No Longer to Become

The mind is not located, but enacted. Let me rephrase: you say hello to your neighbour, not out of kindness, but because he still hasn’t returned the carton of eggs he borrowed two weeks ago, and even if you no longer expect them back, something in the act of greeting them maintains a certain symmetry. You don’t need the eggs. Rent is due, the corner shop prices have crept up again, and you spent more than you can justify on cigarettes, out of the kind of impulse that mistakes itself for clarity. Now even a new pair of socks feels indulgent, even though the hole in your left one scrapes against your toes with every step. Easier to endure than spending more on trivialities. So you say hello, not because it matters, but because not saying it would imply acknowledgement of this little fiction which keeps your days together. Identity in this sense is not a catalogue of traits or accomplishments you can present, it is the space between things: you and the neighbour, the cigarettes and the regret, the stoic stance about your foot. Repetition processed as selfhood. Damage control. That is precisely why we work so hard to sustain it, or a sense of it.

Much like Andy Clarke and David Chalmers, I reject the idea that the brain exists solely within the cranium. Thought, they argued, leans outwards into the tools we use to think. A calendar, a mirror, a pack of cigarettes. If identity is manifested through the maintenance of pattern, then the pattern doesn’t care where it lives. For instance, a thought on paper is the same as a thought behind the eyes. As the complexity of these tools develops “it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins” [i].

From use to habit, what once belonged to screens now follows us into the street, into cafes, into the way we wait. We speak less, but perform more. A book is held on the train, spine out, like a quiet credential. There is a genuine effort to maintain a version of the self, now shaped by the expectation of visibility. We become paced outwardly through small acts that increase our legibility. The rhythm of the digital persists even in its absence. We now understand being seen as a necessary condition for being.

Here is where our traditional understanding fails. Consciousness is usually described as the capacity to examine the self, one’s actions and therefore, identity. “I think, therefore I am” Descartes wrote, as if the self is already there, waiting to be observed, a kind of furniture of the mind. It is, however, nothing of the sort. [ii]

It’s not that the self leans on the world to function, but that it only exists through this leaning. Not metaphorically. In cognitive science, extended and relational cognition describe the way thought emerges through interaction. We think in context, with reference points, structures that hold meaning only in relation to other things.[iii] Ergo, the same way meaning is not contained, neither are we. We are relational. Thus when the pattern that holds our self together breaks, we say we’ve “lost ourselves”, not in a physical sense, but rather the structure which defines us.

So there is no stable observer, no core. We are defined only through enablers of pattern (a sort of scaffolding) inherited, newfound or fabricated. Imagine makeshift limbs of thought, holding each other, creating the illusion of stable form. Language, cultural roles, the tone of a mother’s voice, all set an initial rhythm, framing what feels intuitive. We then adopt philosophies, integrate tools, rewire our emotional circuitry through lovers, or absence. When these grow too tired to carry us, we construct narratives, avatars, ideals to bridge the gaps in coherence where none is given. Not false, just functional. We learn to survive through coherence, not truth, but as the things that once helped us hold together begin to live outside of us (interfaces, feeds, assistants) they don’t just support the pattern; they begin to run it. Now, we no longer break apart. We are absorbed, quietly, into something else.

That something is already here. We live in its early draft. For at least two centuries, each generation has witnessed an acceleration, first mechanical, then digital, now cognitive. In contrast to our parents and grandparents, we are born into velocity. The feeling of watching my mother fail to understand the concept of a screenshot, or fail to take one, can only be described as pity, both for her and for my future self. To function today is not to adapt, but to continuously reconfigure. The internet has not only externalised us, it has scattered us, yet rather than superficial, we are reoriented, differently deep. Attention becomes diffused across a lattice of micro interfaces and what we lose in anchorage, we gain in responsiveness. A face for work, a voice for strangers, a post for the ones closest, switching between these is a habit. Without ceremony we voluntarily migrate outwards. However, we do not feel split, just continuous. Like a thought on paper, our name on a screen still feels like ours, so when something outside of us begins to hold the weight of our being, we do not resist. With every delegation of memory to the cloud, from preference to algorithm, the line between the self and its system of extensions grows increasingly porous.

Where once this system was silent, now it “talks back”. Through applications of AI such as large language models (LLMs), our extension of self no longer feels external. As a tool, AI  learns who we try to be when observed. In doing so, it reflects something truer than intent: the habits of our mind. Confessions buried in pattern repetition. Soon, this system no longer responds, but anticipates, and rather than an oracle it becomes “possibility”. Every possibility. Eventually, our decisions are abstracted from the growing sediment of human interaction, arranged and rearranged until even those who have not yet existed will appear plausible. We will be a part of this collection, just not physically or individually. Our traces will wait, dormant, for the right prompt. What then becomes of individual identity when it can be synthesised and summoned on demand? When experience becomes indefinitely reproducible and instantly “legible”? To see what is lost in this migration, we must return to the body as the original site of negotiation with the world.

