"How do you know if she is still your beloved?"

[CheertheSecond]

One of the most major character in my series was entangled with an almost philosophical trouble.

Background:
On each planet that sustains life, the many lifeforms will accumulate power and gain spirits. These spirits at first are just spirits of individual lifeforms. They would slowly fuse with each other, beginning with those from the same species first then to their genus and so on. These spirits will also grow in power (we are talking about the duration of hundred of millions of years) and later on becoming eternal and no longer reincarnating through the power of the planet. Later on, they became free spirits and no longer bound by the planet.


The character of today subject is one of such spirits. She was originally a mutant rose that mutated to be able to actively spread and hunt other animals ( slow speed, about as fast as fly trap plants speed of closing their traps). Due to the amount of lifeforms she had killed before being brought to extinction, she accumulated enough power to be a spirit. She later reincarnated as a human and found herself attracted to a white tiger spirit also reincarnated as a human.

The two women lived their love life until the white tiger reincarnation died of natural death. However, the rose spirit lived on immortally. Whenever the white tiger reincarnated, she would find her and attempt to reconnect their love. However, even if the tiger spirit allowed the reincarnation to remember her past life, it is still the past life. The new reincarnation while behaving similar to the rose's beloved still continue to change as time past.

It was a million years later and the rose's spirit realised just how much had changed, her, her beloved, their experience through out the millennia. Nothing stay constant as change is the only thing constant. The new reincarnation had the past memories but they had their own growing up story too, they interacted with different people, they faced different challenge even the molecules of their physical body changed over time and their perception and reaction to external stimuli changed too. It is at this point that the rose's spirit reflected and believed that her love was that very first reincarnation and she was gone. She believed she had just been wrongly attribute the immortality of spirit to the immortality of an individual. Her love was truly gone and she was just chasing after a memory. Her action was forcing herself onto a different person rather than the wrong interpretation of changing yourself for love like someone would say. Hence, as she spent the last day with the current reincarnation of the tiger spirit who she did love just as any other reincarnation in their unique way, she decided to not seek out any subsequent reincarnation.



The question: Was her conclusion about her beloved had gone forever true? Or was that just her misunderstanding?

 

[LilRora]

When faced with a problem like this, I usually prefer to approach it from a slightly different perspective. You have to remember that just as people change, just as spirits change, relationships do change too. Seeking the same relationship from each subsequent reincarnation is foolish, but that doesn't mean she should abandon the rose's spirit altogether.

I have always found romantic love weird for immortal beings. For humans, whose lives are extremely short on the cosmic or an immortal's scale, that is a natural and common relationship, but for someone who does not die, human expressions of love and romantic relationships become pretty symbols at best. There are other forms and expressions that become much more important, and many are stretched into decades or millennia rather than days or months they take for humans, if they actually have an end.

I don't think her conclusion was true. An immortal being is more than the sum of its parts, and it's the memories and journey that define them, not the beginning and an abstract end. The Theseus' Ship may disappear over time, but as you interact with it through its journey, it's the "soul", the developing and evolving identity of the subject as a whole that matters, not its individual parts.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

If you, as the writer, believe her conclusion was true, it was. If not, then you have a plot point to explore or ignore at your discretion.

 

[Macha]

Was her conclusion about her beloved had gone forever true? Or was that just her misunderstanding?

I can make her conclusion true for a fee.

 

[CheertheSecond]

When faced with a problem like this, I usually prefer to approach it from a slightly different perspective. You have to remember that just as people change, just as spirits change, relationships do change too. Seeking the same relationship from each subsequent reincarnation is foolish, but that doesn't mean she should abandon the rose's spirit altogether.

I have always found romantic love weird for immortal beings. For humans, whose lives are extremely short on the cosmic or an immortal's scale, that is a natural and common relationship, but for someone who does not die, human expressions of love and romantic relationships become pretty symbols at best. There are other forms and expressions that become much more important, and many are stretched into decades or millennia rather than days or months they take for humans, if they actually have an end.

I don't think her conclusion was true. An immortal being is more than the sum of its parts, and it's the memories and journey that define them, not the beginning and an abstract end. The Theseus' Ship may disappear over time, but as you interact with it through its journey, it's the "soul", the developing and evolving identity of the subject as a whole that matters, not its individual parts.

And this is where the true problem comes from.

Soul is just a part of an individual as in the body, mind and soul. Having any part of the three being different will result in an individual developing differently. I can not say that an immortal being is more than the sum of their part but I will say that the individuality of an immortal being is the emergent property of their parts. This means that each part of themselves is equally important and any change to each of them will result in a different individual.

