I don’t know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I’m trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can’t stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren’t they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can’t bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don’t know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I’m bored, stressed or relaxed.
Your body and mind is just a bag of chemical soup, undergoing a constant reaction. Your tangle of nerves and synapses feed a mess of neurons that are wired in a circuit that gives you that spark of consciousness. But none of this is a fixed system, and your body goes through constant change. As one neural pathway dies, another one is rewired and the circuitry is now different.
You can play the game of debating the Ship of Theseus, but who you “are” or “were” is just an illusion. Our memories are just the old circuits powering up, but even those change over time. Your memories are a false representation of the past because they only ever exist in the present and you’re at the mercy of your own perceptions.
You “are” until you are not. So do what feels good —Kiss your loved ones, hug a tree, and be kind to yourself and others while your bag of soup ain’t leaking.
deleted by creator
Thanks for your consideration. I’ll keep that in mind.
Dead is not the same as gone. We are a stream of consciousness moving through time. The past isn’t “dead” it is just behind us, just as the future is not “birth”.
If you imagine yourself as a river of water, there is still a river behind you and In-front of you, but all you are aware of is now.
Whether or not we can go back or forward in that stream of consciousness - who knows. We don’t know what we perceive when we do actually die.
If you can’t get past this focus on the concept then at least stop thinking of it as “death”. That’s anthropomorphising what is happening (trying to attribute a human experience to it) but it’s adding the baggage of all those negative or anxious feelings we feel about death. Our consciousness moving forward through time is its own thing, it is not death.
Yes, the river analogy was my first thought here. The water rushes by, but the river stays the same. We would never call the changing water or river dead.
We would never call a growing tree dead. In fact, growth and change is exactly how you know the tree is alive.
Listen if past me couldn’t keep up that’s on them.
We’re all probably better for it.
I’m way cooler than that guy.
I can’t remember so much of what used to be me, it astounds me sometimes. But also it doesn’t really bother me. The me I am now was shaped by what was regardless of my knowledge of it. Those past parts of me have passed through me, and new parts are yet to come.
I guess I’m just not a very sentimental guy.
I had a dream one time (a literal asleep and dreaming dream) where I went back to my younger selves and it was the first time I felt continuity, like the me I am is built from all those previous instances of me. They aren’t gone, exactly, while I am alive. Yes as you experience time as going in one direction you are not all of them at once, but neither are you a series of points, you are more like a line.
I really like this topic and think the idea of ones past self is a very interesting concept to think about. Personally I’ve thought about it in a different way, specifically about whether I own my past and it’s also a question about how we own our body.
For example, let’s say ten years ago someone took a picture of me and I demanded that this picture must not be shared or posted online. Now if ten years later I ask the photographer to send me the picture and I post it online, then the photographer and I broke the rules. I certainly did not get consent from my past self. So now the question of whether or not I am my past self comes up. Most people would probably say yes, but it’s still an interesting question.
To continue this chain of thought even further one can be creative and add themes like time travel and meeting ones past self. That expands the idea to a crazy big scope of possible questions though and is perhaps a bit too unrealistic for most people to bother thinking about.
Coming back to a more realistic idea, would posting a picture of my baby self online and insulting the person in the picture be considered morally wrong? It would certainly be considered rude by people who don’t know the context. But how many rights do I actually have here? How about using it as a profile picture on social media? There’s many different possible interesting questions here.
I understand that this is opening a whole other can of worms and a different idea than the original post, but I feel it’s a similar direction and also brings up the question about the relationship between a person and their past self.
edit: Also I just now noticed that I tend to write “past self” as singular while you write it as “past selves” in plural. I guess that’s because you talk about the topic as a more continuous thing that happens constantly. That reminds me of a theory according to which the universe splits up into many different paths every time a random quantum thingy happens. I think it’s this thing: Many-worlds interpretation (wikipedia).
For example, let’s say ten years ago someone took a picture of me and I demanded that this picture must not be shared or posted online. Now if ten years later I ask the photographer to send me the picture and I post it online, then the photographer and I broke the rules. I certainly did not get consent from my past self. So now the question of whether or not I am my past self comes up. Most people would probably say yes, but it’s still an interesting question.
Interesting. I also wonder why people justify past selves as an identity of us even though we have changed or grew as person while our past selves have already dead.
Well if you were to decide to take the two identities out of context and compare them to each other, then they would definitely be different. You know, some people do take their past selves and make fun of them, they can hate them, they can insult and loathe them. Similarly, if they could see us today, our past selves might be disappointed or even offended at what we have become. Imagine growing up in a very conservative family, perhaps adopting prejudice views and as you grow up, you change and maybe even find yourself befriending and loving the things or people you used to hate. Your past self might attack and kill you if you were both put into the same room.
I’m aware that that’s a very extreme example. It’s just an idea I wanted to bring across. Of course it can go both ways. I guess the topic would make for very interesting stories in media, I’m sure it was already used often.
You know that reminds me, this whole concept is already a very realistic daily occurrence. Say two people fall in love, but then years later they break up. Oftentimes people say things like “you’ve changed”. They fell in love with each others past versions. I’m sure we all know humans or mechanical devices or software programs that we used to love, but then they changed and we started disliking them. I might like my new comb, or my new phone. But when they break, I might get angry and hate them.
