#presumption of non-functionality

THE PRESUMPTION OF NON-FUNCTIONALITY

The null hypothesis of character traits. Or why I could never call myself ‘kind’.

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Ever since I was a child, I’ve been stumped by questions like ‘What sort of person are you?’. I didn’t know how to answer. Kind? But I could get angry. Caring? But not towards everyone. Everyone around me called themselves good, but I saw their actions and found no evidence to back it up. It was like a parade of hypocrisy, where everyone was marketing themselves as a product, keeping their flaws under wraps.

Back then, I didn’t know there was a name for it. I simply adopted a rule: a quality isn’t a trait, but a hypothesis.

You aren’t ‘kind’. You’ve done a kind deed. You aren’t ‘wicked’. You’ve acted badly. But until an action is taken, you’re a zero function. You’re nothing. This isn’t cynicism. It’s pure mathematics. You can’t assign a value to a variable before it’s been calculated.

It works the other way round, too. A market vendor will never say that their strawberries are sour. An advert will never say ‘the previous model was worse’—it will say ‘this one is better’. This is a fundamental principle of human communication: to present the product in the best light. I don’t blame people for this. But I don’t play along either.

I don’t call myself ‘kind’, ‘generous’ or ‘caring’. Not because I’m a bad person. But because I don’t know how I’ll turn out in the next situation. I might help, or I might not. I might share, or I might refuse. And only after I’ve done so will it be possible to say: ‘In this situation, I behaved in such-and-such a way.’ Not before.

This isn’t modesty. It’s architecture. ‘A state gives rise to an event’, not the other way round. My identity isn’t a list of adjectives. It’s a space of possibilities. And I’m in the process of exploring it.

The world is not a set of entities. It is a space of events in which entities merely manifest themselves. And I do not know who I am. But I am discovering it. Step by step.

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This is not a manifesto. It is documentation.