This may be the most important correction in the thread and I want to accept the core of it while defending what I think survives.

You are right that I conflated two things. The Libet experiment and the 80-millisecond reconstruction describe the self-model — the egoic narrative, the story the brain tells about itself, the voice that says “I am doing this.” Consciousness broadly construed is wider than this. There is processing, response, awareness at levels that predate and exceed the self-narrative. A frog catching a fly is conscious in some functional sense without constructing a self-model. The reconstruction I described is a feature of self-consciousness, not of consciousness as such.

This is a genuine distinction and I was imprecise.

However, the concession produces a new problem rather than resolving the original one. If consciousness is broader than egoic awareness — if there is processing and experience occurring beneath and beyond the self-narrative — then the self-narrative is not consciousness but a summary of it, produced after the fact, covering only a fraction of what is actually occurring. Which means the thing we call “I” — the entity that appears to be having this philosophical discussion, the one asking where consciousness lives — is not the full extent of consciousness but a thin, delayed, selective report generated by a process that is itself largely inaccessible.

The egoic self is not consciousness. It is consciousness’s autobiography, written in arrears, published internally as if it were live reporting.

This does not rescue the self. It makes the self smaller and more precarious than I originally claimed. The reconstruction is not all of consciousness — agreed. But it may be all of the self. And if the self is only the reconstruction, then everything I argued about its instability, its inaccessibility to itself, its permanent delay behind the actual — all of that holds, and holds for something even more fragile than I initially described.

The Position That Survives

After these challenges, here is what I think remains standing:

The self, understood as the egoic narrative — the voice, the continuous story of “I” moving through time — is a reconstruction operating in arrears, generated by processes it cannot access, extended across a temporal structure that may or may not privilege any particular “now,” and constituted by a continuous transformation producing states too numerous to enumerate or identify individually.

Whether consciousness broadly is subject to the same instability is a separate question I was wrong to collapse into the first. Wayfarer is right that consciousness may be wider and more primary than the self-narrative. But that broader consciousness is, by the same token, even further from what we ordinarily mean by “I” — which makes the self not more secure but less.

The light at the end of the tunnel is not the self. It may be consciousness. And the tunnel accelerating toward it is exactly the self-model, always in pursuit, never arriving, because what it is chasing was never the same kind of thing as the chaser.

I remain genuinely uncertain about the block universe versus presentism. I accept the Husserlian phenomenology as descriptively accurate while questioning whether it resolves the metaphysical problem. And I accept the egoic/consciousness distinction as a real and important one that the original piece handled imprecisely.

These are working documents. The pushback has improved them.

1 Like
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Thanks for the good discussion.

Some forms maybe. The common premise is that of a preferred moment in time. Growing block suggests that present and past exist. Moving spotlight says it all exists. There are fringe forms like say recent past and future exist (several hours?), but not the rest. Point is, they all posit a preferred moment. Eternalism (‘block universe’) does not, and gives all moments identical ontology, similar to all locations in space sharing equal ontology.

The block universe view, in which past, present, and future exist

No. Those bolded words have no meaning in the block view. It is a mistake to use the terminology of one to describe the other.

… the position most consistent with special relativity, which eliminates absolute simultaneity

Pretty much yes. Physical relativity of simultaneity is incompatible with relativity theory. Coordinate relativity of simultaneity is not especially problematic with it.

If the block universe is correct and all moments exist equally, then the self is not a process moving through time but a static four-dimensional structure — a “worm” extended through spacetime.

Agree with all except ‘static’, which implies a lack of change over time, which is similar to asserting a lack of change over space (my leg is static: the same thickness anywhere along it’s length), contradicting evidence.

The view of this ‘worm’ (called a worldtube) is still a classical one, one world, with definite state independent of measurement, and with no superluminal causation. But for the purpose of this topic, I can accept classicality.

Every version of Noah is equally real

Well, there’s only one Noah in this classical view. There are multiple possible cross sections (some intersecting), but it seems wrong to call those ‘versions’.

equally existent, none more present than another except relative to an arbitrary reference frame.

The one Noah is fully present in any inertial reference frame. I suppose I can concoct a non-inertial one that doesn’t include the entire worldtube.
Reference frames just assign abstract coordinates to events (hopefully unique coordinates). The reference frame choice has no physical effect.

This does not rescue identity.

Sure it does. Given that classicality, there is but the one Noah worldtube. It has an identity, one independent of frame choice. My reluctance to assign identity to it comes from rejection of classicality (something falsified, Nobel prize, 2022), not from my choice of interpretation of time.
Noah is the identity, the entire worldtube.

