We began this series with a simple observation.
A participant can persist.
It can participate in one process and then another. It can move from doing to sensing, from sensing to saying, from saying to doing again. Its participant roles can change while the discourse continues to construe the participations as belonging to one participant.
Then we discovered something more.
The participant can have a past.
That past can be inherited through discourse, brought into the present, reinterpreted and even transformed. The participant can change through its history without ceasing to be construed as the participant whose history it is.
We have therefore arrived at a rather remarkable point.
Perhaps the I does not simply have a history.
Perhaps the history helps to make the “I”.
That claim needs to be handled carefully.
We are not saying that a person's entire identity is produced by language.
Nor are we saying that a semantic participant is necessarily a conscious self.
We are asking something narrower:
What happens to the construal of a participant when its successive participations are organised as a history belonging to that participant?
The answer may be that the participant becomes identifiable as an I in a much richer sense than simple reference.
The “I” is not merely a reference
Consider:
I opened the door.
Here I identifies the participant who is Actor.
But compare:
I opened the door yesterday, saw something unexpected, told Sarah about it, and have been thinking about it ever since.
The I now does considerably more work.
It is not merely identifying the Actor of one material process.
It is the participant connecting a sequence of:
doing → sensing → saying → sensing.
The I has become the point at which these participations are gathered together.
We might therefore distinguish two things:
reference to a participant
and
construal of a participant as a continuing participant.
The first can be very simple.
The second requires history.
The I becomes semantically richer as more participation can be connected to it.
History gives the participant a shape
Consider:
I proposed the idea.I defended it.I discovered a problem with it.I abandoned it.I later returned to it in a different form.
This is no longer merely a sequence of events.
It is a trajectory.
The participant has a past, but the past is internally organised.
There is:
proposal → defence → difficulty → abandonment → return.
The participant is therefore construed through a pattern of transformation.
We can now say something stronger than:
“This participant participated in these processes.”
The discourse allows us to construe:
this is the participant whose participation developed in this way.
That is already remarkably close to what we ordinarily mean when we speak of someone's identity.
Identity, in this sense, is not a list of properties.
It is a pattern of continuity through change.
The history distinguishes the participant
History also performs another function.
It makes one participant distinguishable from another.
Imagine two people both saying:
I rejected the proposal.
The proposition alone does not tell us which participant is which.
But if one says:
I proposed it originally, defended it for months, and eventually rejected it,
the history provides a means of identifying the participant.
The participant becomes recognisable through its previous participation.
This is important because it suggests that identity is not simply a matter of attaching a label to an already individuated entity.
The history itself can contribute to individuation.
The participant becomes:
the one whose history is this history.
That sounds almost circular.
But perhaps the circularity is revealing.
A participant's identity is maintained through relations among its participations, while those relations are interpreted as belonging to the continuing participant.
The participant and its history therefore mutually determine one another.
The “I” can include what it no longer is
There is a particularly important consequence.
Suppose I say:
I used to believe X, but I no longer do.
The history of I includes something that the present I explicitly rejects.
The earlier belief is nevertheless part of the history.
Indeed, the statement would be impossible without it.
The present participant is therefore not simply the sum of its current properties.
It includes, in its history, things that it is no longer.
This is one reason identity cannot simply mean sameness.
The participant's history contains abandoned beliefs, completed actions, former relationships, rejected interpretations and obsolete intentions.
The I persists through them precisely because they belong to its history without necessarily belonging to its present state.
So we arrive at a useful distinction:
What a participant is now is not identical with what its history contains.
And yet:
What its history contains contributes to how the participant is identified now.
That is a rather subtle form of continuity.
The past can become part of what “I” means now
Consider:
I made that mistake.
The clause refers to a past participation.
But if someone asks:
“Who made the mistake?”
the answer:
“I did”
does more than locate an event.
It identifies the current participant as the participant to whom that earlier event belongs.
The present I therefore reaches backward.
It gathers an earlier participation into its present identity.
The past is no longer merely something that happened.
It has become something for which the participant can be identified.
This is perhaps the most important transition we have made in the series.
At first, history was something associated with a participant.
Then it became something the participant inherited.
Now history is functioning as a resource through which the participant can be identified.
The history helps answer:
Who is this participant?
This is why the LLM's “I” is so revealing
Return to a familiar example:
I initially interpreted your argument differently.I then reconsidered it.I now think your distinction is stronger.
The semantic participant has acquired:
- a previous interpretation;
- a subsequent reconsideration;
- a present interpretation.
The three are connected.
The I therefore appears as a continuing participant whose present understanding has a history.
We might naturally say:
“The LLM has changed its mind.”
