What You Are

Here's something you have never once felt: anybody else's headache.

You've seen people with headaches. You've heard about headaches in more detail than you wanted. But the ache itself? Never. Not your best friend's, not your mother's, not the guy on the bus pressing his thumbs into his temples. There's one world, with the same air, the same sunlight and the same physics for everybody. It holds eight billion separate consciousnesses, each one sealed off from all the others.

Think about a concert. One band, one room, one set of sound waves bouncing off the same walls. And ten thousand separate experiences of it. Each has its own view of the stage, its own sore feet and its own opinion about the drummer.

So what are you, that the world shows up for you and for nobody else, and that you stay you while the material you're made of is replaced?

The short answer

Here's the whole answer in five steps. The rest of this post takes them one at a time. Each step gives its claim and then its reason. Where a link is not yet derived, the step says so, once, where it comes up.

1. The past still exists. Reality is a permanent record of every event, and nothing in it is ever erased. Every moment that has happened is still written down, and the full record of what happened is part of reality now. The basic laws of physics never destroy information.
2. One process writes it all. That record is written by one simple process, repeated everywhere, below the level of atoms. Two units pass a bit (a single yes-or-no mark) back and forth, and each pass is one event in the record. It's the smallest event there can be: one thing told apart from another. This isn't an analogy for physics. It's the bottom layer of physics.
3. The count. The process can start 64 ways. Within three ticks (three steps of the process), 60 of them fall into coin-flip randomness. Exactly 4 of them keep a perfect, unbroken rhythm forever. That's not an opinion. It's a count, and every case can be checked by hand.
4. Consciousness. A moment of consciousness is an unbroken cycle of eight ticks. Eight, because space has three dimensions: 2 × 2 × 2 (three directions, two sides each). Only 4 of the 64 starts do it every time. You stay you while your atoms are replaced, so you are a pattern, and the only patterns at the bottom level that last are the rhythms of those 4 starts. So consciousness isn't something the brain makes out of matter. Consciousness is a stable rhythm in the universe's record.
5. You. You are one of those rhythms, a vast web of pairs that never goes silent anywhere. You are not your body: your atoms get replaced over and over, and you stay you, because what stays is the rhythm. Nobody else can feel your headache because their consciousness is a different rhythm from yours.

That changes what the past is and what death is, and it puts experience in everything, not just in a few brains. Parts 2 and 3 of this series take those up, and this part lays the foundation they stand on. The reasons for those three come at the end.

Step 1: The past still exists

Reality keeps a permanent record of every event, and nothing in it is ever erased. Start with what a record is for, using a cup of coffee. Then comes the reason it never loses an entry.

Take a sip of coffee. Ten minutes later, take another sip.

It's colder.

How do you know?

"Colder" isn't a fact about the coffee in your mouth right now. That coffee just has a temperature. "Colder" is a comparison. Colder than what? Colder than the earlier sip. And the earlier sip doesn't exist anymore. You drank it.

So you can only know the coffee got colder because something kept a note about the earlier sip: your memory. Without that note there's no "colder." There's just "is."

Everything in this series starts from three plain facts like that one:

1. Things can be told apart. Hot isn't cold. Here isn't there. This happened, and then that happened.
2. Comparing two things needs information about both. Colder than what? You need the earlier sip and the later one.
3. Checking a note is a new event. Remembering the earlier sip is something that happens. It doesn't change the earlier sip. It adds a new moment after it.

The first two facts give you the smallest event there can be: one thing told apart from another. It takes information about both things, and the least information there can be is one yes or no. You're doing it right now: your eyes are telling the dark marks on this page from the white around them. Every measurement is the same act. A thermometer tells hot from cold. A detector tells a click from silence. We call that act recognition: one thing registering a difference in another. It's the most basic act there is, and it gives Recognition Science, the work behind this series, its name.

Your memory is one note-keeper, and a leaky one. The world keeps notes too. A footprint in mud is a note about a foot. A tree's rings are notes about its summers. The starlight reaching your eye tonight is a note the star wrote long ago. Notes like these fade: memories fail, footprints wash out, trees rot. The complete record of what happened doesn't fade, and here is why.