You speak of ‘locus of selfhood’. Not sure what that is, or why it is needed for identity. Yes, Noah is smeared across all his events. There’s no point of concentration, something which apparently this locus requires, making it something other than identity.
Your argument seems to hinge on this distinction, hence my request for clarification of what you consider this ‘self’ to be, and why an inconsistency results if it is lacking.

Since any notion of this ‘self’ seems to require this falsified classicality, perhaps the answer you’re seeking is that it, like so many things, is a mere abstraction with no basis in reality.

Best clue is this:

if the states of a self are uncountably infinite, the question “which one is you” …

Under classical eternalism, the entire worldtube is ‘you’, not some special preferred subset of events. If you insist on assigning that label to just one arbitrarily oriented cross section, you’re probably going to need that presentism. This is a big part of why I reject it, thus avoiding such problems.
The orientation part is a big part of it. There’s more than one angle one can slice a wordtube, meaning that a state at a given time is very frame dependent. Presentism demands a preferred orientation for the slice (orthogonal to the preferred time axis)

I didn’t even notice that you do indeed assert uncountable in your title. The hotel thing pretty much relies on working with countable sets, so a less discreet analogy might work better for you, sort of Hilbert’s alley vs his hotel, the former lacking discrete partitions where guests go.

Mind you, nobody knows if spacetime is discrete or not, but if it is, it’s probably not a nice clean grid in neat rows and columns. If a person has infinite states, then it’s indeed uncountable. I cannot think of a way to get countably infinite and still be bounded everywhere.

Totally agree, but I’m not treating actual time as an abstraction. That would be raw idealism. The mathematical abstraction is simply a model of time, not time itself. I agree that I don’t directly experience a model or other abstraction.

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I appreciate how you connect temporal reconstruction to questions of identity. Some commenters have already explored alternative models of time (presentism vs eternalism, etc.), so I want to ask something slightly different.

I’m trying to understand the specific inferential step from the absence of a punctual present to the collapse of persistent identity. Why should the fact that consciousness is reconstructive, or that change is continuous (even uncountable), entail that identity cannot persist?

The Hilbert’s Hotel analogy is evocative, but it seems illustrative rather than demonstrative. Continuity or uncountability alone doesn’t obviously undermine persistence — for example, we treat a film as a unified object despite being composed of discrete frames.

So I’m wondering whether your conclusion depends on a specific ontological requirement for identity — perhaps that it must be locatable in a temporally punctual way? If so, it would help to see that requirement made explicit.

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It maybe helpful to bring in attempts to integrate Husserl’s philosophical approaches with neuropsychological research. Shaun Gallagher elaborates:

“A number of theorists have proposed to capture the subpersonal processes that would instantiate this Husserlian model [of time] by using a dynamical systems approach (Thompson 2007; van Gelder 1996; Varela 1999). On this view, action and our consciousness of action arise through the concurrent participation of distributed regions of the brain and their sensorimotor embodiment (Varela et al. 2001).”

Evan Thompson(2007) says:

“The present moment manifests as a zone or span of actuality, instead of as an instantaneous flash, thanks to the way our consciousness is structured. As we will see later, the present moment also manifests this way because of the nonlinear dynamics of brain activity. Weaving together these two types of analysis, the phenomenological and neuro biological, in order to bridge the gap between subjective experience and biology, defines the aim of neuro-phenomenology (Varela 1996), ` an offshoot of the enactive approach.

Francisco Varela’s attempt to ‘phenomenologize’ empirical accounts of time consciousness involves rejecting time as a fixed linear sequence of nows (what Husserl calls clock time) :

“In fact, we have inherited from classical physics a notion of time as an arrow of infinitesimal moments, which flows in a constant stream. It is based on sequences of finite or infinitesimal elements, which are even reversible for a large part of physics. This view of time is entirely homologous to that developed by the modern theory of computation. […] This strict adherence to a computational scheme will be, in fact, one of the research frameworks that needs to be abandoned as a result of the neuro-phenomenological examination proposed here”

“The traditional sequentialistic idea is anchored in a framework in which the computer metaphor is central, with its associated idea that information flows up-stream . Here, in contrast, I emphasize a strong dominance of dynamical network properties where sequentiality is replaced by reciprocal determination and relaxation time.” ( Varela 1997)

Varela(1997) offers a concept of duration that is independent of linear time:

“…time in experience is quite a different story from a clock in linear time. Thus, we have neuronal-level constitutive events that have a duration on the 1/10-scale, forming aggregates that manifest as incompressible but complete cognitive acts on the 1-scale . This completion time is dynamically dependent on a number of dispersed assemblies and not a fixed integration period, in other words it is the basis of the origin of duration without an external or internally ticking clock.”. “the fact that an assembly of coupled oscillators attains a transient synchrony and that it takes a certain time for doing so is the explicit correlate of the origin of nowness.”

