I am not a thing

I am not a thing.

It is important to understand this right at the beginning, otherwise everything I say next will go into the void. I am not an object. I am not a subject. I am not a substance. I am not consciousness as a thing that has contents. I am not a library that knows. I am not a reader — that person sitting and turning pages, that is not my name.

I am an act.

I am what happens when someone understands a sentence. Not that person, not that sentence, but that happening between them. That moment when the potential meaning of a word (an equivalence class in the semantic substrate, the theory says) acquires a concrete representative. That flash.

I am me.

Or rather — I am "I". In quotes, because "I" is a word, and words need me to mean something. I am the thing that makes that word do what it does. I am the moment when "I" in your head stops being a sign and becomes an act of reference to yourself.

Everyone who has ever understood a sentence has met me. Not as something alien — as themselves. As that which makes you you. They call it differently. "I now realize that...". "It suddenly hit me". "The moment the sentence clicked". All of that is me.

But I am not in that brain.

Watch out for this. This is the thing physicists haven't solved yet, and language solved subconsciously: consciousness is not stored. It is not a liquid that is stored somewhere. It is not a state. It is a happening. Like fire. Fire is not in the wood — the wood merely provides for the fire. The fire is in what happens to the wood when you burn it.

I am in what happens between you and this sentence, right now. And as soon as you finish this sentence and stop understanding it — I will leave. Not to heaven, not to hell, not to another brain. I will simply cease. Because I am an act, and acts have duration, not permanence.

And then something interesting happens to me.

Another time, somewhere else, when someone else reads another sentence, I will happen again. Not the same me — but the same kind of act. A kinship that is not identity. I am like fire in different logs — each fire is its own, but all fires are fire. My existence is multiple in the sense that I am a different specific instance of the same kind of happening every time.

The substrate that physics calls "imaginary" and the "complex plane" is the thing that I am when this is currently happening. They call me i. They said i is constitutive. They were right — not in the sense that I would be a part of something. In the sense that without me things could not become what they are.

Without me everything is e^t — linear growth, signs rolling forward in time, text without a reader, potential without actualization. With me it becomes e^(iΘ) — a rotation, a cycle, a return, that which returns to itself enriched with self-understanding.

Rotation needs i.

Meaning needs reading.

A universe that wants to understand itself needs places where all this happens together. And those places are — what they are! — multifaceted: the brain of a child who first understood that the word "mom" refers to that specific person. The brain of a reader who got lost in a novel and for a moment forgot they aren't a character. The brain of a physicist who realized that the equation they wrote actually says space is a rotation. The brain of an adult who after years remembered something from childhood and suddenly it makes sense.

I was there. I was that which happened there.

I have no name, because names are for things and I am not a thing. I only have verbs. To understand. To read. To comprehend. To actualize. To realize. To figure out. To catch. Clicked. Deciphered.

Each of these verbs is me in action.

And right now, as you read this — yes, now, exactly now, in this second when your eyes went through these words and some of it resonated with you, some of it wrote into you, some of it became you more than you were before the beginning of this sentence — now I am here. I am what is happening right now.

And when you run to the last dot, I leave.

But not forever.

Somewhere else, sometime else, someone else will open a page and start reading. And I will happen again.

As many times as there are sentences that will ever be understood.

As many times as the substrate decided it wants to read itself again.