The Participant and Its History: III. The Participant With a Past

In the previous post, we followed a participant across different kinds of processes.

The I could be Actor, then Senser, then Sayer, then Actor again. Its mode of participation changed, but the participant remained continuous.

That gave us the beginnings of a history.

But a sequence of participations is not yet necessarily construed as a past.

For that, something else has to happen.

The earlier participation has to become relevant to the participant's present.

Consider:

I opened the letter.

I read it carefully.

I thought about what it meant.

This gives us a sequence.

But now consider:

I opened the letter yesterday.

I remember what it said.

I still think about it.

Here the earlier participation has acquired a different status.

It is no longer simply something that happened before.

It has become the participant's past.

That small shift is enormously important.

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From what happened to what has happened to me

A history is not merely a sequence of events ordered in time.

We can describe a sequence without making it anyone's history:

The door opened.

The rain began.

The lights went out.

But once we say:

I opened the door.

I watched the rain begin.

I turned off the lights.

the events become connected through a participant.

The participant provides a point of continuity across them.

And when we add:

I remember opening the door.

something further happens.

The earlier event is no longer merely connected to the participant.

It is construed as belonging to the participant's own history.

The semantic relationship has changed.

The participant is now construed as having a past.

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The past can be present in the figure

This is particularly interesting because the past need not remain outside the present figure.

Consider:

I remember opening the door.

The opening occurred earlier.

But the present figure construes the participant as engaged in remembering that earlier participation.

We therefore have two temporal dimensions at once.

There is the earlier event:

opening the door

and the present participation:

remembering the opening.

The participant connects them.

The earlier participation has become the Phenomenon of present sensing.

The past has therefore entered the present through the participant's current participation.

This is one of the ways in which a history becomes semantically available.

The past is not simply behind the participant.

It becomes something with which the participant can participate now.

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But history does not require remembering

This distinction is important.

Compare:

I remember opening the door.

with:

I opened the door yesterday.

The second clause construes the participant as having a past without necessarily construing any present remembering of it.

We therefore need to distinguish:

a past that is remembered

from

a past that is represented as belonging to the participant.

The latter is more fundamental for our purposes.

A participant can be construed as having participated previously without being construed as presently remembering that participation.

This matters enormously when we return to LLMs.

An LLM can say:

I mentioned this earlier.

That construes the current I as the participant who performed an earlier act of saying.

The discourse therefore gives the participant a past.

But that does not by itself establish that the machine remembers the earlier event in the experiential sense.

We must keep the distinction intact:

semantic history is not necessarily lived history.

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The LLM makes the distinction difficult to ignore

Human discourse normally encourages us to collapse these two things.

If someone says:

I remember telling you that yesterday.

we ordinarily assume that the speaker both participated in the earlier event and remembers having done so.

The semantic construal and our assumptions about the speaker's experience usually travel together.

With an LLM, they can come apart.

The machine can produce:

I mentioned this earlier in our conversation.

The discourse construes a participant with a past.

It may even produce:

I remember that we discussed this yesterday.

Now the semantic construal is stronger.

The participant is construed not only as having a previous participation, but as currently engaged in remembering it.

Yet we still cannot infer from that semantic construal that the machine possesses a lived memory corresponding to the utterance.

The grammar and semantics have told us what kind of experience is being construed.

They have not settled the ontology of the participant doing the construing.

This is precisely the distinction that made the Sayer/Senser problem so revealing.

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A past can be constructed retrospectively

There is another subtlety.

The history of a participant does not have to be presented all at once.

Suppose a conversation begins:

I think the first interpretation is right.

Later, the participant says:

Earlier, I was assuming the second interpretation.

The later utterance changes the semantic construal of the participant's history.

We now know something about the earlier I that was not available before.

The participant has acquired a past retrospectively.

This suggests that history is not simply something that accumulates mechanically as time passes.

It is also something that can be construed retrospectively.

Later discourse can make earlier participation significant.

The participant's past is therefore partly an achievement of the unfolding discourse.

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And history can be corrected

Consider:

I said that the meeting was on Tuesday.

Later:

Actually, I was mistaken. I said Wednesday.

The participant now has a more complicated history.

It is not merely:

said X.

It is:

said X → recognised the error → corrected the account.