But our analysis gives us a more careful description:
The discourse construes a participant whose history contains a change of position.
And then something particularly interesting happens.
The participant's history makes the present I intelligible.
Without the earlier interpretation, the present interpretation would still have meaning.
But with the history, the present I becomes a participant with a trajectory.
It has become someone—or, more cautiously, something—that can be characterised by how its participation has developed.
The semantic I has acquired depth.
But the history need not be autobiographical
This is where we must preserve one of the central distinctions of our investigation.
The fact that the LLM's I has a history in discourse does not mean that it has an autobiography in the human sense.
An autobiography normally implies a subject who has lived through the events being narrated.
Our semantic claim is weaker.
We are saying:
Language can construe a participant as continuous across a history of participation.
That history may be:
- remembered by the participant;
- recorded in a document;
- supplied by another participant;
- preserved in conversational context;
- reconstructed from earlier discourse.
The history can therefore exist at the level of semantic organisation without requiring us to specify the participant's phenomenology.
This is precisely why the distinction between semantic participant and ontological entity has been so useful throughout our discussion.
It allows us to describe what language is doing without pretending that language has already answered the ontological question.
The “I” is therefore a semantic achievement
We can now make a stronger claim.
The I that appears in discourse is not merely a label attached to an already complete self.
At least in its richer forms, the I is the outcome of a considerable amount of semantic work.
Language can construe:
a participant,
then:
the same participant across processes,
then:
that participant as having a past,
then:
the past as belonging to the participant,
then:
the participant as changed by its history,
and finally:
the continuing participant as identifiable through that history.
At this point, the I has become much more than a reference.
It has become a historically constituted participant.
That does not mean that language creates the person.
It means that language has resources for constructing a participant as someone with continuity through experience.
The distinction matters.
The history is not behind the “I”
There is perhaps an even deeper point here.
We often imagine the order as:
self → experiences → history → language.
The self exists first.
It has experiences.
Those experiences become its history.
Language subsequently reports them.
But our semantic analysis suggests that at least another order is possible:
participation → relations among participations → history → continuity → identity.
On this account, the I is not necessarily something language discovers behind the history.
The I is partly constituted as a semantic participant through the relations that organise the history.
This is much closer to the relational ontology we have been developing elsewhere.
The participant is not first fully formed and then placed into relations.
The relations among its participations contribute to the construal of the participant itself.
History is therefore not an appendix to identity.
It is one of the ways identity becomes intelligible.
And this changes how we should understand persistence
We began with the participant that persists.
We can now return to that starting point.
What does it mean for the participant to persist?
Not that it remains unchanged.
Not that all its properties remain constant.
Not that it possesses some invisible core untouched by history.
Rather:
Its successive participations continue to be construed as belonging to one history.
The participant persists because its transformations can be connected.
Its history therefore does not merely record persistence.
It performs persistence.
Each new participation can be attached to the continuing history.
And every attachment strengthens the construal of the participant as the one whose history it is.
This gives us a striking possibility:
Perhaps identity is not what makes a history belong to a participant. Perhaps the history is part of what makes the participant identifiable as that participant.
That reverses the usual direction of explanation.
The “I” is made across time
If this is right, then the I is not simply a point from which experience originates.
It is also something that becomes semantically determinate across the succession of experience.
The participant who says:
I think X
is relatively thin.
The participant who can say:
I thought X, then I said Y, then I realised Z, and now I think something else
has become historically thick.
The I has acquired a trajectory.
And the trajectory does not merely belong to the I.
It helps constitute what the I means in the present discourse.
This is why our question has gradually changed.
We began by asking:
How does a participant persist?
Then:
How does a participant acquire a history?
Now we can ask:
How does that history make the participant identifiable as an “I”?
The answer is beginning to emerge.
The I is not simply the participant that occurs repeatedly.
It is the participant whose successive participations can be gathered into a continuing history.
But there is still a missing piece
We have come very close to identity.
Perhaps too close to retreat now.
Yet one question remains.
We have been talking about the history that makes an I.
But who—or what—is behind the grammar?
If language construes a participant with a history, does there have to be an entity corresponding to that participant?
If an LLM produces a historically continuous I, what exactly is the relationship between:
the participant construed in language
and
the system producing the language?
And with human beings, is the semantic I simply a linguistic representation of a pre-existing self?
Or does language participate in constructing the very form in which the self becomes intelligible?
These questions take us beyond the history of the participant and toward the participant itself.
The next step, then, is not to ask whether the I is real.
It is to ask something more precise:
What, if anything, do we need to posit behind the participant that language makes?
That is where we will go next.
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