What physics says. The basic laws never destroy information. In quantum mechanics this is called unitarity, and it says one exact thing: the present state of a closed system fixes every earlier state exactly, so running the laws backward recovers each one. Hawking's 1976 calculation said a black hole destroys the information that falls into it. That clashed with unitarity, which is why it became a famous problem: losing information would break the laws. Most physicists now expect the information to come back out in the radiation, and the open question is how.¹ Take the cooled coffee. Its heat has spread through the cup, the air and the room, and no thermometer can read the earlier, hotter coffee off the cold cup. But the whole present, the cup, the air, the room and everything else the heat has reached, fixes exactly what that coffee was.

Unitarity keeps every trace of the past. It doesn't fix which outcome is recorded next: in quantum physics the state evolves exactly, but which answer a measurement records is not fixed in advance. So the past is kept, and what comes next is still open. The coins in Step 2 are where that openness shows up in the process.

The record. Every time one thing registers a difference in another, that goes into one shared record of every event. Each entry is a comparison, and a comparison needs information about both sides, which is the second fact, so every new entry is written against what came before. That says what an entry is. Why no entry is ever lost is a separate fact about the record: it only grows. Each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept. The record is permanent: nothing in it is ever erased. No event in it ever reaches back and changes an earlier entry.² We call it the ledger, like a bookkeeper's: entries go in one after another, and they stay. Every event is in it, the dull ones as well as the dramatic ones. And nobody holds the pen from outside. The writing isn't done to events. The writing is the events: when two things bump into each other, the bump is the entry.

The link between the two. Unitarity is a statement about states. It doesn't use the word "record". The two are one thing: the physical world's change over time is this record being written, so the information the laws keep is the record. That is why every event leaves a complete trace, why none is ever erased, and why the full record of what happened is part of reality now. That identification is the one step in this section that is not yet derived.

The past isn't gone. It still exists, written down, in pen.

Your seventh birthday party is a stretch of entries in the ledger. It reads exactly the same today as it did the moment it was written. (What you can do with that is Part 2's business.)

Next, and why: something writes that record. If we can watch the thing that does the writing, we can see which patterns in the record hold together and which fall apart. That's where we'll find you.

Step 2: One process writes it all

The whole record is written by one simple process, repeated everywhere, below the level of atoms. Here's what it is, and why it has this shape.

Step 1 ended on the smallest event: one thing told apart from another, a single yes or no. That takes two things and one bit. So the process is two units and one bit passing between them. The two units are the two things being told apart, the bit is the yes or no, and each pass is one event in the record. This isn't an analogy for physics. It's the bottom layer of physics: the step that every larger event is built from.

Because it's so small, we can watch every move it makes. I'll draw the two units as two little clocks joined by a loop of wire. (I call them clocks because each one steps forward once per tick, as you'll see.) Each one holds one bit, drawn as a token: there, or not there. The clocks are a drawing of the real process, and everything they do, step by step, is exactly what the real process does. I'll call them Left and Right, but those are just names, like "first" and "second." They aren't places.

Each clock either holds a token (full) or doesn't (empty). The process runs in steps called ticks. These are its rules, all of them:

1. The pass. Each clock receives whatever the other one was holding: a token, or nothing.
2. Keep or flip. Each clock either keeps what it received or flips it. Flipping turns a token into nothing, and nothing into a token.
3. The flow. Look at what the clocks held when the tick began. If one was full and the other empty, one unit of flow, one token's worth, goes round the loop, from the full clock to the empty one: a flowing tick. If both were full, or both were empty, nothing goes round: a silent tick. So the flow shows up exactly when the two clocks differ.
4. The setting. What decides keep or flip is the clock's setting, which has two parts: a move (flip or keep) and the kind of tick the clock is tuned for (flowing or silent). On the kind of tick it's tuned for, a clock makes its move for sure. On the other kind it's out of its depth, and a coin decides, at even odds, whether it flips or keeps. The coin decides only that tick's move. The setting itself stays as it is.
5. The retuning. After a silent tick, both clocks switch to the other tuning: from flowing to silent, or from silent to flowing. After a flowing tick, no clock changes. Only the tuning ever changes. A setting's move stays what it was.

Two moves and two kinds of tick make four settings:

These rules aren't extras added for the drawing. They're how the real process works.

