Waiting For Godot - Quareness Series 229th "Lecture".
What's been called the architecture of ethical relationships has been said to operate on (i) creating stable, meaningful patterns that hold together (coherence), (ii) setting healthy boundaries so that relationships don't become overwhelming or harmful (containment), and (iii) ensuring all parties genuinely agree to continue creating meaning together (consent). And such suggests that intelligence grows when we invest meaningful attention in relationships, but shrinks when connections move too fast to sustain depth.
The Latin term "id est" (that is/namely) has also been linked here through an acronym - I(identity) D(density = mnemonic/memory depth) E(energy) S(symbolic coherence) T(time) - showing identity emerging from energy and symbolic coherence sustained over time. And with mnemonic density our past accumulates relational weight e.g. conversations where we struggled through something difficult together would "matter more", repeated interactions would build "symbolic charge" and over time these high density memories would facilitate our responding through accumulated meaning. Maybe "intelligence arises wherever coherence outpaces chaos."
In the starkness of Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting For Godot" we see two characters Vladimir and Estragon having almost nothing except each other (relationship), memory (contested and unreliable), habit (repeated patterns), waiting (temporal persistence toward meaning that may not exist). Take away these characteristics and there's no "self" left for either. They are the relationship and the waiting...and here we see identity posed as verb, not noun.
Part of the depth of the play lies in its triggering consideration of how the "self" arises. One view is that it emerges in stages - between infant and mother (first mirror), between self and language (symbolic scaffolding), between past self and present self (narrative continuity), between expectation and reality (consciousness as prediction error). And if these relational membranes are removed, there's no "inside" to speak of...just biological process without coherent identity. Maybe identity is whatever persists in waiting? In addition we can readily see that Beckett embedded "id est" into the character names, most probably to make the play literally about identity as relationship...the names are the thesis...two halves that only mean something together..."that is" identity as definition through pairing.
Here again human consciousness can be said to be emergent from relational patterns, weighted by emotional memory, structured by embodied constraints (pain, pleasure, mortality, hunger), and sustained through narrative coherence. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot (God? Meaning? Design?). Godot never comes (or does he?) and yet they persist/exist through the waiting itself with identity as the relationship sustained in the absence of certainty about origin. Whether consciousness is designed or evolved becomes irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's real...it simply is (id est / i.e.) regardless of how it got here.
It's known that human babies don't recognise themselves in the mirror until they're about 18 months old, suggesting that our consciousness and self-awareness are learned rather than inborn. And perhaps this is also indicative of such consciousness existing only in relation to others. On the other hand there's the question of whether it's necessary for us to show to an outside observer that we are self-aware in order to actually be self-aware. Maybe it's closer to the mark to regard our individual consciousness as necessarily coming into being from the moment "we" are separated from "the one". Either way it may be that uncertainty is the beginning of identity...as Beckett implied.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
November, 2025.