(I)ndexicals

Introduction

One of the few memories I have from before I was six years old is of a nondescript afternoon, probably a weekend, reading in a nook of the first-floor playroom in my childhood home. This nook, which sat between a couch and a small book cart and was backed by faded light-green walls, was the natural habitat of my hungry less-than-six-years-old brain, where I’d soaked up the Magic Tree House series, Harry Potter, and for some unknown-but-probably-good reason, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.¹

On this particular day, in a transient moment between flipping pages, my brain spoke (something to the lines of this, I cannot recall in exact detail) to itself:

“What is I?”

I am I.

“Yes, but what is I?”

I am I. I is me. Right? No, I am I.

I wasn’t satisfied with the answer “I am I”, yet it was also the best thing I could come up with. So I kept repeating myself until I lost focus on my first self-aware moment and went back to reading My Weird School or something like that. What I could never figure out, though, and what stuck with me for so many years, was the circular definition of “I” that I’d given to my self. The salient part of that memory was just how far down I could go, asking myself unendingly what “I” was. I also couldn’t shake a kind of uneasiness associated with it.

Years later, I read Douglas Hofstadter’s books Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid and I Am a Strange Loop, which offered one answer: the self and the sense of self are emergent properties of self-reference in the brain. The very concept of self-reference gives rise to the self. Low-level neural activity soup gives rise to increasingly complex abstractions of reality and experience. “I” too is a complex abstraction of the self, capable of guiding, revising, and reflecting upon other abstractions (such as hopes, beliefs, and memories). The mind turns back on itself, generating the experience of an “I.” Hence, I am a strange loop.

Hofstadter’s thesis is very reminiscent of the infinite regress I got stuck in many years prior: “I am I am I am I.” Yet, however insistently I told myself this, I lacked any definitive certainty about the statement. In other words, I had no proof. In fact, Hofstadter devotes a considerable portion of the two books to introducing Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which, in a gross oversimplification, posits that any sufficiently powerful and consistent system of logic will contain true statements that cannot be proven true, and false statements that cannot be proven false. In a similar flavor, that “I am I” might be true or false, but we can’t really prove it.

Well, that sucks. I’m not quite satisfied with that, and there’s perhaps some kind of resolution we can find.

The I Loop

The astute reader may have noticed in the six-year-old me’s brief self-dialogue the italicized “I” and the regular “I”. The italicized “I” is the first-person pronoun, and the regular “I” is speaker, or self, to whom the word refers. Please bear with me for this next section.

It’s possible that my little self was consciously learning that the word “I” that is used in the sentences “I am six years old” or “I like to eat chocolate cake” was indeed referring to the six-year-old who liked chocolate cake, that being me. The first-person pronoun I is only used by those speaking to refer to themselves. But where did the infinite regress come from?

Consider the following sentence:

$$\text{I}\text{ am I.}$$

Using the Italic/Roman distinction for I’s above, this sentence semantically says, “The first-person pronoun I refers to the self”, so that “The first-person pronoun I indicates the person speaking”. Now consider:

$$\text{I am }\text{I}.$$

This sentence now says ,“The self is the first-person pronoun I”, or, for more clarity, “the self recognizes itself as the referent of the word I.

These two sentences are two sides of the same coin, and if you drop notation, they are literally the same sentence! The word and the person it names appear to define one another:

$$\text{“I” am the one who says “I”,}$$

which depends on the very perspective it is trying to explain. That is, the first-person pronoun I can only exist because I, the self, exists. And this works only from within the experience of being the speaker. Let’s refer to this as the “I Loop”.

Forgive me for how convoluted that may have been. For another perspective, think about how “I” differs from other words. Anybody could refer to me as “Cory” or “the child in the playroom”. Anyone could refer to you as your first and last name, or “the person reading Click To Forgive”. However, we can both say “I” and refer to different things; everyone can say “I,” but no one else’s “I” refers to me.

Indexicals

Words whose meanings shift depending entirely on the context in which they are spoken, like “I”, are called indexicals. Many common words fall into this—“you”, “me”, “us”, “here”, “now”, “today”, “yesterday”, “she”, “he”, and “that”. It’s cool that these words are very common, like, incredibly common. I’m willing to bet that since you learned how to speak, there hasn’t been a single day you didn’t utter an indexical.