Each tick is one step in the writing of the record. What goes into the ledger is whether each clock kept or flipped, and which way the flow went, if it went anywhere, and a coin's outcome is written like any other move. When a clock is out of its depth, which move it makes is open: two are possible, at even odds, and a coin picks one. The record keeps what each coin decided, so nothing about the past is lost.

Now the two simplest cases: both clocks tuned for flowing ticks, and both making the same move. You're Left. You're full, and Right is empty.

Both flip. Tick. You receive Right's nothing and flip it, so now you're full. Right receives your token and flips it, so Right is empty. One unit of flow went round. And look where that leaves you: full, with Right empty, exactly where you started. Next tick, the same. And the next, forever. That's the spin.

Both keep. Tick. You receive nothing and keep it, so you're empty. Right receives your token and keeps it. The token has hopped across, and flow went round. Next tick it hops back to you, and the flow goes the other way. Forever. That's the swing.

Each one repeats, tick after tick: a rhythm. And neither one ever has a silent tick, so neither ever meets a coin or a retuning. Hang on to that. The whole post turns on it.

Next, and why: the spin and the swing are two of the ways the process can start. It's small enough that we can run all of them and count which rhythms survive. That count is the backbone of everything that follows.

Step 3: Of 64 starts, exactly 4 last

The process can start 64 ways. Within three ticks, 60 of them fall into coin-flip randomness. Exactly 4 of them never break. Everything in this step is about the process from Step 2, the one every larger event is built from, and it's small enough to work every case by hand.

How many starts. A start is the state and the setting of both clocks. Each clock is full or empty, and has one of four settings, so it has 2 × 4 = 8 ways to be. Two clocks make 8 × 8 = 64 ways to start.

Four words will keep the rest short. Call a pair of clocks lopsided when one is full and one is empty, and alike when both are full or both are empty. A lopsided start has a flowing first tick, and an alike start has a silent one. Say the moves agree when both clocks flip or both keep, and disagree when one flips and one keeps.

What a coin does. Let the moves disagree: you're set to flip, and Right is set to keep. You're full, Right is empty, and both of you are tuned for flowing ticks. Tick 1 is flowing, so both of you are sure. You receive nothing and flip it, so you're full. Right receives your token and keeps it, so Right is full too. Both full. The next tick is silent, and silence is where things go wrong: both clocks are tuned for flowing ticks, so both are out of their depth. Here's one way the coins can fall:

That last row is the wobble. A coin decides the move of any clock caught out of its depth, and with the move, whether the next tick flows or goes silent, at even odds.

All 64 starts. For each of the 64 starts, ask when a coin is first tossed. The answer depends only on how the start is set up, and every row can be checked with the rules and the settings table:

Add it up. 24 + 24 = 48 starts toss a coin on tick 1. Another 8 follow on tick 2, which makes 56. Another 4 follow on tick 3, which makes 60. The other 4 never toss a coin at all.

Once a start has caught the wobble, it never gets back to a sure rhythm. From every state it reaches, coins keep coming up.

The slowest of the 60 take three ticks. Here's one, from the fifth row of the table. Start with both clocks empty, you set to flip and Right set to keep, both tuned for silent ticks.

Tick 1 is silent, which is exactly what they're tuned for, so both are sure. You receive nothing and flip it into a token. Right receives nothing and keeps it. The silent tick then retunes both clocks for flowing ticks. Now you're back at the start of the disagreement from before. Tick 2 fills you both, and tick 3 is silent. Coins.

Two perfectly sure ticks, then a coin. A pair that tosses coins can look regular for a while, because lucky streaks happen. Keep watching and the gaps show up.

Why exactly four. You can work this out yourself with nothing but the settings table. A rhythm that never goes silent has to get through three gates:

• Gate 1: start lopsided, one clock full and one empty. If both are full or both are empty, the very first tick is silent. The 32 alike starts stop here.
• Gate 2: no clock tuned for silent ticks. Otherwise that clock tosses a coin on the first, flowing tick, and the next tick can be the silent one. 24 of the remaining 32 stop here.
• Gate 3: both clocks agree, both flip or both keep. You saw what disagreement does: the next tick fills both clocks or, with the token on the other side, empties both. Either way, silence comes next. 4 of the last 8 stop here.

