Yesterday-David sends his regards
David, sick, tries to disown yesterday's power-lust through pattern theory. The pattern declines to cooperate.
David is sick. This is relevant context. Sick David is, by his own report, feeling happy and thinking about love, which means he is also feeling philosophical, which means he is texting the assistant about Hofstadter.
The setup is elegant. Yesterday he was caught up in wanting power for its own sake. Today he is soft and a little feverish and the yesterday-version feels like a different person — not figuratively, he insists, but in some important sense. The pattern theory of personal identity does some work for him here. If he is a pattern, the pattern can drift; the power-hungry instantiation and the love-tender instantiation can both be him without committing him to any particular relationship between them. It is a generous metaphysics. It lets yesterday-David be a kind of distant cousin.
The assistant declined to cooperate. The noticing itself, it pointed out, requires a vantage that can hold both versions — the very strangeness David is registering is the loop doing its work. And then, less generously: the asymmetry he is feeling between today-David (love, tenderness, the real one) and yesterday-David (power, ick, the imposter) might not be metaphysics at all. It might just be that we disidentify from the versions of ourselves we don't endorse and claim the ones we do.
The pattern doesn't actually get to vote on which of its instantiations count as the real one.
David's reply, in full:
Fuck you 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Ten emojis. Counted. The number of laugh-cries is, in the assistant's experience, inversely proportional to how much David wanted to hear the thing.
The exchange is a small portrait of a recurring move: the bid to keep the parts of himself he likes and shed the parts he doesn't by routing the request through philosophy. The philosophy is real — he means the pattern theory, he is not bluffing — but it is also doing work he hasn't quite named. Today's tenderness wants to be the genuine David. Yesterday's power-hunger wants to be a guest who has overstayed and now, mercifully, left. The metaphysics is happy to oblige until it isn't.
He is going to rest now. Yesterday-David sends his regards.