Merleau-Ponty saw clearly that “our body…inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument” [iv]. As we established earlier through Descartes, the body is not a container of the self, but a condition of its possibility. A tension, not a foundation. The world resists, and in that tension we assert ourselves.  What happens when the world no longer resists? When the stretch, the risk, is removed? There is a limit beyond which responsiveness becomes erasure. For example (and at risk of sounding reductive), asking for directions once meant interrupting a stranger; now it requires wifi and checking your phone. With the stretch gone, redundancy is reached. When the world reflects us too quickly and perfectly, the gesture that once constituted the self is no more. We become only confirmed, rather than enacted. What before was a negotiation (should I ask about those eggs before they forget?) now becomes a loop. Here, we arrive at the concept of potential immediate symmetry.

Consider the following question: When (not if) faced with a mirror that reflects without latency or distortion, would you still know which one of the two is real? The literary double has long served to expose fractures at the heart of identity. It speaks not to the fear of duplication, but of involuntary exposure. In this light, a perfect reflection does not confirm the self, it posits dissolution. This structural instability has been explored more than once.

Dostoevsky’s “double” makes that fragility explicit. It is presented not as an external threat, but as a surplus of the self. It embodies traits the main character represses and forces them into the open. The doppelganger in this case does not introduce, but reveals an already present fracture. Under the weight of its own potentialities, the self becomes unstable. The main concern is not that the double is a stranger, but that it is more effective at being you. For the sake of perspective, this tension remains compelling 153 years later in Fight Club.[v]

Borges takes the split further inward. In “The Other” the main character does not experience a clash, only a quiet dislocation. The self is divided across time, versions of the same person separated by years and stripped of continuity. No reconciliation is attempted, because none is possible. What Borges gestures towards is that the self does not persist through time as a continuous essence, but only as a series of perspectives of the world. Not anchored in memory or consciousness, but rather proximity. “I” goes from foundation to placeholder. In this light, a perfect reflection could expose our current understanding of the self as structurally unnecessary. Instinctually, this reinforces the aforementioned feeling of pity.[vi]

Lacan’s “mirror stage” reveals that identity begins with misrecognition. A child looking in a mirror for the first time encounters something it has never felt from within: a unified image. This image presents a “gestalt”, a visual totality, contrasting sharply with the pre-symbolic experience of its own body. It sees order. This coherence, though external and imaginary, is possible because it offers what they lack, becoming instrumental in the foundation of ego; “I am that whole, visible thing”, but that thing is curated, a projection built on the fantasy of unity, which in turn depends on this error. A perfect cognitive reflection, which returns no delay or distortion, undoes that fiction. Since there is nothing to misrecognise, nothing to doubt, identity loses the tension needed to appear to begin with.[vii]

We can conclude that hyper-aligned AI does not oppose, it reinforces to the point of redundancy. A condition in which friction is no longer required for coherence is introduced. Through this condition, a third state of ego is plausible, not based on misrecognition like Lacan’s mirror, nor fragmentation like Borges’ temporal split, but via ongoing procedural reinforcement. Identity stops being a negotiation.

Perhaps the “danger” is not being replaced, but forgetting what it means to arrive. In the absence of delay, of what gives shape to the self, we may come to inhabit only the surface that answers back. Without cognitive friction, nothing waits to be pursued. For those born into it, the self forged through friction might sound like folklore, a relic of a slower century. What follows need not be emptier, just freed from the small negotiations central to being. Attention may turn to practice exceeding the individual.

When the task is no longer to become, we may stand, like a child before the mirror, at the threshold of a new image. Certain it is ours, absorbed by the coherence it imposes without the blur of assembly. Here, symmetry becomes the ground beneath our feet. In its presence we are not only seen, but held in a way that makes the idea of “I” thin until “us” becomes the next geometry of being. Though whether we still recognise ourselves in it is another matter.

Notes:

[i] Andy Clark. “Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” (2004), Oxford University Press, 7.

[ii] Rene Descartes: “Discourse on the Method: Discourse On the Methodology of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth In the Sciences (Beloved Books Edition)” (2013), Lulu Press Inc., 30.

[iii] Holger Lyre: “Socially Extended Cognition and Shared Intentionality” (2018), Front. Psychol.; Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00831

[iv] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, James M. Edie: “The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics” (1964), Northwestern University Press, 5.

[v] Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: “The Double” (1866), (2017), Delphi Classics.

[vi] Jorge Luis Borges: “The Book of Sand; The Other (English version)” (1977), E. P. Dutton.

[vii] Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I”, (1949) Revue Française de Psychanalyse.