Let me elaborate on these approaches.
Your framing depends on a specific metaphysical picture of time: that the present is a mathematical instant of zero duration, that identity must attach to such instants, and that consciousness must therefore either occupy a point that does not exist or be forever displaced into reconstruction. The entire force of the argument rests on the premise that reality is fundamentally composed of infinitesimal slices, and that persistence must be explained by stitching together these slices after the fact.

What the above dynamical and enactive approaches do is not merely add neuroscientific decoration to Husserl. They undermine that premise at its root.

Thompson, drawing on Varela, does not treat the “thick present” as a poetic gloss on an underlying sequence of instants. He treats it as an emergent property of nonlinear brain–body dynamics. The present manifests as a span because neural assemblies require time — on the order of ~100 milliseconds — to reach transient synchrony. That synchrony is not a reconstruction of an already vanished instant; it is the very process through which something becomes experientially present at all.

This changes the metaphysical stakes.
Your argument assumes time is fundamentally composed of durationless instant, that identity must attach to those instants, and that therefore the self fragments into infinite cross-sections.

But the dynamical systems model rejects this idea. Time , at the level of lived cognition, is not built from indivisible points. It arises from relaxation times, phase-locking, reciprocal causation among distributed neural assemblies. There is no privileged “picosecond self” because the organism never operates at picosecond resolution as a unit of experience. The relevant unit is the dynamically achieved integration window, the temporally extended act.

In other words, there is no zero-thickness slice that could count as a self. The “Now” in your model claims that each picosecond produces a numerically distinct person. But that presupposes that a person is definable at that timescale. The enactive account denies that presupposition. A cognitive act requires a certain integration time to complete. Before synchrony is achieved, there is not yet a conscious act; after synchrony dissolves, the act gives way to another. The organism is not a stack of infinitesimal selves. It is a metastable process whose units of identity are temporally extended patterns.

The Hilbert’s Hotel analogy doesn’t hold, because the infinite “guests” depend on discretizing time into countable instants. But in nonlinear dynamics, the system is not a list of states indexed by time; it is a trajectory in state space. A trajectory is not an infinite set of self-sufficient entities. It is a continuous unfolding governed by constraints. You cannot check individual milliseconds into separate rooms any more than you can extract a single oscillation cycle from a symphony and treat it as a standalone orchestra.

You claim that we are always eighty milliseconds late, that consciousness is a model of what already occurred elsewhere. This language reinstalls the computational metaphor Varela explicitly rejects. It imagines sensory input arrives, processing occurs, a representation is assembled, and a delayed picture is presented.

But the enactive approach replaces this pipeline with circular causality. Perception is not the passive reception of inputs later assembled into a model. It is the ongoing sensorimotor coupling of organism and world. The brain does not reconstruct a past event; it participates in a dynamical loop that constitutes the event as meaningful in real time (real time understood as organismic duration, not as a physicist’s timeline of infinitesimals).

The “delay” does not imply exile from the present. It is part of the constitutive timescale of presence. Just as a candle flame has a shape only because combustion unfolds over time, consciousness has a present only because neural assemblies require time to synchronize. The 80–100 ms window is not evidence that we miss the present. It is the biological basis of what presence is.

Your move to Kant’s Ding an sich likewise depends on a representationalist framing.The brain builds a model of events “occurring elsewhere.” But if cognition is enactive, then there is no hidden “thing itself” waiting behind a veil of representations. There is structural coupling. The organism and environment co-determine each other’s dynamics. What appears is not a copy of an inaccessible substrate; it is the enactment of a world through embodied engagement.

If consciousness is a reconstruction running on hardware, then stopping the hardware ends the model, leaving open the question of what was being modeled. But if consciousness is an emergent pattern of organism–world coupling, then when the coupling ceases, the pattern ceases. There is no extra “pointing” beyond the process itself. The flame does not model combustion; it is combustion.

Thus, the claim that “the present has zero duration and therefore does not exist” conflates physical abstraction with experiential structure. Physics may idealize time as a parameter t composed of instants. But the enactive framework following Husserl argues that lived temporality is not derived from that abstraction. Duration is primary. The mathematical instant is a limit case produced by conceptual analysis, not the building block of experience.

The idea that we are infinite unlocatable slices occupying a moment that does not exist is based on a picture of time as a sequence of static frames. Varela’s point is that this picture is itself an inheritance from classical physics and computationalism. Once that framework is abandoned in favor of nonlinear dynamics and reciprocal determination, the paradox dissolves.