I like this idea. You explained it simple enough to be understood and provided relatable examples.
Yay! It makes my-current-self happy that your-past-self said nice things about my-past-selves comment. Go, my-past-self!
With that silly comment of mine out of the way, there’s one thing I want to add which is that I think we should maybe show a bit of leniency towards our past selves. Keep in mind that our past selves had less experience than us. They didn’t have all the experiences that shaped us. For better or for worse. When we say “I didn’t know.” maybe to make things more interesting we could instead say “My past self didn’t know.” at least once, just for the fun of it.
Physically speaking, what our past selves did have though was a lot more potential than us. They had the potential to become our current self and at least in theory they also had the potential to become different versions of our current self. Some of them we might consider better, others worse. These versions would all have a different experience than our current self. Maybe even a slightly different thought going through ones head can be an experience with a big impact on the future.
I guess some people do say that they need to makes ones past self, or even another persons past self proud. One thing that I thought was funny was hearing another person saying “That will be future me’s problem.”. So in a way we really do take snapshots and project things onto them.
Personally, I’m glad that fuck-up is dead.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, nothing really matters, on a universal scale. We’ll be extinct as a species in a million years, probably much less. Our solar system will be nebula after our sun explodes in less than 5 billion. There will be no trace we ever existed.
Just try to hurt as few people as little as possible, and be kind to as many as possible. Leave the place better than you found it. That’s all you can do. Or don’t, it’s up to you.
I never really solved this, though I grown to accept it as a sort of reassuring fact.
I am constantly dying and being substituted by my new present self, but I’m only aware of that because my reasoning brought me there, I’m unable to feel that I’m experiencing it first hand. The self who started this comment is already lost in the past and didn’t even realise that it happened, there is a perfect continuity between them and me.
It’s a bit sad that “I” won’t be specifically the one to experience the future, but some of the other selves with which I compose my identity will, which is good enough.
Moreover, it means that I have no need to fear ceasing existing (like with neurodegenerative diseases, death and similar situations), because it has always happened and it’s painless.
Because of the nature of time, the universe is in a constant state of becoming something else. Everything is changing all the time. But, because of the Laws of Conservation of Energy and Mass, there is always part of what was before persisting in what is now. For example, a fire burns logs, releasing the kinetic energy as heat, water vapor, carbon dioxide, etc. The heat dissipates because the atmosphere is very large, but it doesn’t dissappear, it just gets diluted. The water vapor is released into the atmosphere, and those molecules become moisture in a cloud and turn into rain, continuing in the water cycle. In a metaphorical sense, your past selves have “burned” and “released” what you are now. You may consider your past selves dead, but the molecules that made them continue to exist as your current self, even if those molecules are rearranged or are slightly different (we eat food and excrete waste, so our molecules are regularly being exchanged with other molecules in the environment). Those same molecules were once inside the sun. Before that, those molecules existed at the beginning of the universe. So, in a way, yes we are constantly dying and being transformed, but the stuff that we are made of can never die. We are just constantly changing, along with the universe, because we are part of the universe.
Maybe another way of putting it is “the information that makes you up remains the same”? As in, it doesn’t matter if one electron is exchanged with another, it’s still the same component? Assuming two things have the same physical properties, it doesn’t matter which one you use. You are not just the objects you consist of, but also the way they are positioned/aligned/etc.
Maybe a bit like binary code/data, if you copy a file then the copy will be able to do the same thing. Though I guess it’s more complex than that, because it all depends on where this data is located, so not only the building blocks but also the context in which they exist matters.
Buddhism has some interesting takes on this. In particular, I really enjoyed The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche.
I highly recommend the book Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz. It’s helped me a lot, and boils down to the idea that we have “parts,” and that our thoughts and feelings can sometimes be diametrically opposite.
It, along with being able to speak with zero inhibitions to my therapist that makes me feel heard and my thoughts not seem batshit insane, has really brought up a lot of old memories and scared parts of myself. What I thought was anxiety, I’m learning to notice as a fear I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and that fear helped me survive a lot of my early years of trauma.
I can guarantee that this book will give you a sense of the answer you’re asking for.
Here’s a poem I wrote last night:
01:53
I miss the point,
a lot of the times,
Because I think about,
The consequences
Repercussions,
The echoes in my mind,
They’re not helpful,
They’re not relevant.
I can never reach,
That inner calm,
That lets voice surface,
Because it’s screaming to be heard.
I can’t make conclusions,
There’s too much doubt,
And though I see now,
Why
I don’t know how, To stop running,
It used be to away,
And now it’s sprinting forwards.
But there’s so much wrong,
So much to figure out.
Rushing hard doesn’t help,
When I don’t know the route.
I can’t avoid feelings,
But with them, I’m always lost.
I can’t seem to feel my feelings,
When they’re always pushing,
And I’m always reeling.
Try all I can,
Give all I’ve got,
That’s the way,
I brought me up.
02:10
The questions you pose are exactly the type of thing one can explore through various forms of meditation.
The thing we usually associate with self can not, in fact, be it, as it is just an appearance in our consciousness. It is a sort of thought, really. Our consciousness, however, is just the sum total experience of the present moment. Everything before is no more, everything after may only be.
I hope my ramblings made sense.
Probably isn’t going to help you at all but we get an entirely new skeleton every five years thanks to our osteoclasts and osteoblasts.
