You Are — Who?

In week five, they offered to let me edit my own memory. And I agreed, because by that point, “offered to edit my memory” ranked roughly eighth on my personal leaderboard of insane events, after “teleported a glass” and before “learned Earth is an incubator.”

(The leaderboard, by the way, is growing faster than I can keep up with in this notebook. I’ll need a second one soon. Or a third. Or a spreadsheet. Although no: a spreadsheet means the cloud, the cloud means servers, servers live on the first floor, and I’m trying to work on the fourth. Nobody’s invented Excel for cause-and-effect yet. Maybe that’ll be my contribution to civilization.)

Wei Lin explained it like this:

— Everything you’ve done so far has been “outside.” You’ve seen the stack. Moved glasses. Felt stones and branches. All of that is the external world. Now — the internal.

— What do you mean, “internal”?

— Your consciousness. Your memory. Your “self.” What you consider to be you.

— “Consider”?

— Consider. Because — and here’s the unpleasant news — “you” is also a construct. Like a table. Like an apple. Like a glass. Assembled from parts, held together by connections, existing as long as the connections hold.

— You’re saying “I” is IKEA furniture?

— I’m saying “I” is a process, not an object. And like any process, it can be reconfigured.

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I need to talk about memory here. Memory as material. The stuff “I” is made of. The neurobiology of memory (hippocampus, synapses, long-term potentiation) I know from textbooks, and it turns out to be roughly one percent of what you need to know.

Think about it: who are you? Who are you, not “what’s your name”? What makes you — you? If you remove the name, are you still there? If you remove the profession, are you still there? If you remove the body (hypothetically), is there still a “you”?

Most people, if you ask this, after some confusion will answer: “I am my memories.” Because everything else — name, profession, body — those are attributes. You can swap them (people change names, professions, and — within limits — bodies). But memories are “me.” They’re the continuous tape connecting a seven-year-old boy drawing a house with a fence to a twenty-eight-year-old physicist sitting on the porch of a dacha that isn’t a dacha. Without that tape, there’s no “me.” There’s a collection of organs functioning in a particular sequence. A computer without an operating system: fans spinning, LEDs blinking, but on the screen — a cursor on a black background and not a single program.

Memory is the operating system of “I.” It’s what boots up when you wake and partially unloads when you sleep. It’s what turns a bundle of neurons into a person.

And Wei Lin was proposing I edit the code.

(“Edit the code of your own personality.” I reread that line in the notebook and the pencil hovered over the page.

We — humanity, eight billion fragile constructs — are used to thinking of “I” as a given. Like height or eye color: it is what it is, don’t like it, deal with it. Therapy tries to “help” you accept yourself. Self-help tries to “improve” you. Religion tries to “save” your soul. But all three start from the same assumption: “you” are a fixed object that can be worked on but fundamentally is. Like a table: you can repaint it, repair it, even move it. But a table stays a table.

Wei Lin says: no. You’re a program, not a table. And like any program, you can be rewritten. Rewritten. Not improved, not patched. From scratch. Keeping only the kernel — the thing that runs the program, not what the program does.

The scariest thing in programming is refactoring. Scarier than bugs, crashes, or deadlines. When you take working code — code that works, maybe crooked, maybe slow, but it works — and you rewrite it. Knowing the new code might not work. That in the process you might break what was working. That “better” isn’t guaranteed. And “worse” is entirely possible.

Rewrite is refactoring a personality, performed without Ctrl+Z or any possibility of rolling back to the previous version: no backup is provided here. You rewrite yourself — and if the new version doesn’t set, the way badly mixed concrete doesn’t set, you become an exhibit: living, walking, drinking tea and knowing that something has been lost without which tea has no taste; or a Heptarch; or something else for which even the Academy has no name.

Seryozha — my Seryozha, with the soldering iron and the philosophy — once said: “The most dangerous thing is fixing what works.” He meant the cryostat; but he could just as well have meant everything.)