You Already Are Who You’re Becoming
Why becoming may be less about building a self than aligning with one that already exists
I was a teenager in Birmingham when I first read Alan Watts. Working-class city, working-class immigrant household, not the sort of place where Eastern philosophy had any obvious reason to appear. But Watts had a way of arriving exactly where he wasn’t expected.
The book was Become What You Are, a collection of essays drawing on Zen, Taoism, and Christianity to make one quietly radical claim: the self you are searching for is not waiting for you at the end of the search. It is already here. You are not becoming who you are. You already are who you’re becoming.
At the time, I did not have the physics for it. I just had the feeling, that strange sensation of something true landing before you can explain why it is true. It has taken me decades, and a doctorate in physics, to find the language. But the intuition was Watts’s first.
There is a version of you that has already figured it out.
Not a future version in the ordinary sense. Not someone you are slowly constructing through effort and time. A version that, if our best physics is right, already exists at another coordinate in spacetime.
This is one of the strangest implications of relativity. Space and time are not separate arenas. They are fused into a single four-dimensional structure: spacetime. And once you take that seriously, the familiar distinction between past, present, and future begins to wobble.
What counts as “now” depends on the observer. Two observers moving differently through spacetime will disagree about which events are simultaneous. That means the idea of a single universal present, one shared slice of reality unfolding everywhere at once, does not survive Einstein.
What survives is something stranger: the possibility that the universe is not a stream but a structure. Not a thing coming into being moment by moment, but a four-dimensional whole in which every event already has its place.
The physicist Hermann Weyl put it with characteristic bluntness: the objective world simply is, it does not happen.
If that is right, then the seven-year-old you still exists. The you awake at three in the morning last Tuesday, doubting everything, still exists. And the you five years from now, calmer, clearer, more fully expressed, exists too. Not as fantasy. Not as wishful thinking. As another coordinate in the structure.
That changes the meaning of becoming.
Becoming who you want to be is not a matter of construction. It is a matter of coordination.
The Self at the End of the Path
In an earlier essay, I wrote about the principle of least action. The basic idea is simple, even if the mathematics is not. Nature does not merely respond to whatever force is acting in the moment. Instead, it selects, from all possible paths between two points, the one for which the total action is stationary across the whole trajectory.
That last part matters. The path is not determined locally, one instant at a time. It is shaped by the entire arc.
And crucially, the physics requires two boundary conditions: where you begin, and where you end.
Without both, there is no path selection in the deeper sense. Only reaction. Only local pushes and pulls. Only the next force acting on the next moment.
This, I think, is where the metaphor becomes personally useful. A life without a real endpoint is reactive in exactly this way. It is driven by circumstance, urgency, mood, algorithm, appetite. It is moved by whatever force is nearest.
But a life organized around a genuine endpoint behaves differently. The path gains coherence. Decisions stop being merely local. They begin to make sense as part of a trajectory.
In a block universe, that endpoint is not merely imagined. It is not just a motivational fiction. It is a real part of the structure. The self you are trying to become is not waiting to be invented at the far edge of time. It is already there.
The question is whether you can come into alignment with it.
How Learning Actually Works
This is where neural networks become useful, not as a loose metaphor but as a structural parallel.
A neural network does not learn by moving forward.
The forward pass is the easy part. Data goes in, activations move through the layers, and an output comes out. The network makes its guess.
But the guess does not teach the network anything. At least not by itself.
Learning happens in the backward pass. The network compares its output to the target, computes the error, and propagates that error backward through the system. Each layer receives information about how much it contributed to the mistake. The weights adjust. The architecture reorganizes. That is what learning is.
The output reaches backward and reshapes the present structure.
Without that backward signal, the network cannot learn. It can produce. It cannot improve.
Hold that image next to a human life.
Suppose the more coherent version of you already exists, not as fantasy but as a real structure toward which your life can orient. Suppose the gap between your present self and that more integrated self is not just frustration, but information. Then the question is no longer how to force yourself forward.
The question becomes: can you receive the gradient?
Can you let the discrepancy between who you are and who you most deeply are become signal rather than shame? Can you let it travel backward through the architecture of your life, through your habits, your tolerances, your speech, your assumptions, your self-deceptions, and reorganize them?
That is what growth actually feels like when it is real. Not performance. Not brute force. Not endless self-assertion. A signal passing through the layers.
The gap is not the enemy. The gap is the information.