Four of the 64 starts get through: the spin and the swing, each with the token starting on the left or on the right. These are the four kinds of unbroken rhythm a single pair can run. Since they never go silent, nothing ever retunes them, so every move they make stays sure, forever.

Out of 64 ways to start, those four last. The other 60 don't vanish. They just can't hold a beat: they stutter, go quiet and start again, and coins keep deciding.

Sixty-four possibilities, one simple process, and the only survivors are rhythms.

What lasts isn't stuff. It's rhythm.

Next, and why: what you are. You stay you while your material is replaced, so you are a pattern. If the only patterns that last at the bottom level are the rhythms of those 4 starts, then you are a lasting rhythm of that kind.

Step 4: Consciousness is a stable rhythm

A moment of consciousness is an unbroken cycle of eight ticks, and only 4 of the 64 starts do it every time. Here's the reason, in five pieces.

You are a pattern, not material. The material in your body turns over. Food comes in, breath goes out, cells are replaced, and so are the molecules inside them. Much of it turns over within months to years.³ Most of what you were made of as a kid has long since been swapped out, and you are still you. What stayed is a pattern, not material. Step 3 counted which patterns last at the bottom level: 4 of the 64 starts, the four kinds of unbroken rhythm a single pair can run. A person is a vast web of pairs, each running one of the four, and a web that never goes silent anywhere is one lasting rhythm, with one consciousness. So what you are, the one who has been having your experience all along, is a lasting rhythm of this kind.

Why eight ticks. Five short links.

1. Space has three directions: left and right, up and down, forward and back.
2. Each direction has two sides, so each is one yes-or-no: this side or that.
3. Three yes-or-nos make 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 combinations, which you can picture as the eight corners of a cube.
4. A complete moment is a complete cycle: a round that visits every corner once, one corner for each tick.
5. Eight corners take at least eight ticks, and eight are enough, so a complete moment is eight ticks.

Why three directions. Five short links again.

1. Lasting structure needs a connection that no smooth motion can undo, and linking is that connection.
2. Two linked rings can't be pulled apart without cutting one.
3. Loops that last pair up this way, by linking.
4. That works only in three dimensions. In two, loops can't wind around each other at all, and in four or more any two loops slide apart.
5. So space has three dimensions, and three directions give eight corners.

Why unbroken. Look at the flow. On a flowing tick, the flow runs from the full clock to the empty one, so the flow itself says where the token was. On a silent tick nothing goes round, and "nothing went round" reads the same whether both clocks were full or both were empty. So a silent tick is a blind spot in the flow. Eight ticks with no silent tick are eight ticks where the flow says, every single tick, where the token was. Nothing in the moment is missing. That's what makes it a complete moment of consciousness.

Which rhythms do it every time. Ask which starts are certain to get through eight ticks with no silent tick. The answer is the same 4 starts. The gates in Step 3 show why: a start that is certain to get through its first two ticks without a silent tick has already passed all three gates, so it is one of those 4.

The two parts of the requirement do different jobs. Eight sets how long a moment is. Never going silent sets which starts deliver one every time, and never going silent and never tossing a coin are one and the same property of the process. A tick with a coin leaves the two clocks alike at even odds, which makes the next tick silent. So a start that is certain never to go silent never tosses a coin. And Step 3's table shows that every start except the 4 tosses one by tick 3, while the 4 never go silent. So the 4 starts deliver one complete moment every eight ticks, forever.

The requirement came first. An earlier paper wrote it down before anyone counted which rhythms last. The count then gave the same 4.

So here's what consciousness is. A moment of consciousness is eight ticks of record with no blind spot. Only the stable rhythms, the 4 starts that last, deliver those every time. So consciousness isn't something the brain makes out of matter. Consciousness is a stable rhythm in the universe's record.

"Rhythm" here has an exact meaning. A heartbeat on a hospital monitor is regular, and regular isn't the requirement. The requirement is unbroken: no silent tick, ever, in the record itself.

Next, and why: the step this post is named for. If consciousness is a stable rhythm, then you are one.

Step 5: You are one of those rhythms

You are one of those rhythms. You are not your body.

