Identity and persistence through change: SMM/DTT and Panpsychism and cosmopsychism

01The question behind the comparison

Persistence is the relation by which an object or person continues despite change. In SMM/DTT, a world generated through successive completions invites a pattern-based account: what persists may be a stable organization and its inherited history rather than an unchanged material token. This is a promising way to connect renewed creation with ordinary identity. It also raises a precise question: which continuities are sufficient, and how are rival successors distinguished?

Physical, functional and personal identity need not use the same criterion. A repaired instrument can remain the same instrument through replacement of parts. A mathematical pattern can have many identical copies. A person’s identity involves bodily continuity, memory, commitments and first-person perspective in ways that philosophers contest. Calling all of these retained information does not settle the disagreement. Two copies may carry the same stored information while having different locations and future experiences. A source theory must therefore distinguish qualitative resemblance from numerical identity.

The six nested levels could help articulate a hierarchy of persistence conditions: lower distinctions support relations, relations support an organized readout, and completed records support a history. But the architecture does not automatically establish personal survival or an immortal psychical carrier. Such claims need their own arguments. A physically useful account would first identify stable equivalence classes of generated configurations and the transitions that preserve them. A philosophical account would then ask whether those equivalence classes capture the kind of identity at issue.

02The single-source and nested-time proposal

SMM begins with one nonspatial generative source. DTT distinguishes its inner production from the outer order in which completed results become accessible. The six inner levels are nested functional dependencies within that production; the seventh denotes outer completion. They are not six independent clocks, six spatial directions, or six simultaneously occupied temporal axes. This distinction makes the framework more specific than a general claim that everything changes: it asks how a world of persistent relations can be generated before its spatial representation is taken for granted. ^[2]

03The comparator’s explanatory structure

Panpsychist approaches make experiential or protoexperiential properties fundamental and widespread. Cosmopsychism gives priority to a cosmic experiential whole. These positions face different explanatory directions: combining many experiences into one subject and accounting for distinct subjects within an experiential whole. Shani’s cosmopsychism offers an original philosophical treatment of the second route.

SMM’s one source is structurally closer to a top-down dependence than to a collection of independent micro-subjects, but a nonspatial generative source is not automatically a cosmic consciousness. The additional experiential claim must be stated. A useful example is a shared database accessed through separate permissions: one information source can support several perspectives, yet nothing about permissions alone establishes that those perspectives feel like anything. A source theory needs both individuation and an account of experience. Cosmopsychism can sharpen that task, while DTT contributes an explicit interest in how differentiated access and temporal histories are generated. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

Cosmopsychism can ground local subjects in one experiential whole, but it must explain why a local subject persists as this subject through change. SMM/DTT’s renewed generation offers a possible mechanism for preserving a perspective’s history, while the common source explains overarching dependence. The two ideas cooperate only if local identity is not dissolved into the identity of the whole.

A copied memory makes the problem concrete. Two generated perspectives might inherit identical contents yet later receive different experiences. Their common origin and initial similarity do not decide whether one, both or neither continues a previous subject. DTT can define causal lineage and access partitions, providing a disciplined structural account of the branching. Cosmopsychism then needs a principle connecting that account with phenomenal ownership. The comparison strengthens SMM by turning persistence into a specific individuation problem rather than an assurance that nothing is lost because the source remains one. The six nested levels may organize continuity, but a theory of personal identity must state what their completion preserves and what it does not. ^[1]

05Worked example: what follows and what does not

Suppose a notebook is copied perfectly, including its history. The copies are qualitatively identical at the copying moment, but one can later be edited while the other remains unchanged. They are therefore two objects with a shared informational ancestor. If a renewal theory identified identity with data alone, it would have difficulty distinguishing them. Adding causal lineage helps: each successor has a particular relation to the copying event. For persons, however, lineage alone may still leave questions about subjecthood. The example shows why memory is essential to a persistence account without making memory a complete definition of identity.

06What this comparison contributes

A strong SMM/DTT account can make persistence a lawful achievement of generation. It should state which features are conserved, how successors inherit them and what counts as interruption. This has value even without settling every metaphysical dispute: it clarifies what a generated world must preserve to support stable objects and accountable histories. Comparisons then become concrete disagreements about identity criteria rather than vague contrasts between static substances and flowing processes.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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