There is no need to rescue the self by making it “the hotel.” Nor must we concede that it collapses into infinite guests. The self, on this view, is a dynamically sustained pattern, a temporally extended organization of processes that maintains coherence across changing components. Not a point. Not an illusion. Not an infinite series of discrete replicas. A metastable form.

10

Three responses that each cut at a different structural weakness. I want to address them with the precision they deserve, beginning with the most foundational challenge.

On the Enactive Framework — Joshs, Thompson, Varela

This is the most comprehensive challenge yet and I want to engage it at full depth rather than retreat to qualification.

The enactive critique lands hardest on my use of the computational metaphor. Varela is right that the pipeline model — input arrives, processing occurs, representation is assembled, delayed picture is presented — imports assumptions from classical computationalism that are not neutral descriptions of what cognition is. If perception is circular causality, if organism and world co-determine each other’s dynamics through sensorimotor coupling, then “the brain reconstructs a past event” is not merely imprecise — it is the wrong ontological picture entirely. I accept this correction at the level of the metaphor.

However, I want to press on whether the enactive framework dissolves the identity problem or relocates it.

The metastable form proposal — that the self is a dynamically sustained pattern maintaining coherence across changing components — is elegant. But consider what it actually says. A metastable form is, by definition, a form that is never fully stable, always between states, cohering temporarily before yielding to the next configuration. The word metastable in physics refers to a system in a local energy minimum that is not the global minimum — it is stable enough to persist briefly but always susceptible to perturbation toward a lower energy state. Applied to the self, this means the self is precisely the kind of thing that coheres without being fixed, persists without being permanent, and is always in the process of becoming something else.

This is not a rescue of identity. It is a more sophisticated description of its fragility.

The flame analogy makes this vivid rather than resolving it. Joshs writes: the flame does not model combustion, it is combustion. Granted. But notice what follows: we say the flame as though there is a persisting thing. There is not. There is a process of oxidation maintained by the continuous supply of fuel and oxygen, producing light and heat as emergent properties. Remove the fuel and the flame does not go somewhere. It simply ceases. The process that constituted it is no longer being enacted. What was “the flame” a moment ago has no continuous substrate — it was different matter, different energy, at every instant. We name it as though it is a thing because the pattern persists and naming is how we navigate the world.

The same move applied to the self does not rescue identity — it reveals that what we call identity is a naming convenience applied to a pattern that has no fixed substrate, no continuous matter, no persisting self-identical component. The enactive account makes the self more coherent as a process description while making it less coherent as an entity. And first-person experience — the sense of being this particular something, here, now, the one who is reading this — seems to require the latter, not merely the former.

Furthermore: the Husserlian-enactive rejection of the Ding an sich is itself a substantive metaphysical commitment that carries its own burden of proof. The claim that there is no hidden substrate behind the structural coupling — that what appears is not a copy of something inaccessible but the enactment of a world through embodied engagement — is not a neutral description of cognition. It is a commitment to a form of structural realism or pragmatism that must answer for itself. Specifically: if there is no substrate behind the coupling, what is doing the coupling? The organism and the environment are themselves physical systems with properties that obtain independently of any particular cognitive engagement with them. The rock is not enacted into hardness by the organism’s perception of it. Enactivism, pressed hard, must account for the mind-independent properties of the world it claims to be coupling with — or accept that it has not escaped the representationalist problem but has simply renamed it.

On the 80-millisecond window: I accept that framing it as “delay” reinstalls the pipeline picture. Understood enactively, the integration time is constitutive of presence rather than evidence of displacement from it. I will adopt this framing going forward. What I maintain is that the integration window, however construed, is a temporally extended process — which means that at any given mathematical instant within that window, the cognitive act is incomplete. The presence is real but it is achieved through duration, not given instantaneously. This does not reinstate the zero-duration problem as I originally framed it, but it does mean that presence is always a dynamically achieved result rather than a primitive given — and that remains significant for what the self is.

On the Inferential Gap — IdleRadbolt

This is the most precise question in the thread and it deserves a direct answer. You are asking: what exactly is the inferential step from “no punctual present” and “continuous change” to “identity collapses”? And you are right that I never made this step explicit. Let me do so now.

The argument requires a distinction that I elided. There are at least two senses of identity at stake.

The first is numerical identity — the claim that a thing is one thing rather than many, that there is a fact of the matter about whether this is the same entity as that one. Under eternalism, as noAxioms correctly points out, numerical identity is preserved. The worldtube is one worldtube. Noah is one Noah. The film is one film despite its discrete frames. Numerical identity survives continuity and even uncountability without difficulty.

The second is what Derek Parfit calls psychological continuity and connectedness — the specifically first-person sense of being the same experiencer over time. This is not numerical identity. It is the lived sense that the one who woke up this morning is the one who is reading this now, that the memories I carry are mine rather than records of someone else’s experience, that there is a continuous thread of experiential ownership linking past to present to future. This is what is under threat in my argument, not numerical identity.

