What you are is inherently transient, silly.

If as a person you are constantly changing, then certainly what is most fundamentally "you" is a vehicle for change.

If you observe yourself at any given moment, you are only observing a snapshot, a tiny fragment of "you." Don't think of you as having to be a certain thing in time, but instead as transcending time. You are an existence.

You could take this alone as a recognition of self, or you could take the point of view that you are only a part of the larger existence of human life, which is a part of the even larger existence of all life. In this way, maybe there is no real self or "you" or "me" but instead these are only ideas that help our minds cope with reality, but they are not actually reality.

The self does not exist. There is no discrete boundary between 'you' and 'everything else'. Without that boundary, the terms 'you' and 'everything else' (in this context) become meaningless. Therefore, 'you' (the self) does not exist.

Paradoxically, though the self does not exist the concept of the self does. Self-awareness (by definition) necessitates it. If you replace every part of the Ship of Theseus, is it the same ship? Literally, no, but conceptually, yes.

This is a thorny topic. It's arguably more about semantics than anything else, but is besides that conceptually rather taxing, and is related to the nature of time (which is not well, if at all, understood) and the nature of conscioussness (which is not only poorly understood, but is also saturated by base misdirection).

We are the stories that we tell ourselves to give meaning to our actions

This concept is called the "subject/object problem", so I suggest further reading into that. It's fascinating.

I would argue that the self does exist, but it is completely incomprehensible to anything or anyone that's not of higher intelligence than our own as a human race. The events that shape a person are tangible, at least to some degree. The effects they have are tangible in theory, but not in practice because psychology is not an exact science. Thus the higher intelligence comment.

Don't think of yourself as a three-dimensional being. You are four-dimensional. You have duration, you span time. Like >>419 said, your nature is to change. Consider your four-dimensional self as a very long string containing an infinite number of copies of "you", except these copies change minutely as time passes. At the start of the string there is a physical representation of you at your earliest stage of existence, at the end exists you right before you die. The fundamental "you" is a single slice taken from this string. The nature of your being extends beyond what you are able to observe with just your senses.

You are not a person in any one moment of time, if time were to freeze you would cease to exist as a thinking individual, the composite of active biological processes.

However, this person that you are, this person that exists only within the passage of time, is immutable and constant.

Suppose for contradiction that the person you are changes from one moment to the next. Consider the person that you were ten minutes ago, clearly there must have been a person at the halfway point between now and then, 5 minutes ago. But again halfway between now and 5 minutes ago there was another person, and so on. Continuing this process, the result is that due to the continuity of time from one moment to the next you would have been infinitely many different people, even in a span of a millionth of a second.

This is clearly repugnant to the senses and irrational, so it follows that the person you really "are" is independent of your position in time, an unchanging and absolute ultimate form of your own essence. Change as a person is impossible, and existence is the process of self-discovery and disclosure over time of the unary "me" into infinite reality.

The self is a myth. It is a fable concocted by the brain, to make it possible to function and survive. In reality, your predispositions are simply correlations of dendritic connections. The more connections, the more used the pathways, the more likely the brain will default to these patterns.

In a social species, it is important to notice certain predispositions in others, because that must inform your interactions with them. Fight, flight, fuck, friend, etc. It is also important to signal your predispositions, in a manner that will likely not trigger negative response from others. So to use economic theory, the "self" is a signalling algorithm, that supposedly chooses the best response to observed environmental variables.

The concept of self evolved from the need to maintain a place in a social group. Baboons "present," apes puff out their chests, all to show their status in the tribe. This is no different from men who show off fancy cars, or get tatoos. Think of it as a highly evolved form of plumage. Your personality stems from the same instinctive process, the same need to present one's worth to others.

We have gotten so good at this, that we don't even think about it. Personality cannot exist in the absence of socialization. This is why schizophrenics and other types of shut in frequently describe themselves as not having a personality. On the other side of the spectrum are the autists, who have a dysfunction of observation. They cannot best respond to signals, because the signals are ignored or weakly recieved. The presence of these vestigial traits in the population demonstrates that personality as we know it is a relatively recent development in terms of evolution.


The essential question is whether animals who are not "self aware" have selfhood. Is it a characteristic of life? The litmus test seems to be whether an animal can recognize its reflection. But such creatures also engage in social signalling. The problem is describing the phenomena in terms of wonder and enlightenment, as opposed to hard observational science.

>>540
A philosophical argument based on a controversial interpretation of mathematics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity

>>580
seems like this is related to the thought of heidegger

You are a pattern

This pattern is not totally static, but retains certain elements across time