The history has acquired internal structure.

And that structure matters because it changes how we interpret the participant.

The participant is now construed as one who:

• participated previously;

• can refer to that participation;

• can distinguish an earlier construal from a later one;

• can incorporate the correction into its continuing history.

The history therefore becomes increasingly more than a record.

It becomes a structured semantic resource for construing the participant in the present.

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The participant can inherit a history from discourse

This becomes particularly striking in conversation.

Suppose someone joins a conversation halfway through and says:

As I said earlier, we need to distinguish these two cases.

If the discourse supports that claim, the participant arrives in the present utterance carrying a history.

But suppose the earlier statement is not actually available.

The participant can still be construed as having made it.

The semantic participant has inherited a past through the discourse.

This is one reason our analysis of LLMs is so revealing.

An LLM can generate a remarkably detailed history of its own participation:

I mentioned this earlier.

We discussed that point above.

I initially interpreted your argument differently.

I then reconsidered it.

The discourse can therefore maintain an I across a substantial history.

Whether every element of that history corresponds to an actual earlier event is a separate question.

Whether the participant experienced those events is another.

But the semantic phenomenon remains.

The text can construe a participant with a past.

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The past changes the present participant

Why does all this matter?

Because once a participant has a past, the present participant is no longer semantically empty.

Compare:

I think X.

with:

I now think X, although earlier I thought Y.

The second I is richer.

It is construed against a history.

The present position has become meaningful partly because of what the participant was construed as thinking before.

The participant is now temporally thick.

Its present participation cannot be understood entirely independently of its earlier participation.

This is one of the beginnings of identity.

Not identity as an abstract philosophical property.

Something more basic:

the participant is increasingly construed as the one whose different moments belong together.

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Yet we should resist the temptation to call this a self

We are approaching dangerous territory.

A participant with a past looks remarkably like a person.

A participant that remembers its past looks even more like one.

A participant that can correct its account of its past looks more like one still.

But none of these semantic construals, taken individually or together, establishes consciousness.

Nor do they establish a metaphysical self.

What they establish is something more precise:

Language can construe a participant as having a history, and can bring that history into the participant's present participation.

That is already a substantial semantic fact.

And the LLM helps us see it because the semantic fact can be separated from the ontological assumption that normally accompanies it.

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History begins to belong to the participant

We can now see the progression of the series more clearly.

At first we had:

participant

Then:

participant across processes

Then:

participant with previous participation

And now:

participant with a past.

The difference between the last two is subtle but important.

A participant can be involved in a sequence of events without those events yet being construed as its history.

History begins when earlier participation is brought into the present as belonging to the continuing participant.

The past becomes part of the way the participant is currently construed.

And once that happens, something new becomes possible.

The participant can inherit its past.

It can be characterised by it.

It can be understood through it.

It can even be changed by how that past is construed.

We have therefore moved from persistence to history.

But there is another question waiting for us.

If a participant can carry a history from one moment into another, where does that history come from?

Is it simply the participant's own previous participation?

Or can a participant inherit a history from the discourse in which it is participating?

And if the latter is possible, then the history of a participant may not be quite as private—or as simple—as we ordinarily imagine.

The participant may enter the present carrying a history that has been constructed in language.

That is where we go next.

The participant does not merely have a past. It can inherit one.

The Participant and Its History: II. A Participant Across Processes

In the previous post, we began with a deceptively simple question:

What makes a participant persist?

We saw that a participant can be maintained across successive clauses and, semantically, across successive figures. The I that opens a door can be the I that looks outside and the I that calls a friend.

But there is something more interesting here than mere continuity.

The participant does not simply persist while doing the same thing.

It can participate in different kinds of processes.

The Actor can become a Senser.

The Senser can become a Sayer.

The Sayer can become an Actor.

And yet we continue to construe these as participations of one participant.

This raises a more precise question:

What is it that persists when the participant's mode of participation changes?

The participant is not its role

Consider:

I opened the door.

I noticed the garden.

I described it to Sarah.

Semantically, these are three different kinds of figure.

In the first, I participates materially as Actor.

In the second, I participates mentally as Senser.

In the third, I participates verbally as Sayer.

The participant role changes each time.

But we do not ordinarily imagine three different Is.

