10 years from now

I just wrote my future self a letter again. I try to do that every year around my birthday. The idea is that I write a letter every year and I start opening them then years from now, one at time. It means an investment of a few hours once a year, for a very long delayed reward that should be well worth it.

That’s the idea, but I’ve discovered today (and probably last year as well, if I go look back through my blog) that I get an almost immediate reward from it. First off all, of course, I get to pause and reflect. That, in and of itself, isn’t that special though (nearly every third entry on this blog requires that I pause and reflect. Hell, with the amount of pausing and reflecting I’m doing I can’t help but wonder how I get anything done!)

The thing that got me going today (and to a less extent last year) was this thought: is the future me really me? It’s not a new thought. It’s been had by people for years, centuries, possibly even millennia; but right now the thought is mine and it goes something like this.

The way we establish that you are you and I am I (is that the right grammar? Bradley, tell me if that’s the right grammar!) is through an analysis of dimensions (or, in plain English, by seeing if we occupy the same spot or not). You might say that we establish it by our history and our memories, but that’s not true. If I happen to have two histories stored in my brain I would still think of myself as the same person; just a very, very confused person who’s somehow picked up an extra set of memories. What is more, we can’t really trust memory; so, in other words, it’s a bad idea to establish yourself as in independent person from the bum rolling in his own faeces on the corner by comparing memory, it’s a much better idea to just think ‘he’s on the corner, I’m here reading this wierdo’s blog, therefore we are not the same person’ (you could of course check if smelled of faeces, but that’s cheating).

Time is, of course, a dimension.

So doesn’t this therefore mean that you are not the same person that you will be tomorrow? Or, if we imagine a day as a very small increment in distance (a tenth of a millimetre?) then you over the next few days, weeks or months might just be a blurring of the same person (as if you and the bum almost occupied the same space), but the you ten years from now must most certainly be a different person, right? Hell, you’d be 36.5 centimetres apart! True, only people close to you get to be that close (unless you’re on a Japanese commuter train) but you’d still be fundamentally different.

So am I writing to myself when I write to myself ten years in the future? Well, maybe I am; because there’s another thought that just occurred to me. There is an actual physical gap between you and that bum. In case of time you occupy the point now and the point 10 years from now, but also every single point in between those two yous. It’s as if you’ve been stretched over the entire 36.5 centimetres and if we did that to you, though it would hurt, we would still see all of that as being a (miss formed) you.

Is your head hurting yet? Don’t worry, you’ll probably have forgotten all of this by tomorrow. That is, if that’s still you.