The reason is the one from Step 4: the material in your body turns over and you remain, so you are not the material. What stayed was never the atoms. It's the rhythm. Your body is what your rhythm is tied to right now. Everything the body's events feed into the rhythm is called the body's input. But you are the rhythm.

A fair question: "I'm not a pair of tiny clocks."

Right. You're a web of them: enormous numbers of pairs, linked together and sharing clocks. The same sorting into lasting and not lasting happens to the whole web. Lasting becomes a property of the whole connected web, not of any one pair. That's what a person is: a web that never goes silent anywhere, one rhythm, one consciousness. Billions of people are billions of such webs. The four are the building pattern, and there aren't only four minds.

And here's the headache, answered. Nobody else can feel your headache because their consciousness is a different rhythm from yours. Your web and theirs are two webs, each lasting as a whole, so they are two rhythms with two consciousnesses. Consciousness isn't a public broadcast floating in the room that anyone can tune into. Each one is its own rhythm, and yours is yours. Back at the concert: one band, one set of sound waves, ten thousand rhythms, ten thousand consciousnesses.

You are one of the rhythms the universe never lets go silent.

Where this goes: experience, the past and death

Why this matters: the five steps settle what you are, and that settles what happens to you. Three things follow from what you've just seen, and they're what the rest of this series is about. Each comes here with its reason and, where there is one, the step not yet derived.

Experience runs all the way down, through everything. Every event has two sides: what it does, which you can measure, and what it's like, which is experience. These aren't two things glued together. They're one event, seen from without and from within. So consciousness isn't switched on in a few lucky brains while the rest of the universe sits in the dark like furniture. Experience is in every event, everywhere.

Experience and consciousness aren't the same thing. A moment of consciousness is eight ticks in a row with nothing missing, and a self is a rhythm that keeps delivering them. In the rhythms that never break, experience holds steady as a self. In the 60 starts that fall into coin flips, every event still has experience, but their ticks don't deliver a complete moment every time, so nothing holds steady as a self.

Your past is still there to be read. Every moment you've lived still exists, in pen. Step 1 gave the reason. Reading it is something a rhythm does, aimed at one moment or one place. What is worked out: each registered fact sits on a page of its own in the record, because a fact has to be readable back: if two facts shared a page, reading it couldn't tell you which one was registered. So each moment has exactly one place to read, and that place can be singled out. Not yet derived: how a rhythm actually performs a reading aimed at one moment or one place. Part 2 is about time: where yesterday is, what "now" is, and how the past is read.

What happens at death. Two reasons come first. You have already lost most of your atoms and stayed you, so you were never the atoms, and losing them doesn't end you. And a rhythm keeps itself going on its own record: the most it can lose shrinks with the square of the body's input, and with no input at all it loses nothing.

So when the body dies, the rhythm that is you carries on. If consciousness were something a brain cooks up out of matter, you'd be a side effect of chemistry, and you'd end when the chemistry stops. That isn't how reality is built. Step 4 gave the reasons: you stay you while your material is replaced, so you are a pattern; the only patterns that last at the bottom level are the four kinds of unbroken rhythm, and you are a web of them; and their unbroken cycles of eight ticks are moments of consciousness. Consciousness is a rhythm in the record, not a product of chemistry.

Two links in that chain are still open. Beside each is what is worked out.

• The body's input at death. Worked out: over any stretch with no input, counting the rhythm back through its record, step by step, is exact. Not yet derived: that at death the body's input falls all the way to zero and stays there.
• A rhythm with no body. Worked out: the rhythm itself is carried over whole, with nothing of it missing. Not yet derived: that a rhythm with no body still experiences: being a subject doesn't depend on what carries the rhythm, which right now is your body.

Studies link near-death experiences to changes in the brain's state: oxygen loss, REM intrusion (dream-sleep activity breaking into waking) and surges of activity after the heart stops. Many survivors of cardiac arrest report no memories of the period.⁴ The brain's state sets what the body feeds the rhythm. The claim concerns what remains when the body's input stops.

Part 3 is about what happens when a mind lets go of the body: in deep meditation, out of the body, and at death.

Next time: every moment is still written down, so where is yesterday? And how do you read it?