Who am I? I’m Jean Valjean…

In England, I’m Claire Sinclair; in Russia, I’m Ivan Ivanov; in Sicily, Nemo; in France, Jean Valjean. In other words I am a Quantum of Being (QB)…wherever and whenever. As such I am simple, I am inert, the same at the hour of my death as at the moment of my conception, the same at 80 as at 8. I cannot be divided into parts, displayed as aspects, or reduced to qualia; I am the Aletheia behind all that crazy Doxa.

Everything about me changes: my environment, my personality, my behavior, my appearance; even the cells that make up my body recycle every 7 years or so. “I seem to be a verb” (R. B. Fuller), but through all this, I never change. There’s nothing to change! (Not that I’m perfect, mind you.) There’s nothing to change because there’s nothing that is subject to change, nothing changeable.

Assuming that you are real, and my ontological equal, there’s no reason to doubt that you too are a Quantum of Being. We saw (above) that a QB has no hair! (Hawking? Kojak?), no qualia, nothing to distinguish one QB from another. My QB constitutes an identity: QB 8 = QB 80; not just an equivalence, an identity! 

Same goes for you, I’m sure, but let’s go further. My QB 80 is my QB 8 and vice versa. There is only one UB Me. Same for you, right? Then why shouldn’t my QB 8 and your QB 8 also constitute an identity?

“R U Mad? I is me and you is you, end of! You are not me; in philosophy you are known quite simply as ‘the other’ (reminds me of an episode from Lost).”

Imagine yourself as a singularity…wait, you are a singularity. What you ‘are’ sits on your ‘event horizon’. Believe me, I’m looking at it and it’s one hairy mess! Don’t they have barbers, excuse me ‘scalp sculptors’, where you come from?

But that’s outside of you. You are the undifferentiated, hairless ‘black hole’ beneath that horizon. Beyond our respective horizons, we have not a mote of dust in common; inside those horizons we are indistinguishable and what is indistinguishable is identical (i.e. constitutes an identity).

My ontological equals are all singularities with unique mops of hair covering a single featureless interior (Quantum of Being). So, your QB and my QB are one and the same QB. In fact, there is only one QB though it is shared by innumerable entities.

“Ridiculous! You were born in the castle, a prince of the realm; I was born a slave in your fields. You were raised on quail eggs and poached salmon; I was raised on a root broth and some gruel.” 

But none of this has anything to do with us, with what or who we are! Let’s play Prince & Pauper (not really playing) except that we change places every night. Who is the real prince, who is the real slave? After a certain period of time, they become two roles played by a single person.

One of the many errors of the Enlightenment was the idea that we are what we experience. Hence, genetics, nutrition, psychology, even travel. A whole generation was raised on the meme, “You are what you eat!” – it’s in the running for MLP honors (‘Most Ludicrous Proposition’).

You are not your circumstances. You are not the accidental things that happen to you throughout your life. You are not what you eat! On the contrary, you sh*t what you eat; what you eat is precisely what you are not. To eat is to incorporate the ‘other’ into yourself, and at the other end of the line, you graciously return the ‘other’, albeit modified, to its natural habitat.

Jesus said it best, didn’t he? (He usually does.) “It is not what goes into a person’s mouth (food) that defiles them, but what comes out (speech).” (Matt. 15: 11) We’ve got everything backwards, don’t we? (We usually do.)

Nothing you experience is you. If you were what you experienced, you would not be there to experience it. ‘Experience’ requires differánce (Derrida). A quantum of difference. Identity is the complete absence of differánce. 

So your QB and my QB are one and the same QB. What about your pet monkey and my pig? Do they have Quanta of Being? Do they have identity? Do they experience? Of course they do! And now for the question we’ve been avoiding, and you’ve been anticipating, drum roll please:

“If your QB and my QB are the same and if pigs and monkeys also have Quanta of Being, do they share a common QB and, if so, is that the same QB that you and I share?”

Nothing’s more fun than London on election night. At 10PM sharp, the neon signs in Piccadilly Circus go dark…and immediately relight with a single number flashing over and over again (red or blue) on a screen. It’s the number of seats the winning party will have in the new Parliament.

This is like that! Do you share QB in common with my pig?

YES! YES! YES!

I mean what else could the answer be. A QB has no hair so there’s nothing that allows us to distinguish one QB from another. There can only be one QB because every possible QB must be identical to every other QB. So, “QB or not QB, that is the question.” (Come on, be honest, you knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

So you and I have a complex relationship. On the level of pour soi, you and I share a common QB – we are identical. On the level of en soi, we have nothing whatsoever in common. We share nothing; we are pathologically distinct, strangers in the night.

It is the intersection of identity and difference that gives rise to what we call society and taxonomy and it is what constitutes solidarity!

Keep the conversation going.

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