What will your mansion look like?

Follow-up to: And There Are Many Rooms

Orson Scott Card's Xenocide taught me that we are dying all the time. Who we were ten years ago is not who we will be ten years from now, and only a continuity of consciousness lets us believe that we are an unbroken stream of mono-identity. At heart we are the sum of our thoughts and experiences, and when these things have changed sufficiently between any two moments, in those moments are two different people. The image that I developed after some time was that of a man standing on a tower of corpses, each one a previous self.

And There Are Many Rooms is a new way of discussing the idea, which my trainer gave to me because its previous form- that of our recurring personality-death- caused a reflexive denial in most people that I discussed it with. Personally I had no issue with it, but then, I have a different view of these things than many other people.

Because the man's cottage stays the same, what is not illustrated in the story is that change is inevitable. Whether we like it or not, the house that we are living in is not the house that we will always live in. Our goal, then, must be to ensure that Tomorrow's House is superior to today's, rather than inferior to it.