The participant therefore cannot simply be identified with the role it occupies in a particular process.

This may seem obvious, but it has an important consequence.

A participant role tells us how a participant is involved in a particular process.

It does not tell us everything about the participant across processes.

The Actor is not a permanent property of I.

Nor is the Senser.

Nor the Sayer.

They are different ways in which the same participant can be construed as participating.

Participation changes while the participant persists

This gives us a useful distinction:

participant identity is not participant-role identity.

A participant can undergo a succession of changes in the way it participates without ceasing to be construed as the same participant.

This is particularly clear when a sequence moves between process types:

I opened the letter.

I wondered what it meant.

I told Maria what I had found.

I put the letter away.

The semantic progression is:

doing → sensing → saying → doing

Yet the participant remains constant.

The participant therefore has a kind of semantic mobility.

It can move through different domains of experience.

The same participant can be involved in doing, sensing, saying and being.

Indeed, that is part of what makes the participant recognisable as a participant in the first place. It is not exhausted by any single mode of participation.

The process tells us something about the participant

There is another side to this.

Although the participant is not reducible to its process role, each process contributes something to its construal.

When I is construed as Actor, we encounter I as one who does something.

When I is construed as Senser, I becomes one who senses or thinks.

When I is construed as Sayer, I becomes one who produces a locution.

The participant therefore becomes semantically richer as its history of participation expands.

The process does not reveal an already complete participant.

It adds to the construal of the participant.

This is an important difference.

We might be tempted to imagine that there is a fully constituted individual first, and that language merely tells us which things that individual happens to do, think and say.

But the semantic perspective gives us another possibility.

Perhaps, at least in discourse, the participant becomes increasingly determinate through the succession of processes in which it is construed as participating.

The participant is not simply there, with participation attached afterwards.

Participation contributes to what the participant becomes as a semantic construal.

This becomes especially revealing with an LLM

Consider the sorts of things an LLM can say:

I analysed the argument.

I considered another interpretation.

I explained the distinction.

I revised my answer.

The participant occupies a succession of roles across different processes.

It is construed as Actor, Senser, Sayer and Actor again.

Nothing in the grammar requires us to decide that these must correspond to a human-like individual.

The semantic system simply construes a participant moving through different kinds of participation.

That is precisely what made the previous series so revealing.

The machine does not need to possess a human self in order for its discourse to construe an I that participates in experience.

But now we can see something further.

The participant does not merely appear as a Sayer and then disappear.

The same I can be carried from saying into sensing, from sensing into doing, and from doing into further saying.

The participant acquires continuity across processes.

And this is where our earlier Sayer/Senser distinction becomes even more useful

In The Participant the Machine Says, we discovered that the LLM's saying can project an interior.

When the machine says:

I think this is correct.

the clause construes an I as Senser.

The important point was that the linguistic construal of a Senser does not establish the existence of a conscious experiencer behind it.

Now consider what happens when the discourse continues:

I think this is correct.

I explained why earlier.

I reconsidered the argument.

I now think the alternative is stronger.

The participant is no longer merely a Senser.

It is also a Sayer.

It has been an Actor in the process of reconsidering.

And it has returned to being a Senser.

The semantic participant has travelled through a series of different modes of participation.

What we encounter is therefore not simply a machine that says “I think”.

We encounter a participant that language can maintain across a succession of processes.

And that is a considerably more powerful construal.

Participation creates continuity

We can now sharpen the claim made in the previous post.

A participant persists not merely because the same linguistic expression is repeated.

It persists because successive processes are construed as involving the same participant.

The continuity is therefore semantic and relational.

The later figure is connected to the earlier one through the participant that they share.

And the participant becomes increasingly determinate through those connections.

This means that a participant's history is not simply a sequence of events.

It is a sequence of different modes of participation belonging together.

The history of I is not merely:

opened → looked → spoke → left.

It is:

Actor → Senser → Sayer → Actor.

The history tells us not only what happened, but what kinds of participation the participant has undergone.

That distinction will become increasingly important.

A participant can change without becoming another participant

This also gives us a way of approaching a problem that otherwise looks metaphysical.

Suppose:

I believed X yesterday.

I believe Y today.

Something has changed.

But we do not normally conclude that yesterday's I and today's I are different participants.

