Thread by @IntuitMachine

Individuality is an interesting phenomenon. Without it, there would be no life. alexdanco.com/2020/04/09/lif…

However, life on earth is characterized by organisms that preserve a digital code. This allows it to be preserved across time.

There are non-linear phenomena that preserve itself for a short duration (example: whirlpools and hurricanes) only to eventually dissipate. These phenomena aren't living and also don't have digital codes.

I hypothesize that anything that is considered to be living (i.e. replicateable, homeostatic, learning) has underneath it's mechanism a digital code.

One can further argue that human languages are living things. Language is propagated through human adoption, maintains its structure through its use, and adapts through the creation of new vocabulary by its users.

American English is individually distinct from British English, although we can have individual humans who switch between either. There's enough commonality between the languages that users of one can speak and understand another.

Each individual language however evolves at slightly different rates. It will surprise many that British English is spoken in an accent that evolved away from a form that sounds more like American English. (I digress)

However, the thing about digital code is that they do not fully capture the semantics required for the individual to thrive. Reality, at the scale of biology, appears to be continuous.

Living things are analog. It employs digital codes to allow it to be invariant across time.

DNA keeps our children from having some resemblance to us. Language allows us to understand what our ancestors wrote about in the past.

It is estimated that the body replaces all the cells in its body every 7 to 10 years. Your body and your brain isn't the same one that you had 10 years ago. It was regenerated as a consequence of the digital code in all your cells.

We are all individuals because there is an inert digital code that is essential to maintaining our individuality. It is the intrinsic property of digital code that allows for lossless copying that enables the invariance of individuality.

But what about the concept of our selves? How is it able to maintain itself without any evidence of a digital code?

How is it that when we wake up from our sleep that we still are the same self as that went to sleep the previous night?

How is it when our lights are turned off during anesthesia that we still wake up as the same person?

We surely cannot be like computers that have its state stored in non-volatile storage only to be rebooted back to the same state as storage is read back into RAM.

What then is the digital code that appears to be necessary to maintain our concept of self?

Perhaps this is because our brains are intrinsically encoding its behavior in digital form. This is very different from an analog system like the weather. Brains are not dynamical continuous system, but rather digital systems that exhibit dynamic behavior.