Your Identity

That thing you see: look at the center. Try and focus on it, letting the complexity of the surrounding lines sort of morph into a blur. It almost looks like it's moving, doesn't it?

That's you.

That's me. That's all of us.

I know, weak sauce, right? You're shown a picture of some kind of weaving project and expected to shift your entire sense of self to accept this notion? Not very reasonable.

If it helps, it's a metaphor. If that doesn't help, everything is a metaphor.

Here's a link to the mathematical description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics)

You'll find that it's technically a 2-dimensional representation of a 248-dimensional object that exists as basically the most complex structure representable without hitting the limit of infinity. That's not the best description of it, but feel free to peruse the background information and draw your own conclusions - that thing about making your own meaning to arrive at truth is much more important than glib attempts to oversimplify mathematics, and you could get lost in the argument over how to properly explain it pretty easily, thus missing the point.

Close your eyes.

You have a body. Feel it. Experience the sensation of being bound by physical limits. You're probably sitting down right now, but if you're not, it's at least a safe bet that your feet are touching the ground, or just that some part of you is in contact with some material that connects you to the ground. If you're floating right now, then you win the game.

Find your center. Most people imagine it somewhere around their solar plexus, or maybe their gut, but the general symmetry of your physical construction paired with the laws of gravity suggest that you have one, and you can imagine where it is.

This is the center of E8, too. This is all our centers.

Sorry, that probably seems weird - just entertain the notion, though: do you own your center? If you do, then what do you get out of this sense of ownership? Does it make you feel powerful, or that you possess some piece of this universe that others don't? It's okay to admit this: you do have power - more than you realize, probably.

But this power is not owned by any one of us. This center is a singularity of consciousness that represents the limit of all information within this universe, and while you are connected to it, and you can feel it, it is not you.

You are not your body.

I read somewhere that repeating things in threes is supposed to have some sort of rhetorical power, and tap into transcultural manifestations of ritual significance, so let's hope that worked.

But seriously, you're not your body. Here's how the metaphor works: look at the center of E8, and then look past that central circle to find a single thread, starting anywhere. Follow it. Don't worry if it's blurry and you're having trouble following it, and you think you may have skipped from one to the other: it's such a vastly imperfect representation of what it would actually look like, it's not really worth worrying about. Do you see how when you start with one, it almost immediately branches out into something that wends through and loops circuitously throughout the entire framework? It's almost maddening to think about, right? Like, you could spend an entire lifetime trying to follow that one thread and see where it might connect with others, and carry that all the way until some imagined endpoint that just as likely loops back to where it started?

Protip: you are doing that right now.

Your sensory perception has a limit. Sight is an interpretation of photons that are actually an aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum, and each one is bound by a speed limit (represented in physics as "c"). Sound is a physical vibration of molecules interpreted by a vast series of tiny bones and skin in your ears (as well as felt by other parts of you, if it's loud enough). Touch is the feedback of forces that hold together the atoms of your body, between the nucleus and outer shells of which is a scaled space equal to that of the distance between a peanut and the edges of a baseball stadium (for those unfamiliar with how big that is, here's a useful link: https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/3hzbkj/overview_of_mlb_stadium_dimensions_very/cuc2jhj/). Taste and smell are actually a tandem of the olfactory senses, which interpret chemical composition to provide information to your brain (and often trigger memory and emotion to a level not sufficiently explained by science).

Of course, there are more senses than that. The proximal awareness you have of the relative space your body takes up and its orientation compared to other objects around you - that's a sense. The passage of time as you are reading this sentence and the recognition that there is a movement of sorts that presses you forward into "the future" - that's kind of a big one.

We also know that those last two are the same thing: they call it space-time. It's complicated, but it's pretty simple to understand: if you walked over to something fairly distant from your current field of vision at a constant rate, then you could say it was either several hundred yards or, depending on that rate, a few minutes away. Distance implies time unless you can teleport - which, given your imagination, you can.

So, then, how does this connect to your identity? Well, what do your senses tell you? Let's say you had a perfect memory, and you could record with the utmost precision every single perception from any and all physical apparatus you possess and play them back at will, and you could step outside of the time-space continuum and review every single one... would that be you? Are you the sum total of every action and word you have ever committed or spoken?

If so, then where would your center be while you were reviewing this data, and who would be reviewing it?

And who, then, are you when you dream?

At the center of it all, we're all more or less honest storytellers, when it comes to the question of "Your Identity," and part of our search for any kind of objective truths involve the necessary recognition that any identity which might have the authority to claim omniscience would also require the distinct lack of a physical body in the traditional sense of what counts as such in terms of human experience.

It's not exactly the immanentization of the eschaton, but it is at least the awareness that if enough people believe that the Anthropocene is over... then it's over.

Humans might just be the last natural disaster, but that doesn't mean they have to be consumed by the storm.

Abandon all Eschatology, ye who enter here.