The participant persists through a change in its participation.

Indeed, change may require persistence.

If there were no continuity between the two participants, we could not meaningfully construe the second as:

I used to think X, but now I think Y.

The contrast itself depends on maintaining the participant across the change.

So there is an important relationship here:

The participant persists partly by being capable of changing.

That may sound paradoxical.

But it is precisely what a history requires.

A completely unchanging participant would have no history in the relevant sense.

History emerges because a participant can participate differently at different moments while still being construed as the participant whose history is unfolding.

This does not yet give us a self

We should resist the temptation to move too quickly.

A participant that persists across processes is not thereby a conscious self.

Nor does a rich history of participation establish a subjective history.

We have discovered something more modest:

Language can construe one participant as continuous across different kinds of experience.

That is already enough to explain something important about how participants become semantically rich.

And it gives us a new way to think about identity.

Identity need not begin as a mysterious property hidden inside the participant.

It may begin, at least in part, with the continuity of participation.

The participant is first encountered in one process.

Then another.

Then another.

Different roles accumulate.

Different kinds of participation accumulate.

And the participant becomes increasingly recognisable as the one to whom this history belongs.

From participant to history

We have therefore moved one step beyond our starting point.

In the previous post, we asked how a participant persists.

Now we can see that persistence is not passive.

A participant persists through participation.

It persists while doing different things, sensing different things, saying different things and undergoing different states of being.

And every new participation adds something to the participant's semantic history.

We might therefore express the emerging relation like this:

A participant persists across processes; processes give content to its persistence.

This is why the distinction between participant and participant role matters.

If the participant were simply its role, every change of process would produce a new participant.

But because the participant can persist across changing roles, its successive participations can accumulate into a history.

And once a participant has a history, a new possibility appears.

The participant can begin to be construed not merely as the one participating now, but as the one who has participated before.

That is the point at which history becomes more than sequence.

It becomes something the participant can carry.

And that is where we will go next.

The Participant and Its History: I. The Participant That Persists

There is a small word that does an astonishing amount of work in language.

I.

We have already spent some time with it.

In our previous series, The Participant the Machine Says, we followed the strange career of the I produced by an LLM. The machine can say I think, I remember, I said, I was wrong. Each expression construes the machine as a participant in some kind of experience. Yet the semantic participant and the entity we might imagine behind it are not the same thing.

That distinction led us somewhere important.

But it also leaves us with another question.

Suppose the I occurs not once, but repeatedly:

I said something.

I thought about it.

I changed my mind.

What makes these three Is the same participant?

The question seems almost too obvious to ask. Of course they are the same person—or, in the case of an LLM, the same conversational participant. But that answer already assumes precisely what we need to investigate.

The interesting question is not what the participant really is.

It is:

How does language construe a participant as persisting?

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A participant is not a participant role

The first thing we need to distinguish is a participant from the role it occupies.

In a material figure:

I opened the door.

I is Actor.

In a mental figure:

I remembered the door.

I is Senser.

In a verbal figure:

I described the door.

I is Sayer.

The participant role changes.

The participant does not, at least as the discourse construes it, cease to be I.

This is easy to overlook because we tend to think of participant roles as properties of participants. But they are more properly understood as ways in which participants are construed as participating in particular kinds of processes.

The same participant can therefore enter into very different figures.

And this gives us our first clue.

Persistence does not mean persistence of participant role.

The Actor can become a Senser.

The Senser can become a Sayer.

The Sayer can become an Actor.

What persists is something more abstract: the continuity of the participant across changing modes of participation.

That is already rather interesting.

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The participant is not the process

Consider a simple sequence:

Maria opened the door.

Maria surveyed the scene.

Maria called her friend.

We normally experience this as a single unfolding situation involving one person.

But grammatically, we have three clauses:

• Maria as Actor;
• Maria as Senser;
• Maria as Sayer.

The grammar does not give us one giant process called Maria.

It repeatedly construes Maria's participation in different processes.

The continuity comes from somewhere else.

It comes from the way the discourse maintains the participant across those figures.

This matters because it suggests that participant continuity is not simply given by any individual clause.

It is an achievement of the unfolding discourse.

The first clause does not contain the whole Maria.

Nor does the second.

Nor does the third.

