Identity

Notes on the limits of the linear model in understanding the intersection of two opposing arrows of time.

If I am a mirror, and the mirror is you, then we are one. It sounds romantic. But logically… it is horrific.

In a cemetery in Vienna, an equation about entropy is carved onto Ludwig Boltzmann’s tombstone. If our identity is a system, this equation explains why we need the space to be ‘messy’ in order to keep evolving.

To understand this, we can look at how identity is typically verified. In daily life, identity is often reduced to data: name, place of birth, status, or occupation. As if with just that data, a person can be fully “understood.” Something similar happens in biology. To recognize an organism, we need various indicators—from morphology and anatomy to physiology and even molecular data. It’s a complex process, and interestingly, taxonomy is often considered one of the “grayest” areas in biology. ...

This confusion isn’t exactly new. It’s been lingering for a long time, reminding me of the doubts I once wrote about in Certainty. Back then, I questioned the certainty of our perception of the world. This time, I’m questioning the certainty of who is actually doing the perceiving. There was a time when I felt like the “weird” one among “normal” people (honestly, I still feel weird now). As a communications student back then, the “normal” thing to do was to practice persuasion techniques or try to look confident in front of an audience. But in reality, I actively avoided it. Instead of joining discussions about practical methods, I spent most of my time sitting alone in front of the psychology faculty, imagining that if I were a psychology student, I’d confidently mock Sigmund Freud’s penis envy theory. ...