We’ve all experienced nostalgia before—that feeling of
sentimentality, longing, or affection for our past. It is a
poignant experience that intimates the passing of time and
reminds us of who we once were but will never be again.
When we look back, sometimes even
just a year, it can often feel like we are observing a person and life
that is completely different—a stranger experiencing an almost
unrecognizable life and sense of self. But of course, this person
was us, and of course, we are also us right now. But then,
who are we? What makes us who we are? What does our present self have
in common with our past self of ten years ago?
What will it have in common with our future self in ten more years?
Is there anything that truly persists through it all that makes
and keeps us who we are? What is it if there is?
For starters, when trying to pin down what makes us who we
are, we might consider our body. But in truth, most of us don’t
really find our body to be the primary source of our sense of
self. For example, if you lost all your limbs, it is fair to
assume that you would still feel and claim to be you. Even taken
to the extreme, if somehow you lost your whole body but could
still live and experience the world from within your head,
carried around in a jar or placed on some sort of android,
although a strange and different life, you would likely still feel and claim that you are you.
Not only that, but regardless of what you claim, essentially all the cells that comprise your body
are replaced anew every ten years or so, so if you identify yourself with the consistency of your
body, your body is never really physically the same anyway. And of course, throughout your life,
your body’s appearance changes completely as well. Your eight-year-old self looks essentially nothing
like your thirty-year-old self, but you almost certainly would never claim that one is more
or less you. And of course, the circumstances of your life essentially change completely as well.
Even if you live in the same place, the same place changes all the time.
And so, there is nothing really outside our body that can be identified with either.
Instead of the body or circumstances, most of us identify primarily with our brain.
But what part of the brain is us? The brain is an immensely complex organ with
tons of components and functions, and most of us wouldn’t identify with much
of it. We likely don’t feel like we are the parts of the brain involved with automatic,
unconscious functions and responses—the regulation and adjustment of the breath and heart and balance
and all the other things that happen beneath our direct control and awareness. We might say, then,
that we are the parts of our brain related to our tastes and preferences. But what if this
part of your brain was altered? Would you no longer be you? If yes, doesn’t this happen all
the time throughout life in general? Are we not constantly changing our tastes and preferences
across our lifetime? What about if the part of our brain affecting how we talk and act changed? What
if we lost or gained sets of skills? Again, don’t these things occur all throughout life as well?
How about the way in which we respond to things—our character
and temperament and humor and so on. Again, arguably this changes continually as well.
Imagine what you liked, what you were good at it, what you cared about, how you talked, and how
your temperament was fifteen years ago. Are these things at all similar in any real substantial way
to you now? Probably no more than a distant friend, at best. And so, if we, as a central
and consistent thing, are not our bodies, not our brains unconscious functions, not our tastes and
preferences, not our technical capacities, and not our character, who or what are we?
Perhaps the most fundamental thing that makes us feel like the same person across our lifetime is
our memory. This seems to be the most difficult thing to imagine we would still be ourselves
if we lost it. But what does that mean for people who have extreme long-term memory loss,
like certain individuals with Alzheimer’s disease? Are they no longer themselves? Do
they no longer have a self? If so, who are they? Are they somehow nobody? If so, who is it that we
are interacting with when we interact with them? Perhaps they
are nobody in the way we typically think of somebody, but
perhaps so are you. In truth, for all of us,
if we look into our body and mind to try to find precisely and concretely who or what we are—that
central, persistent something that makes us—we find this same strange nobody-ness.
In the words Fernando Pessoa, “I’ve changed at every
moment. I always feel like a stranger. I’ve never seen or found
myself. I am my own landscape, I watch myself journey - Various,
mobile, and alone. - Here where I am I can’t feel myself.
That’s why I read, as a stranger, - My being as if it were
pages. Not knowing what will come - And forgetting what has
passed... - Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?””
From a neuroscientific understanding, this notion of their
not being a defined self is validated by the fact that there is
no part of the brain where everything comes together for an ego
or self to form, or for a sort of center stage where thoughts
are displayed, perceived, and evaluated. “[Consciousness is a]
cascade of neurophysiology, and everything is distributed
everywhere,” said modern neuroscientist and philosopher Sam
Harris. The self appears merely to be a particular kind of
illusion.
It is not that we don’t have a self, but that the self is
just not how it feels or appears to us. As opposed to a
singular, central, unitary thing that is carried forward from
each moment to the next, it is a process—an emergent phenomenon
of a noncentral, inconsistent progression and unfolding of
everything we knowingly and unknowingly interact with. A seeming
feedback loop takes place between the world, our body, and our
mind, and out of which, the experience of self emerges. In other
words, the self is merely an experience of a process, and as
long as we persist through time, there is nothing to be found
that is constant that persists through us.
It is a common thing to say and believe that it is important to be yourself in life.
When we aren’t, it can feel ashaming and dissatisfying.
When we notice others aren’t, we can feel a discomfort, distrust,
or an unappealing nature to their company. Being ourselves is in
fact an important and worthy goal, if not perhaps one of
the worthiest goals in human existence. But the problem is,
if the self is an illusion, how do we be it?
Perhaps being yourself doesn’t require knowing yourself in
any ultimate sense. Perhaps it isn’t even about being who you
think you are. It isn’t a matter of being consistent or doing
what you or other people expect you to do based on what you’ve
done or who you’ve been. Rather, it is doing and being what you
feel is an honest embodiment of what you think and want right
now. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With
consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as
well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you
think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks
in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said
today. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood...To be
great is to be misunderstood,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Being
who you are is being who you become, and then being who you
become, and then being who you become, over and over. Being
yourself is a continual process of being someone else. In the
end, there is nothing to find or be but a process of finding and
being. These ideas and questions echo throughout human
history across the globe, from modern neuroscience back to the Buddha, Advaita Vedanta of Hinduism,
ancient Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and Plato, and everywhere and everyone in between.
For as long as people have known they are someone, we have struggled to pin down who that someone is.
Of course, because of the ambiguous and unbreachable nature of selfhood,
all of this is just theory and one perspective. And as the only person who will ever experience
the self and perspective that is you, you are fee to think of your self in any way you’d like.
Ultimately, possessing this experience of self is perhaps the most strange,
disorienting, and beautiful things unique to the human experience. To feel like and be aware of a
self compels us to try to define it; it implicates attachment to it and the things it attaches to;
it provides us with a front row seat to the rising and falling action of this strange
show of the universe that ultimately end with a scene that kills its audience.
It is part tragic play and part magic show that strikes divinity into even the most secular of
individuals. We are each given this gift of selfhood—an illusory paradoxical experience
of something and nothing, of experiencer and experiences; the conjunction of both,
a run on sentence always being added to with an and; and perhaps all we can and should
try to do is make the sentence as beautiful as we can, rich with the cadence of poetry,
the diversity of a complete story, and the punctuation of an exclamative!