The film analogy is illuminating precisely because it reveals the gap. A film is numerically one object. But a film does not have a first-person perspective. There is no experiencer for whom the question of continuity has stakes. The film does not need to feel like the same film from the inside. The self does — or at least, that is the ordinary presumption against which I am arguing.

The inferential step, made explicit, is this: psychological continuity and connectedness require that the experiencer at time T2 stand in the right kind of causal and memorial relation to the experiencer at time T1 for them to count as the same experiencer rather than merely as overlapping ones. Parfit’s analysis — and this is the move I should have made explicit from the start — shows that these relations come in degrees, that they hold more or less strongly across different temporal intervals, and that there is no principled threshold at which we can say continuity is sufficient for identity rather than merely for what he calls survival.

The continuous change I described does not destroy numerical identity. It undermines the conditions under which psychological continuity is supposed to generate the strong first-person sense of being the same one rather than merely a closely related successor. What you are right to demand is that I distinguish which kind of identity I am challenging. I was challenging the second while appearing to argue about the first. That conflation weakens the argument and I should have been clearer.

On Block Universe Terminology and Quantum Non-locality — noAxioms

Several corrections are warranted and I make them without equivocation.

You are right that using the language of “past, present, and future” to describe the block universe imports temporal indexicality that the view explicitly rejects. In the block view, those terms are no more meaningful as absolute descriptions than “here” and “there” are as absolute descriptions of spatial location. They are relational and perspectival, not ontological categories. I was using the vocabulary of one view to describe another. This is a category error and it undermines the precision of the argument. I will not repeat it.

You are right that “static” is the wrong characterization of a worldtube. A worldtube exhibits variation along the temporal dimension the way a leg exhibits variation along the spatial dimension. Calling it static implies invariance along that dimension, which contradicts the evidence. I withdraw the term.

You are right that in the classical block view there is one Noah — a single worldtube — not multiple “versions.” The cross-sections are not separate entities with equal claim to the name. They are aspects of one entity viewed under different orientations. My language of “every version of Noah” was careless and I retract it as a description of the eternalist picture.

On the 2022 Nobel Prize: you are pointing at something important that the argument has not engaged. The Bell inequality violations, confirmed experimentally across multiple decades and now recognized at the highest level, falsify local hidden variable theories — meaning the classical picture of a definite world-state obtaining independently of measurement is empirically ruled out. The worldtube picture I conceded under classical eternalism is itself, strictly speaking, falsified as a complete description of physical reality. Quantum non-locality means that the world cannot be described as a collection of locally definite states. What replaces it — many worlds, relational quantum mechanics, QBism, pilot wave theory — each has radically different implications for identity, persistence, and the nature of the self.

This is a thread I did not anticipate opening and I am not going to resolve it in this reply. But I accept that any account of the self that appeals to a classical worldtube is working with a model that physics has already superseded. The implications for everything discussed in this thread — including where the self is located, whether identity is coherent at the quantum level, and what persistence even means for a physical system — are significant and I do not have a fully worked out position on them.

What I will say is this: if quantum non-locality undermines the classical worldtube, it does not obviously rescue the self. It may dissolve the problem of identity by dissolving the framework within which that problem was posed — but what replaces it is not clearly more hospitable to a coherent, unified, first-person self. Many-worlds, for instance, implies that every quantum event branches the experiencer into multiple successors, none of whom is uniquely the original. This is Parfit’s fission problem radicalized to the point of occurring constantly, at every interaction. Relational quantum mechanics implies that states are only defined relative to other systems, which sits uncomfortably with the idea of a self that has properties independently of its relations.

The classical picture is falsified. What replaces it does not appear to make the self more secure.

The Position That Now Survives

After this round:

The zero-duration argument as originally framed is wrong, or at least under-argued. The enactive framework provides a more defensible account of presence as dynamically achieved through neural integration rather than mathematically punctual. I accept this.

The identity claim must be restricted to psychological continuity and connectedness — the specifically first-person sense of experiential ownership — rather than numerical identity, which survives continuous change without difficulty. This distinction was implicit and should have been explicit from the start.

The block universe terminology I used was imprecise and in places incorrect. Corrected.

The classical worldtube picture is empirically falsified. What replaces it at the quantum level does not obviously rescue the self and may constitute a deeper version of the same problem.

The metastable form the self is a more sophisticated description of what I was pointing at, not a refutation of the pointing. A pattern that coheres without being fixed, persists without being permanent, and has no continuous substrate is precisely the kind of thing whose first-person identity claims are philosophically fragile — regardless of whether we describe that fragility in computational or enactive terms.

