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.
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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.
Yes, often.
We as thinking beings consider ourselves to be constant. The trail of memories leading from our childhoods to today make it feel as though we are still that person who lived through all of those times, but we aren’t. We can’t be.
I have memories belonging to an 8 year old boy in my mind, he had the same name I did and lived with parents who also had the same name as mine, but I am a much older person - older than his parents, even - and I share almost no common ground with this boy. How can we be the same person, when we are so obviously different?
I am physically a different person to this person of my memories, and I can’t be sure he exists or existed. He may simply be a figment of my imagination, a story I tell myself of where I have come from but made up from whole cloth.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 think of a tree. It’s a tiny little sprout that grows into a sapling that grows into a young tree that grows into a regular tree that grows into a giant.
Yet when I think back to the sprout or the sapling, I don’t think of someone that’s gone. I get like a cartoon image of the big tree, with the little tree still fully formed inside it, like the big tree has made a cave that shelters the smaller tree. The smaller tree is still there in all it’s form, it’s just safe and sheltered and a bit harder to see.
This is a great analogy. If you were to look inside the tree, you’d see the rings that show the progress of how it had grown. Those earlier versions aren’t there in the same sense, but they are still there in a very real way.
I have their memories, so how can they be dead? Personalities change over time, so it’s only natural to see your past self differently.
The other way to think about it is not to concentrate on your past self dying but a new self being born.
It’s sad when you think that you and I have to die. But the flip side to that is that it is a complete miracle that we will never understand that we even came to being, were born, live, are aware and exist for a brief moment in this amazing universe on this planet.
Buddhism has some interesting takes on this. In particular, I really enjoyed The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche.
Nothing is dead. The past, present and future exist in harmony together. Yesterday is still there, and so is yesteryear. We can’t reach it anymore, but it’s still there.