 

[LilRora]

And this is where the true problem comes from.

Soul is just a part of an individual as in the body, mind and soul. Having any part of the three being different will result in an individual develop differently. I can not say that an immortal being is more than the sum of their part but I will say that the individuality of an immortal being is the emergence property of their parts. This means that each part of themselves is equally important and any change to each of them will result in a different individual.

I don't think you understood what I meant. I put the soul in parentheses for a reason - I did not mean soul literally. I meant their metaphysical identity, and I stand by my words. No matter how much an immortal changes, their identity shouldn't be seen as a particular moment in time, but as a singular, evolving thing. It doesn't matter if you change a bit of the being, it doesn't disappear or switch to a different one, but it gradually develops with time.

Even as someone changes, the relationships they have with others don't suddenly disappear, they don't need to be redefined for their "new" version. Those relationships change just as well together with their identity, and while some differences are obvious and made consciously, most are subtle and happen spontaneously.

The most basic way I can explain this, is that a being is made up of a number of building blocks. If you replace a building block, the being does change, and for some time that part is foreign, particularly in respect to relationships with others. However, before the whole being is replaced bit by bit, there is (except some specific cases) easily enough time to sort of integrate the changes, keeping a singular but changing identity, and keeping any relationships they may have unless they refuse to acknowledge the changes.

The only way I see where the spirit's conclusion is right, is if she did not love any incarnations past the first one and only kept clinging to its memory, but from your description, that was decidedly not the case.

 

[CheertheSecond]

I don't think you understood what I meant. I put the soul in parentheses for a reason - I did not mean soul literally. I meant their metaphysical identity, and I stand by my words. No matter how much an immortal changes, their identity shouldn't be seen as a particular moment in time, but as a singular, evolving thing. It doesn't matter if you change a bit of the being, it doesn't disappear or switch to a different one, but it gradually develops with time.

Even as someone changes, the relationships they have with others don't suddenly disappear, they don't need to be redefined for their "new" version. Those relationships change just as well together with their identity, and while some differences are obvious and made consciously, most are subtle and happen spontaneously.

The most basic way I can explain this, is that a being is made up of a number of building blocks. If you replace a building block, the being does change, and for some time that part is foreign, particularly in respect to relationships with others. However, before the whole being is replaced bit by bit, there is (except some specific cases) easily enough time to sort of integrate the changes, keeping a singular but changing identity, and keeping any relationships they may have unless they refuse to acknowledge the changes.

The only way I see where the spirit's conclusion is right, is if she did not love any incarnations past the first one and only kept clinging to its memory, but from your description, that was decidedly not the case.

I see that I had forgotten to mention the most important detail. The thing is all of these are spoken from the perspective of the characters. They do not have an omniscient being to clarify the thing for them. Thus, the rose's spirit believed the tiger's spirit was her lover since the memory of her lover is transferred through its reincarnation but she had a great doubt that it may not be that spirit that was her lover but the first human reincarnation instead. Since she could not differentiate them, she could only assume they are one and the same but the reincarnation is an reincarnation and the spirit is a spirit. They are not one and the same. They overlapped in some parts and are one entity in certain times but are different.

I think even I misunderstood this part of my novel too lol.

 

[LilRora]

I see that I had forgotten to mention the most important detail. The thing is all of these are spoken from the perspective of the characters. They do not have an omniscient being to clarify the thing for them. Thus, the rose's spirit believed the tiger's spirit was her lover since the memory of her lover is transferred through its reincarnation but she had a great doubt that it may not be that spirit that was her lover but the first human reincarnation instead. Since she could not differentiate them, she could only assume they are one and the same but the reincarnation is an reincarnation and the spirit is a spirit. They are not one and the same. They overlapped in some parts and are one entity in certain times but are different.

I think even I misunderstood this part of my novel too lol.

...I'm not quite sure why this detail matters specifically. I can easily apply what I wrote to this situation.

If we assume that it was the human reincarnation she was in love, then afterwards, they both changed some, and with that, their relationship. It is their choice whether they continue it, or end it - in the first scenario, their relationship just changes a bit together with them, while the second option is a deliberate, big change separate from their own development.

In this scenario, there's no strictly wrong answer. In respect to the original question, I believe that her beloved was never truly gone. That doubt itself, whether she is the same person, is a separate matter, because doubt is an emotion that arises because of lacking knowledge. From an outside point of view, this is a different question, one I've already answered.