A Reworking of Yesterday's Model of Self

Let a book in the library of Babel be any finite string of characters, and let B = {x | x is a book in the library of Babel}. There is a subset of B, call it P, such that every element of P is a property that a thing could have. Examples of elements of P are:

• "Likes Cheese"
• "Has a pancreas that can hold four mL of fluid."
• "Has two billion hairs."
• "Is composed of more atoms than David Bowie is."
• "Has an average velocity of ten meters per a second"
• "Doesn't like Star Wars"
• "Will on die May 1st, 2010."
• "Would, if given the chance, fly to the moon in an attempt to defeat a space Nazi."

Originally I thought that a property could be a function of time. For example,

p(t) = height at time t.

So you would have things like:

• p(May 1st, 2010) = 1.6 meters
• p(the third Tuesday of 1925) = 4 ft. 6 in.
• p(one sec after the big bang) = undefined

This is still right, but there's a simpler way of doing it. In this construction, I forgot just how big the Library of Babel is. It's fricken huge. There is no need to have one property called "height" that varies over time, because the set P contains the following elements:

• "Is 1.6 meters tall on May 1st, 2010"
• "Is 4ft. 6in. tall the third Tuesday of 1925"
• "Has no height one second after the big bang."

This is accomplishes the same thing as the time stamped height function, but in a simpler way.

Let S be an ordered set of boolean values such that each value corresponds to a property in P. For example, S = (1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,...) would mean S does have properties 1,2,3,4,8,10,12, and 13, but does not have properties 5,6,7,9,11, and 14. 

Every object has a corresponding S. I want to say that every object is its S.

Essentially, my concept of an object is just a very elaborate game of 20 questions, with an infinite number of questions.

-Nick