Who Goes There?

Who are you? What makes you you? Without considering your name, your place of residence, or your ethnicity, how would you define yourself?

By that which has been done to you and which has been done by you?

By your strict adherence to some moral code that you’ve written for yourself?

Consider some behavior you consider to be morally reprehensible. You might say, “I would never do such a thing,” and you may feel that your sense of confidence about it is proof enough that some ‘goodness’ exists within you. But, do such perceived essential characteristics really exist? And, if so, where do they reside? What do they attach to?

Who are you? Look inward. What do you see? Are you flitting from one memory to the next, some very recent, some not so? That kid nervously standing in front of a class, trying to ignore the giggles and give a good presentation… is that you? The teenager having a first sexual experience… is that you? Look harder. Is there a center with something there at the controls directing the flow of memories and trying to assemble all those perceptions into a single, unified whole in order to answer the question?

The question which, by the way, you still haven’t answered yet.

Who are you?

Is there some unified whole, a thing you directly perceive as your ‘Self?’ Or is there just a concept of you, some nebulous abstraction? Are you just a series of snapshots, fleeting articulations of various configurations of mental states, a bundle of perceptions that all have the same universal feature, namely that they were all created through the same subjective lens? Does the nexus of all of one’s experiences constitute the entity we call ‘Self?’ Or, is a sense of self, and by extension a sense of personal identity, just an inference made from a collection of experiences all processed and held within a single conscious organism?