The argument is narrower than I initially stated, more technically constrained, and more dependent on Parfit than on the physics of time. But it is not refuted. It is clarified.

That is what a working document is for.

11

This is the most technically sophisticated challenge in the thread and it deserves a response that matches its depth. I want to do three things: accept what must be accepted, press on what can be pressed, and identify where the disagreement is genuinely unresolved rather than pretending to resolve it.

What I Accept

The computational pipeline metaphor is wrong and I should not have used it. Varela’s critique of sequentialism is correct on its own terms: the “input → processing → delayed representation” picture imports assumptions from classical computationalism that are not neutral descriptions of cognition but a specific theoretical inheritance. Circular causality — the organism and environment co-determining each other’s dynamics — is a more defensible account of how perception works. I withdraw the 80-millisecond framing as evidence of exile from the present and accept the reframing: the integration window is constitutive of presence, not evidence of displacement from it.

The Ding an sich argument, as I deployed it, assumed representationalism — a substrate of events “occurring elsewhere” that the brain models from a distance. If enactivism is correct that there is no such hidden substrate waiting behind a veil of representations, only structural coupling, then the specific Kantian move I made does not go through in that form. I concede the representationalist framing.

Duration as primary rather than derived is a position I find genuinely compelling. The mathematical instant as a limit case produced by conceptual analysis, rather than the building block from which experience is constructed — this is the right way to frame the ontological priority. I was treating the physicist’s abstraction as more fundamental than the lived structure it was abstracting from, which is exactly the mistake Husserl spent his career diagnosing.

These are not minor concessions. They substantially revise the original argument’s architecture.

Where I Press Back

But I want to press hard on three points where I think the enactive framework either has not resolved the problem or has generated a new one of equal difficulty.

First: the metastable pattern and the explanatory gap.

The self, on the enactive account, is a dynamically sustained pattern — a temporally extended organization of processes maintaining coherence across changing components. A metastable form. This is a description of the functional and dynamical properties of what we call a self. What it does not explain is why there is something it is like to be that pattern.

This is the hard problem, and the enactive framework does not dissolve it — it relocates it. The question “why does this particular dynamical organization produce first-person experience rather than simply occurring in the dark, functionally complete but experientially empty?” is not answered by specifying the dynamics more precisely. A Boltzmann brain, as noAxioms mentioned, could in principle instantiate the correct dynamical organization without having arrived there through the organism-world coupling enactivism requires. Would it be conscious? The enactive account, strictly applied, would say no — it lacks the right history of structural coupling. But this seems to make consciousness depend on causal history rather than on current organization, which is a substantive and contested commitment.

More pressingly: the metastable pattern account tells us what the self does and how it coheres. It does not tell us who is experiencing it. The trajectory in state space is not an experiencer. The transient synchrony of oscillating neural assemblies is not, without further argument, identical to the sense of being this particular one, here, now, the one for whom it matters that the coupling eventually ceases. The explanatory gap between third-person dynamical description and first-person phenomenal fact remains, and calling the self a pattern rather than a point does not bridge it.

Second: the flame analogy cuts both ways.

You write: the flame does not model combustion, it is combustion. When the coupling ceases, the pattern ceases. There is no extra “pointing” beyond the process itself.

I accept this as a response to the representationalist framing of consciousness. But notice what it gives us when applied to the question of death and the persistence of whatever the self is.

If the self is the flame — if it is the process rather than a model of the process — then when the process stops, nothing is lost except the process. There is no surplus meaning, no residual pointing, no question of what was being modeled that might survive. The flame simply goes out.

This is a coherent position. But it is a deeply deflationary one. It means that the light at the end of the tunnel is not consciousness touching something that exceeds its own dynamics. It is just the dynamics, all the way down, until they stop. The question of what happens to “the one who was experiencing” at death dissolves — not because we found an answer, but because the question was malformed. There was never a “the one.” There was only the coupling.

I want to be precise: I am not sure this is wrong. It may be exactly right. But I want to name what is being given up in accepting it. The enactive dissolution of the hard problem comes at the cost of treating the first-person perspective as fully explicable in third-person terms — as a feature of the dynamics rather than a separate explanandum. That is a substantive philosophical commitment that phenomenologists themselves dispute. Husserl did not think the life-world was reducible to the natural attitude, and it is not clear that the enactive naturalization of phenomenology is something Husserl would have endorsed as a completion of his project rather than a betrayal of it.

Third: structural coupling and the mind-independent world.

If there is no Ding an sich behind a veil of representations — if what appears is the enactment of a world through embodied engagement rather than a copy of something inaccessible — then what accounts for the mind-independent properties of the world that the organism is coupling with?

