“Life started exactly once!” Well… For sure at least once. Could have happened multiple times since then too. Convergent evolution is also a thing, and perhaps some modern life forms can trace their origins back to a different starting point, but happen to have followed a similar enough path that it’s hard to say for sure. We know positively it happened once, but cannot conclusively say it has never happened again.
Oh to be young and feel every new personal discovery so viscerally!
Conversely, I am merely a model of my own behaviors, thoughts, goals, and dreams. The “me” I was twenty years ago is not the same “me” that exists now, at that point I didn’t exist, I wasn’t yet alive, but the thoughts, behaviors, and memories of that person helped grow into the person I am today. My memories of those times before are old and reconstructed, I don’t have the same memories entirely, I have memories of memories of memories, and who knows if the memories I have today will be the same in twenty years. When I die as an individual, the model of my self and my behaviors will be carried by the people I knew and was close to, and parts of me will still exist as the behaviors I had were picked up on, my views and ideas turned into memes carried into the people I relayed them to, the patterns that were “me” now part of everyone as they grow and change into new people themselves. I am not just genetic data, that was just the foundation of my existence, the soil in which I grew, but as I grew and reasoned and modeled myself from my surroundings, I also gave myself back to the connections I made. In that way I am either a continuation of all the humanity I was before and will eventually be as long as the ideas exist, or limited to the self I am in the present, and only for the brief part that I am actually present for.
The closer you look at identity, the less defined and distinct it appears. I’m either the entire river with its myriad sources and tributaries or I’m whatever sliver of water flowing in its path. It doesn’t much matter either way. I think the meaning of such a thing is more distributed across the minds capable of understanding it, as it is with language, a sort of gaussian distribution whose peak is the average understanding, which shifts depending on what part of the local extelligence you have access to.
The sound didn’t match the lip movement 😥
“Life begins at conception? No. Life began billions of years ago, and it’s just been a continuous process ever since!” - George Carlin