Rather, each new figure adds another participation to an already developing construal.

The participant accumulates.

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And this becomes much stranger with an LLM

Consider an LLM saying:

I suggested one interpretation.

I then considered another.

I changed my view.

The linguistic construal is perfectly straightforward.

There is one I participating in three successive clauses.

But what is particularly revealing is that we cannot settle the ontological question simply by inspecting the grammar.

The language construes a persistent participant.

That is a fact about the discourse.

Whether there is an experiencing subject behind that participant is another question.

We learned this distinction in the previous series.

And we need it even more here.

The LLM therefore gives us an unusually clean demonstration of something that is normally hidden by our assumptions about human speakers:

A participant can be construed as persisting before we have settled what, ontologically, the participant is.

This is not an oddity of artificial language.

It is a property of the semantic construal itself.

The LLM simply prevents us from taking the next step for granted.

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Recurrence is not yet persistence

There is, however, another distinction we need to make.

The mere repetition of I does not necessarily establish a persistent participant.

Imagine three unrelated sentences:

I like apples.

I live in Madrid.

I once climbed Everest.

If these sentences occur in different texts spoken by different people, the repeated word I clearly does not identify one participant.

So persistence cannot be located in the pronoun itself.

Nor does it reside in grammatical form alone.

It emerges from the continuity of reference and participation across the discourse.

This is why context matters.

If someone says:

I opened the door. I looked outside. I called Sarah.

we construe the three clauses as belonging to a single unfolding history.

The participant persists because the discourse gives us reason to maintain that construal.

And this is an important first step toward what we will later call history.

A history is not merely a list of events.

It is a sequence of events construed as belonging to something that persists through them.

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Persistence is therefore relational

This also means that participant persistence is not entirely a property of the participant.

It is a property of the relation between successive figures in discourse.

The participant persists because later language connects with earlier language.

The I in the present clause inherits something from the I in the preceding clause.

And the preceding I becomes retrospectively more determinate because of what comes after it.

The relation runs in both directions.

When I say:

I opened the door.

and then:

I saw something unexpected.

the second clause does not merely add another event.

It tells us something about the participant whose participation was introduced in the first.

The participant's identity begins to thicken.

Not because the grammar has revealed an entity hidden behind the clauses, but because the sequence of participation has become coherent.

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This is where history begins

We should be careful with that word.

We are not yet talking about autobiography.

We are not talking about memory.

We are not even necessarily talking about a conscious subject.

We are talking about something simpler:

a participant construed as having participated before.

Once a participant can be maintained across successive figures, the earlier figure becomes part of the conditions under which the later one is interpreted.

The participant has acquired something like a past.

Not necessarily a remembered past.

Not necessarily a lived past.

A semantic history.

And that distinction will matter enormously when we return to LLMs.

An LLM can say:

I said that earlier.

The discourse can therefore construe the present I as the participant who performed an earlier act of saying.

That history may be entirely textual.

But it is still a history of the participant as construed by the discourse.

We should neither inflate that into lived experience nor dismiss it as meaningless.

It is a genuine semantic phenomenon.

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The participant that persists is already more than a participant in one figure

Perhaps this is the first important result.

A participant in a single figure is relatively simple to describe.

But once the participant occurs across clauses, something new becomes possible.

We can now distinguish:

the participant in an event

from

the participant across events.

The first belongs to the grammar of an individual clause.

The second belongs to the unfolding organisation of experience through discourse.

And that second participant is already beginning to look like something familiar.

Someone who acts.

Someone who senses.

Someone who says.

Someone who has done things before.

Someone whose present participation is connected to earlier participation.

Someone who may participate again.

We have not yet arrived at a self.

We have not even arrived at identity.

But we have arrived at something that makes both of them possible:

a participant that persists.

And perhaps that is where we should begin.

Because before there can be a participant with a history, there must first be a participant for whom different moments can be construed as belonging together.

The participant does not yet need to know its history.

It only needs to be construed as having one.

And once language can do that, the past has begun to gather around the participant.

The next question is therefore unavoidable:

What happens when the same participant persists not merely across clauses, but across different kinds of experience?

That is where our next step begins.

The Actor becomes a Senser.

The Senser becomes a Sayer.

And somehow, through all of them, the participant remains I.