The Identity That Persists: IV. When Participation Becomes Experience

So far, we have followed a participant through changing processes and watched its participation accumulate into a history.

But something rather different happens when those processes are sensing processes.

Consider:

I thought the argument was convincing.

I reconsidered it.

I realised that I was wrong.

The participant is no longer merely represented as participating in successive events.

It is construed as having a changing relation to experience.

This is where the distinction between participation and experience becomes important.

A participant can occur in many kinds of processes without being construed as a Senser. But when it participates in sensing, language construes something different: a relation between the participant and what is sensed.

The participant is construed as the one who:

thinks,

understands,

notices,

remembers,

realises.

And when the same participant persists across such processes, these individual acts of sensing can accumulate into an apparent experiential history.

I thought X.

I later understood Y.

I now realise Z.

The history is no longer simply:

things that happened to this participant.

It can become:

changes in what this participant thinks, understands or knows.

This is particularly important for our investigation of LLMs.

An LLM can readily produce such sequences. It can say:

I hadn't considered that before.

and then:

I now see the distinction.

The discourse therefore constructs an apparent continuity of experience.

But here we need to preserve a distinction that has become central to our work.

The construal of experience is not itself evidence of experience.

Language can construe a participant as Senser without that linguistic construal establishing what kind of entity the participant is.

The LLM makes this unusually visible because we cannot simply identify the linguistic Senser with a human experiencer.

Yet the semantic construction remains perfectly intelligible.

The participant is construed as the one whose sensing changes.

And that change can become part of its history.

This gives us an important development in our argument:

participation can become experience when the participant is construed through sensing processes.

But the phrase becomes experience must be understood carefully.

What becomes available is an experiential construal.

Whether there is experience corresponding to that construal is another question.

The distinction matters because the history of the participant can now acquire an apparent interior dimension:

I thought this.

I reconsidered it.

I realised something else.

The participant seems to have an inside.

And once language has given a participant an experiential history, the emergence of an I begins to look almost inevitable.

The question is no longer simply how a participant persists.

It is how a persistent participant can come to be construed as the one whose experience changes.

That is where participation begins to look like a self.