Now I’m neither a linguist nor a philosopher, (and for further reading on indexicals see here), but indexicals might shine some insight onto why the I Loop comes to be. As hinted at above, indexicals afford two different kinds of meaning. One is a sort of linguistic meaning (David Kaplan calls this the “character” of the word), the other a kind of content (circumstantial meaning). For example, the linguistic meaning of the word “I” is a self-referential expression for a singular entity, whereas the content is the actual person who said “I”.

Generally, indexicals follow this pattern: the linguistic “character” is invariant across contexts, while the content changes depending on who says it. Here are a few more examples:

Indexical	Character	Circumstantial Meaning
I	singular self-referential	John, when he says “I need a nap”
you	second-person referential	Mary, when John says to her “You are really cute”
here	the location of the speaker	Cambridge, MA, when Will Hunting says “I work here”
now	the time of utterance	6:33 PM on May 21st, 2026, as “this text was written now”
this	a proximal referent	the particular object indicated
that	a distal referent	the particular object indicated at a distance

Philosophers have devoted an extraordinary amount of thought to indexicals, and I think that the fact that we even have such functionally important words contributes a lot to a sort of universal form of being (many human languages have indexicals), but I digress.²

Back to “Me”

We’ve begun to unpack some of the complexities behind indexicals, so let’s focus again on the I Loop:

$$\text{I am I.}$$

We’ve established that there are (at least) two qualities of meaning that are packed behind the word “I”; one about a kind of meta-structure of reality (character), one actually about reality (content).

When John utters “I am John”, the circumstantial meaning of “I” is invoked. Though “I” still retains its character as a singular self-referential expression, “I” is, for all intents and purposes, John. And when Mary says “I am sorry, John, but I don’t feel the same way”, “I” is Mary. John and Mary (under assumption) are real people, and in almost all cases that “I” is used, there is a strong tie to reality.

I hope you now see a glaring problem. Who exactly would say “I am I”?

It’s not a person named “I”. The sentence is a tautology. It tells us nothing new about the speaker. But this supposes that “I” already exists; that is,

$$\text{I am I is obvious when I already am.}$$

In other words, anyone with a sense of self knows that “I am I”. Another way to see this (paraphrasing Hofstadter):

Suppose there are three authors: A, B, and C. Author A only exists in a novel written by Author B. Author B only exists in a novel by Author C. And Author C exists only in a novel written by Author A.

Can such a loop exist? Yes, they are all in a novel written by Author D! Author D exists outside of the loop in which authors A, B, and C are trapped. But see that Author D’s existence establishes the existence of A, B, and C. If Author D didn’t write this novel, then do A, B, and C write their books about each other?

The I Loop is analogous:

Suppose there are two entities, first-person pronoun I and the person saying I. The first-person pronoun I only exists in a sentence spoken by the person saying I, and the person saying I’s existence is invoked only by uttering the first-person pronoun I.

Does it then follow that “I am I”? Yes, as long as there’s someone around to say “I”! In other words,

$$\text{I am, therefore I am I.}$$

Years ago, before my sense of self was fully developed, my six-year-old self got caught in the I Loop: using just the rules of language to establish my existence. This Gödelian problem of establishing “I am I” is resolved only by presupposing “I am”. Someone has to be there to ask it.³

At some point in my life, I’ve become comfortable with the “truthiness” of the statement “I am I”. Before, I wasn’t able to say it for certain (prove, even), but I haven’t since been able to recreate the sheer uneasiness I first felt when pondering the question: “What is I”? If you believe anything I say above, then this is because I’ve developed a much stronger sense of self. I’m past the major critical period of development, I survived elementary, middle, and high school, and the abstractions my brain uses are robust enough that I can (confidently) know I exist.⁴

All things considered, to paraphrase Descartes:

$$\text{I am, therefore I am I, I think.}$$

Footnotes

1. I know it’s extraneous information, but it’s a small-ish book, quite thick, with a rough-textured distinctly red color and indents along the pages corresponding to alphabetical order. I haven’t seen the book for at least ten years, but I guess it’s significant to me since I remember it so clearly. ↩

2. If we were to assume that animal languages are tokenizable, then shouldn’t we be able to identify indexicals by looking at “token frequency”, that is, would the “I” token in bird calls show up as often as, say, the character 我 is used in Chinese? Birds probably have a sense of self, but do they think about themselves in a way like us humans? Are they vain? ↩

3. Wait… this smells like Cogito, ergo sum. Dammit, Descartes! I’m 400 years too late. ↩

4. As of May 23rd, 2026. ↩