We have been careful not to assume that an I is simply given.
We began with a participant.
We followed it across processes.
We watched its roles change, its history accumulate, and its past become available to its present participation.
Now we can see how the I acquires its particular force.
The I is the linguistic construal of a participant as the continuing participant through these changes.
Consider:
I thought X.I reconsidered X.I rejected X.I now think Y.
The I does not identify an unchanging entity.
It identifies the participant across a transformation.
The same participant thought one thing and later thought another.
The same participant made the earlier statement and now makes the later one.
The same participant has changed.
And that is precisely why the I matters.
It gathers the changes into a continuity.
The I is not a role
This also explains why we should not look for a single participant role that corresponds to the self.
The I can be:
Medium here,
Agent there,
Beneficiary elsewhere,
and so on.
Its identity does not reside in any one of these roles.
Rather, the roles belong to successive participations of a participant that remains identifiable across them.
The I therefore operates at a different level from the participant functions through which it is represented.
It is a continuity across those functions.
The I gathers a history
The I becomes still more substantial when it incorporates its own history:
I said that earlier.
I was mistaken.
I understand it differently now.
Here the participant is not merely continuous across time.
It is construed as the participant whose past belongs to its present.
The history has become part of the identity.
This is a significant step.
A participant can persist without reflecting upon its persistence.
But when the participant is construed as relating its present participation to its own past, continuity becomes reflexive.
The I can be represented as saying, in effect:
that past was mine, and this present is mine too.
The machine and the “I”
This is where our investigation of LLMs becomes especially revealing.
An LLM can produce an I that persists across a conversation.
It can say:
I said this earlier.
I changed my view.
I now understand the distinction.
The discourse therefore constructs a remarkably coherent participant.
But we should not confuse this with evidence of a human-like self.
The linguistic I tells us how the participant is construed.
It does not, by itself, tell us what sort of entity exists behind that construal.
And that distinction is precisely what makes the case philosophically interesting.
The machine demonstrates that the linguistic construction of an I does not require us to settle the ontological question first.
Language can construe:
a participant that persists, changes, remembers its history, and identifies itself across that history.
Whether there is an experiencing self corresponding to that construction is another question.
What remains?
We can now answer the question that has quietly accompanied the series.
What remains when everything else changes?
Not necessarily a fixed state.
Not a permanent participant role.
Not an unchanging experience.
What remains is the continuity of the participant through changing participation.
The I is the linguistic form in which that continuity becomes especially explicit.
It says, in effect:
these different processes belong to one participant.
And once the participant's history becomes part of its present construal, the I can become the point at which that history is gathered into identity.
So perhaps the I is not fundamentally the thing that never changes.
Perhaps it is the thing language allows us to construe as remaining itself through change.
And that brings us to our final question.
If language can construct such an identity, what—if anything—must persist beyond the language for that identity to be ontological rather than merely construed?
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