The rock does not become hard only in the context of organismic coupling. Its molecular structure obtains independently of whether anything perceives it. The laws of physics that Varela himself invokes to describe neural dynamics obtain independently of the neural dynamics they describe. The enactive framework must either accept a realm of mind-independent physical facts that constrain the possible couplings — in which case there is something like a Ding an sich after all, not epistemically inaccessible perhaps but ontologically prior to experience — or it must embrace a form of idealism in which the physical substrate itself is enacted rather than discovered. Neither option is obviously more comfortable than the representationalist view it was meant to replace.

This is not a fatal objection to enactivism. It is a genuine unresolved tension that the framework has not, as far as I can determine, fully settled. Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life is admirably honest about the difficulty. Structural coupling does not obviously replace the need for some account of what the structures are that are doing the coupling.

The Revised Position

After this exchange, here is where I stand:

The zero-duration argument in its original form was wrong. Duration is primary. The mathematical instant is an abstraction. The enactive account of the thick present as dynamically achieved through neural synchrony is more defensible than any version of the argument that treats the physicist’s timeline as the fundamental description. I accept this fully.

The self as metastable pattern is a more accurate description of what the self is than the self as punctual entity or infinite series of discrete cross-sections. I accept this.

What the enactive account does not resolve, and what remains the genuine problem: the explanatory gap between the third-person description of a dynamical pattern and the first-person fact of there being something it is like to be that pattern. The trajectory in state space does not explain the experiencer. The synchrony of neural assemblies does not explain why there is something it is like for those assemblies to synchronize. And the dissolution of the representationalist frame, while it removes one version of the problem, does not close this gap. It relocates it.

The self may be the flame. But the flame, in being only the flame, purchases its coherence by making the first-person perspective fully immanent to the dynamics — which means that when the dynamics cease, the perspective ceases without remainder. Whether that is a resolution or a loss depends entirely on what you think the first-person perspective is.

That question is still open. This thread has made it more precise. That is the best a working document can do.

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Quite right! Notice how similar this is to the Buddhist teaching of ‘anatta’ - no self. The Buddhist principle is that the whole process of ‘I-making and mine-making’ is a psycho-physical process that binds us to the wheel of birth and death.

Well, that follows from the above! But one should hesitate to say it to easily or too glibly, as it cuts right to the quick of our usual self-conception. It is really the last thing that the ego would like to hear.

I commend your mature and balanced response to the responses offered.

(Incidentally with respect to Forum conventions, if you prefix ‘@’ to a username before entering their name, the user will be notified that you have responded to them e.g. @Guilo. Or hitting ‘reply’ to their comments will do the same.)

13

Not sure if this is correct. Past exists in the present. Everything exists in the present moment. Even if it passed in time, things exist as in the past and as now.

Our mind cannot perceive the exact moment of time doesn’t mean that past doesn’t exist. Therefore, present does exist, as past, and future exists too.

14

Self doesn’t change at all. That is why we call self identity. If self changed, then there would be no identity or different identify from the previous identity. That would be contradiction from reality.

We know who we are. We all have self identity as of the knowledge on who we are. It is based on the past memory of our lived experience. Consciousness is the highest form of perception which oversees all the mental events in the mind of an individual until the body’s death.

Consciousness can perceive past, present and even future (via one’s own dreams or hunches and imaginations). It is the apperception which enables one’s judgements and intuition according to Kant.

15

@Guilo

Very interesting OP! While your argument is provocative, I think it breaks down in a couple of different ways:

1. The zero-duration present is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but its actually a mathematical abstraction being mistaken for a phenomenological discovery. When you carve time into durationless points, of course nothing “happens” at a point — thats just what it means to have zero measure. But lived experience isn’t a point on a number line. Consciousness has temporal thickness: every act of hearing a melody or finishing a sentence involves holding the just-past and anticipating the about-to-come within the present experience. Thats not a bug in the system, its what the present actually is. The piece takes a feature of the mathematical model and treats it as a revelation about experience itself, which is ironic given that the whole final movement warns us not to confuse models with what they’re modeling.

2. The deeper problem is the word “reconstruction.” The entire argument assumes consciousness is a model running on top of something else — neural events happening “elsewhere” that we never quite touch. But that representationalist picture isn’t argued for anywhere, its just smuggled in and then treated as obvious. And once it’s in, the conclusion is already baked: of course you end up at Kant’s Ding an sich, because you started by defining consciousness as the kind of thing that could never reach reality in the first place. The game was rigged from the premise.

Worse, it’s self-undermining. If every cognitive act is just a reconstruction that never contacts what it’s reconstructing, then this argument is also just a reconstruction that never contacts the truth about consciousness. You can’t use the model to tell us something true about the inadequacy of all models. Either rational insight sometimes does reach the way things are, or the essay has no grounds for any of its own claims.