What Remains Constant
Emmy Noether showed that what is conserved in a system reveals something deep about its structure. Every conservation law points to an underlying symmetry.
Something similar is true of a life.
Across all your versions, the child, the student, the person in crisis, the person who came through, certain things remain strangely constant. The questions you keep returning to. The forms of attention that feel most like your own. The things that, when violated, break something in you. The patterns of meaning that survive every reinvention.
These are not incidental. They are clues.
They suggest that beneath all the contingency of biography, there is something structurally conserved. A set of deep symmetries that belong to you.
And if that is true, then the future self is not someone foreign. It is not someone you must betray yourself to become. It is the version of you in which those symmetries are most fully expressed.
The path from here to there is not about becoming other. It is about becoming more thoroughly what you already are.
What Coordination Requires
All of this is elegant in theory. The harder question is practical. What does a person actually do with it?
Most self-improvement culture is built on a mistaken model. It treats change as an act of self-construction. Set a goal. Visualize the outcome. Push harder. Manufacture the self you want.
But that is not how learning works. And I do not think it is how a life works either.
If the future self is real in any meaningful sense, if it is an attractor rather than a fantasy, then the work is not fabrication. It is alignment.
That requires at least three things.
First, a clear endpoint. Not a vague ambition, and not a borrowed image of success, but a real sense of what the more coherent version of you actually looks like. What do they no longer tolerate? What have they stopped pretending about? What kind of attention organizes their life? The clearer the endpoint, the more precise the signal.
Second, honest measurement. You cannot propagate a gradient you refuse to compute. This is where most people fail. Not because they lack aspiration, but because they avoid the gap. They turn away from the discrepancy between who they are and who they know they could be. But the discrepancy is the data. Avoiding it does not preserve your peace. It only makes you impossible to train.
Third, architectural integrity. In machine learning, if the gradient vanishes before it reaches the early layers, the system cannot learn. Human beings have an equivalent problem. Defenses, habits, narratives, identities, coping structures, all the things we build to protect ourselves, can also absorb the signal before it reaches the place that actually needs to change. A great deal of transformation is not the acquisition of something new. It is the removal of what prevents the signal from getting through.
The Risk of Borrowed Endpoints
There is a further complication, and it matters.
Not every endpoint organizing your life is genuinely yours.
Some are inherited. Some are mimicked. Some are installed by culture, status, fear, or algorithm. You think you are moving toward a self you chose, but the signal you are responding to was written elsewhere.
And here the structure becomes dangerous. Because backpropagation does not care whether the target is authentic. It only cares that there is one. If the endpoint organizing your life is manufactured, the gradient will still run. Your layers will still adapt. Your habits will still reorganize. You will still coherently become something.
But it may be something built around an attractor that was never yours.
This is why the question of whose vision is organizing your life is not soft or sentimental. It is structural. A system will optimize for whatever objective function it is actually running.
So the work is not merely to have an endpoint. It is to ensure that the endpoint is genuinely continuous with your deepest symmetries rather than a polished substitute for them.
What Free Will Might Actually Be
At first glance, a block universe seems fatalistic. If every coordinate already exists, then what exactly is left to choose?
But I think that framing misses the point.
Freedom may not be the power to stand outside the structure. It may be something subtler: the capacity to participate coherently in it. The capacity to become the kind of system that can recognize its own true endpoint, receive the gradient, and align its life accordingly.
Free will, in this sense, is not the ability to want anything whatsoever. It is the harder achievement of wanting what is actually yours to want.
The mystics say it one way: become what you are.
Physics says it another: the endpoint is already part of the structure.
Engineering says it a third: learning happens when the signal from the output reorganizes the present architecture.
These are not the same language. But they may be pointing at the same fact.
One Last Thing
The self you are becoming may not be waiting somewhere ahead of you in the ordinary sense. It may already be real, already present in the deep structure of things, already exerting its quiet pressure on the life you are living now.
If so, then the work is not to invent that self through force.
It is to see clearly enough to orient toward it.
To become honest enough to measure the gap.
To remove whatever in you is absorbing the signal before it reaches the layer that needs to change.
The rest is not strain. It is convergence.
You are not becoming who you will be.
You are aligning with who you already are.
This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of the convergence between modern physics, consciousness, and the deeper philosophical traditions that have tried to make sense of reality.
If that line of inquiry speaks to you, subscribe and stay close. There is more to come.
Further Reading
A few texts sitting somewhere in the background of this essay: