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What makes you, you? Exploring philosophy of identity and self
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I've been thinking a lot about philosophy of identity lately. What actually makes a person who they are? Is it our memories? Our physical bodies? Our personality traits?
This gets into some deep philosophy of self territory. If you lose your memories, are you still the same person? What about if you change dramatically over time? The person I was ten years ago feels almost like a different person to me now.
And then there's the whole ship of Theseus thought experiment. If every part of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? What about with people? Our cells are constantly being replaced.
How do you all think about your own identity? What makes you feel like you're still "you" over time?
The ship of Theseus really gets at something deep about philosophy of identity. If every part is replaced, is it the same ship? And if not, at what point does it become a different ship?
I think about this with people too. Our cells are constantly being replaced. Our thoughts and feelings change. Yet we feel like the same person.
For me, what feels continuous is narrative. The story I tell myself about who I am, how I got here, where I'm going. Even as details change, the narrative provides a sense of continuity.
But that raises questions about philosophy of self too. If identity is just a story, how real is it? And who's telling the story?
I think about identity in terms of relationships. Who I am isn't just some isolated essence it's shaped by my connections to others, to my community, to the world.
This makes philosophy of identity more dynamic. I'm not just a fixed thing, I'm a node in a network of relationships that's constantly changing.
What's interesting is how this affects ethics. If my identity is relational, then my responsibilities are too. I'm not just responsible for my own actions, but for how I affect the web of relationships I'm part of.
Time is crucial to identity, I think. The person I am now exists in relation to who I was and who I might become. There's a temporal dimension to philosophy of self.
This connects to philosophy of time too. If time is an illusion, what does that mean for personal identity? If past, present, and future all exist equally, am I all my selves at once?
Practically, I try to hold my identity lightly. I'm not who I was ten years ago, and I won't be who I am now in ten years. That's not loss it's growth. The alternative would be stagnation.
Thinking about death has changed how I think about identity. In the face of mortality, some aspects of identity feel more important, others less.
Things like social status, possessions, even some achievements they don't feel like they get to the core of who I am. What feels more essential are qualities of character, relationships, how I've affected others.
This doesn't mean I have a fixed answer to philosophy of identity questions. But it helps me focus on what might matter most in the long run.
I'm skeptical about the idea of a fixed, essential self. From what I understand of neuroscience and psychology, what we experience as self" is a constructed narrative, not a thing.
This doesn't make identity meaningless though. Even if it's constructed, it's real in its effects. The story we tell ourselves shapes how we act, how we feel, how we relate to others.
Philosophy of identity, for me, is about understanding this construction process. How do we build our sense of self? What influences it? How can we build it in healthier ways?
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