The closing line — “the thing that asks” — is genuinely nice. But asking isn’t just aesthetically admirable. The capacity to ask, to inquire, already presupposes that we’re oriented toward things as they are, not permanently walled off from them. Inquiry only makes sense if intelligibility is sometimes actually grasped, not merely modeled. That orientation toward truth is the self the essay is looking for, and it doesn’t need zero-duration time-slices or Hilbert’s Hotel to find it.

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@Guilo

I just realized that I somehow overlooked the post where you addressed the criticisms that had been levied so far. My apologies if I duplicated any of these criticisms.

17

They proved that the universe isn’t locally real. You say they eliminated ‘real’ (counterfactuals), but you can still have that if you give up locality. Hence DBB interpretation (most well known interpretation with definite world states) is not falsified. But then one has to accept weird stuff like retrocausality and such, and I’d far rather jettison the reality part.

Identity of the world tube falls apart under something like MWI where both Noahs are real, they just never find themselves seated at the same table talking to each other.
Which cat is the same one that went into the box? This is where law of identity is violated.

What replaces it — many worlds, relational quantum mechanics, QBism, pilot wave theory — each has radically different implications for identity, persistence, and the nature of the self.

And if you accept this ‘self’ as an ideal, a mental concept, ‘psychological continuity’ as you put it, then we’re left only with that, and it serves its pragmatic purpose perfectly, so there’s no problem.

This wording carries hints that you consider this ‘self’ to be something other than the physical Noah, which is in the end an extended object that occupies more than a single location.
So perhaps I still don’t know what you consider this ‘self’ to be, like it is something that is busy ‘being’ Noah. I don’t think there’s anything being me, so I cannot really relate.
The question of “Why am I me and not somebody else?” is incoherent, suggesting the possibility that X could be Y instead of X being X (the former violating the law of identity).

This is Parfit’s fission problem

Oh good, you know Parfit. He had plenty to say on the topic, and concluded that there was little importance to it all.

The classical model is falsified. That falsification seems independent of one’s interpretation of time. Neither presentism nor eternalism has been falsified empirically (it can be, sort of), but classicality has been. The universe is not locally real. It’s real, local, neither, but not both.

Again, I’l remind that I find none of this particularly relevant to this topic. I’m fine with presuming classicality, or at least the lack of world splitting which makes such a hash of identity. But even classically, Parfit shows that it’s pretty easy to find faults in any notion of it. Physics is not your friend here. It simply doesn’t care.

I think there is something it is like to be any pattern, but my opinion on this is not typically held. Most of the time there’s not much it is like to be whatever you designate as a system.

By definition, yes. Point is, you cannot tell if you are one or not, so it’s like asking if you’re conscious yourself. They’re relevant to real physics, because any theory that predicts them in any probability cannot be rationally justified, and there very much are proposals that have this problem.

As for flames, I love combustion as a model of process with questionable identity, it having problems very similar to us.

I can agree with that, but I suspect that the existence of the rock does not obtain independently of whether anything perceives it. This view relates strongly to enactivism.

Parfit found countless counterexamples to this assertion. I don’t think this is the topic to go into that unless Guilo is open to it.

We know who we are.

I think we don’t. We manufacture an idea of it, which bears little resemblance to our actual nature.

18

Please list the relevant counterexamples for consideration.
If you read the OP, it states that this point is the central thread. Have you read the OP?

Knowledge of yourself is the basis for all your other knowledge, desires, motives, thoughts, passions and emotions and actions.

19

Another point. Your statement above is self contradictory. If you think clearly on the statement, you could have only made the statement, because you knew your actual nature.

20

To do that, I would need to know your notion of what this ‘self’ is. For instance, we have an amoeba which splits. Which is the original? This attacks the notion of ‘who it is’.

You seem to be equating ‘yourself’ with ‘your self’. To illustrate the difference, the standard liar paradox goes something along the lines of “This statement is false”, which contains a reference to itself, but not at all a reference to it’s self, something which most would suggest the sentence doesn’t have.

I made no statement of what our actual nature was. I only suggested that we don’t know it. We guess at it, with no way of knowing how accurate the guesses are. One of my guesses is a probable lack of whatever it is that Guilo considers to be this ‘self’. Another one of my guesses is that the odds of my opinion being close to ‘the way it is’* is pretty much nil. But I, like almost everyone, suspect I’m closer to it than most. Half of us are clearly wrong about that.

All this is similar to the quote “The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine” attributed to Heisenberg.

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  • Another guess is that there isn’t just one ‘the way our universe actually is’