Identity that is what things are. This has become a small problem not changing anything much it would seem but what it is must be fundamental. What a thing is is important to the thing itself if not otherwise. Yet how things are seen is not how things are. How things are are how they are. Is there a need for immutability in the identity. What a thing is is always what a thing is. Is there a need for identity in all this. Clearly not because fifty years ago I was not and in fifty years time I will not be so where is identity if this has to be immutable. So then what a thing is must be what it seems to be so how can a thing be found to be different? Identity is a very problematical problem. Identity is a collection of discoverable properties in which it may or may not be discovered at any time. The ways in which changes occur in the object are the discoverable properties. Identity is a series of discoverable properties and the effect on them of time and circumstances.
Appearance of identity is affected by the discoverable properties and also by the level of discovery individually of those properties. Appearance is not identity. Identity is not immutable.
Let us all look at ourselves. I am the viewer observing me as the object. This is very difficult. Let me look at time as slowly my fingernails need cutting. Let me watch as slowly my hair falls out. Let me watch myself grow slow. Show myself how time can be both dull and sharpen the sight of myself. Mostly I become less clear. I fade as observers and am less strong. Perhaps too many discoverable properties for one mind to hold at once. This is how I can continually surprise myself. For you looking at me I am naturally the object. There is no need for strength in the division. It is easier to see but harder to find out what to see. There is difficulty and I am continually surprising you. Discoverable properties fit into patterns and so patterns are very important. Discoverable patterns almost.
That is what it is to be what it is to be.
So it is that identity can seem to change. More can be discovered by the surroundings. Less can be remembered by the surroundings. Three married men walking in a thunderstorm do not reveal a preference for baked apples, baked beans and golfing umbrellas. This is how they are not the same not revealed.
Yet they are not and in so much forgotten by place.
So identity can seem more or less and can be interesting and not and it can all change as it should do. Also interesting is a property for discovery and also time can change it. Time takes boredom out of familiarity so interest is passing and transience is interesting most and patterned transience most of all. That is how it is for me. Yesterday The poppy had no petals, and tomorrow also but today. Well here is today patterned in red and black. It is one of the properties of today as today is one of the properties of the poppy to be so. So patterns grow and meet and join and grow and meet and join. So discoverable properties are always more and more but some are not as important as others to appear, yet if that is so what is the core of identity that the most important properties approach most closely? This seems to bring us back but it is not right to see. Some properties discoverable are unique or limited to only a few identities and they are close to showing how one individual differs from another, and other properties are not so specific like breathing with people. I am not because I breathe because my dogs do that too. I am breathing because I breathe. If I were not I would not be. It is an essential property to be but it does not help to separate. It is not property individually for me. Nor is ten toes or speaking English. Being John though and mostly of this age does help a bit and there are many more all together. This is why a bucket is more simple than a person. Firstly there is no breathing. Secondly time is slower to change for a bucket. There is more stability and more simplicity.
So this is identity and so often the most interesting is what is not yet discovered. What is discovered already is slowly becoming less interesting and soon boredom becomes with it. And so it is the things that are not known that are most interesting. It is the spaces the way the spaces are defined. The frames and the spaces are what is most interesting. What is not known is most interesting. And so I look for the spaces that have rhythm and patterns of their own by being spaces. These are always most interesting. So what a thing is not is interesting too, and that is what another thing is. All in patterns. think of a grain of sand and remember as you walk on the beach what a very big problem it is to understand completely what you are. The discoverable properties are so many perhaps infinite but perhaps finite. It depends how big the universe is. Remember this on the beach and all the things it is not to be what you are as you take yourself as object. Look at the spaces. That's really what I think about identity today.
I made a pin board a few months ago and on the hooks hang all the things I had that are simplest. It is most interesting for all the things it isn't. It is interesting as being easy to label with one group of properties which it clearly doesn't have many of. It is spaces full of expectation that make it so intereting.
Perhaps that is true of all abstract art of all kinds. Here you find in literature what it is when it isn't which is interesting and may help when it is so very difficult.
So again to people which is where the difficulty is usually. Identity is a collection of discoverable properties about objects and processes. It is a collection. All of these discoverable properties are arranged into a pattern. None of them is immutable, so the pattern can lose and gain elements and only change in that detail without needing a new identity. So I can cut my toenails or have a kidney transplant.
If I transfer my inside self to a new body whose then. The discoverable process of mind by which my friends know me stay the same. The discoverable properties of my body change. So my dog will not think I am me any more. My friends will think I am me. In fact I am still a collection of discoverable properties some of which I know some of which I do not.
The properties people have already discovered are in part changed and in part the same. Half man half biscuit happens here. For those who see the old patterns in the new there is no change of identity, for those who do not there is. it is not immutable.
So I think I am happy with what it is about it that makes it what it is, and so what it is about something that makes it interesting can be discovered. It is the spaces that can be discovered that is interesting. It is building the frames that show the spaces that is interesting. That is what it is for it to be interesting. Finding and building the frames for the spaces.
This is what things have to be if they are to be interesting. Creativity is about frames. Building frames to be interesting.