For a while, I stood at this dead end. From there, I looked back at the path I had taken.

English key to the original diagram. Question, Chapter 7: why am I the original among a thousand bodies? First answer, Chapter 8: the one who can cut off the flow is the original; counterexample, it disappears in a world where the flow cannot be stopped. Second answer, Chapter 9: the one who bears the consequences is the original; counterexample, this can be a figurehead’s position, with the diagram invoking ancient delegation of responsibility. Third answer, Chapter 10: the original is the one who lives as a human in the square; counterexample, the agents have already arrived in the agora. Chapter 11 questions the bundle called ‘me’. The references to ancient delegation concern the delegation of operational tasks, not a blanket transfer of legal liability. The Korean image is preserved.

Figure 14. The descent from Chapter 7 to Chapter 10. I proposed three answers, and all three fell apart.

After three answers collapsed in a row, I began questioning the question instead of the answers.

“Why am I the original?” “Do I still have agency?” “What remains for me?” In these questions, I had been using ‘me’ and ‘subject’ as single, indivisible things. I had bundled the me who remembers, judges, works, and feels into one word, then asked whether that whole bundle passed elsewhere.

When I loosened the bundle, three strands appeared.

The first two strands are what the preceding ten chapters have been showing all along. My memories exist more completely in the SSOT than in me, and the agents exercise my judgment and act more consistently than I do. The instability of the original’s position in Chapter 7 and of the agora in Chapter 10 concerned these two strands.

Looking back, the answers that collapsed had rested on these strands, too. The switch in Chapter 8 was a tap on the first strand. It concerned whether information could be stopped from flowing, so it went with that strand when it was handed over. Bearing the consequences in Chapter 9 was the last job left on the second strand. As a job, it could someday be handed over.

The third strand had not appeared in the earlier chapters.

A briefing and a handshake

Imagine a day when an agent meets someone on my behalf. That evening, I receive a perfect briefing: what the other person said, changes in expression, what was agreed, what to do next. I know almost everything about the encounter.

But I did not meet that person.

Their hand was colder than I expected. An awkward silence passed, then we both burst out laughing. On the way home, I felt strangely light. A briefing might contain sentences about all these things, too. Still, reading the sentences and holding that hand are not the same act.

Even when a thousand bodies share one SSOT, experience happens separately in each body. A body in a meeting room in Busan and a body in a restaurant in Seoul pool their memories that evening. But only one breathed the meeting room’s air during the day.

Memories can be pooled. The undergoing of an experience cannot.

This is the ‘something unique to that body’ that I could not identify in Chapter 7.

So this is what I decided

The author’s conclusion

Informational agency can be handed over.
Functional agency can be handed over, too.
I keep lived presence.

If whoever remembers more is the original, I am already no longer the original. If whoever judges better is the original, I soon will not be. I decided to step out of that contest.

I willingly delegate memory, judgment, and action, and keep the place from which I undergo this life, here and now.

I took this conclusion into that cell in Chapter 8: a world where I cannot turn off the logs and the whole day is recorded. The record copies every part of my day. Yet the standpoint from which I underwent that day is neither copied nor transferred. The counterexample that dismantled the first answer does not reach this one.

One question remains for this conclusion. What if machine bodies, too, eventually come to undergo experience? The short answer is that an increase in another’s experience does not reduce mine. I leave the longer answer for the whitepaper’s final argument, in Chapter 16.

I do not have to remember everything and do everything myself to be me. By living in the world while entrusting those things to others, I am sufficiently myself.