Before anything else can be said, the thing being talked about must have a name.
Plainly
Pick anything. A car. A song. The colour red. A heartbeat.
The number seven. A piston. A parking space. Yourself.
Whatever you picked is an identity. It is what
Dimensional Programming calls x.
That is the first move, and it is the only move you cannot skip.
Nothing in the system happens, nothing is computed, nothing is
rendered, nothing is stored, until the thing being talked about
has a name. No name, no programme.
Notice what you did not have to do. You did not say what
colour the car is, how loud the song is, whose heartbeat it is,
or how big the number seven is. None of those questions can be
answered until the identity is fixed. They are not properties
of the thing — they are other identities that will
interact with this one later.
Identity is the gate. Until the point is named, nothing downstream can fire.
Sharper
Formally: an identity x is the irreducible
"who/what this is" of a thing. Every entity, object, concept,
state, structure, or process is an x. Each one is a single
indivisible point at the dimension at which it is being
observed (the next page makes "dimension" precise).
Identity is not a property. Properties are themselves identities (called y, see
page 3) that act on x.
Identity is not a hierarchy. Whether x is "an atom" or "a system" is determined by
the observer's dimension, not by x. The same identity is a point from above and a whole from below.
Identity is not optional. The first axiom of the paradigm: nothing proceeds
until identity is clear. A programme that begins by computing something whose identity has
not been fixed is malformed by construction.
The AI is also an x. When the AI observes, queries, or determines state, the AI
itself is an identity participating in the system on equal terms.
What this rules out
Code that asks "what is its colour?" before anything has been
identified. Configuration that lists "settings" without naming
what they configure. Documentation that describes "the system"
without saying what the system is. Each of these is a
programme attempting to compute over an unnamed point — and
under this paradigm, that programme has not yet started.