Seb_Maya

Am I simply a set of chemical and biological reactions? Are my thoughts and actions just a result of these reactions? Or is there something more to me? What is it exactly that makes me ?
Every seven years or so my body completes a cycle where it has renewed every cell it is made up of; in effect it is no longer the same body. However I am still me, why do I still have this idea of me ? Is it then my consciousness and my memory that makes me? I remember my name, I remember what I did yesterday, last year etc. Do these memories go a long way to explaining my sense of I? Opinions and comments welcome.
A scenario:
If a man kills another man, but then loses his memory in an accident is he still responsible for the murder?
The murderer pleads and pleads that he has not commited the crime, he has no recollection of it. In terms of trying to pinpoint this I or the self is he still guilty?

fwh

I think many would say that there can be no scientific answer to your question. Hence, it would be deemed an irrelevant one. From that viewpoint they would tend to have more of an underlying fascination with questions similar to these: 1)" How did we get here?" or 2)"Where do we go from here?".

The first question would be commonly answered in terms of historical determinism; RMNS evolution, genes, amino acids, and so forth. The second question would be answered by technology in technological terms.

For the "general public" the answers to the above questions would be in terms of a vague scientific humanism or of historical inevitability for the first; and perhaps a strained existentialist ethic or a "God is dead" theology for the second.

I think your question is an appropriate one, but I will wait for some other responses first.

lunar tee

I think about this question often, Seb. I think I am the result of the convergence of a lot of different events at every point in the moments of time which define my life; I am not a static thing but a constantly shifting entity. Since I am conscious in freeze-frames, I experience myself as constant and enduring and possessed of specific attributes. In reality I, like everyone else, can't be specified because by the time such a thought is articulared, that thought no longer describes me.

99Percent

You are the interaction of the present with all the acumulated memories in your lifetime and also in combination with your genetic heritage (which in turn goes back billions of years).

It is a unique one, though. NO one in the past or future will ever be the exact same you

John Page

Tricky questions, all responses are IMHO:

Physical - above and also atomic etc.
Yes.
What are you looking for?
Oh, that you. To *you*, you are the idea you have of yourself.
Repeatability with cumulative errors?
Yes, your identity can be considered to primarily result from brain function. I would also throw in a large dose of the unconscious activity of the brain - the hidden, essential, you, the complex patterns laid down by a mixture of genetics and experience.
This is one for the justice function of the society in which he lives.

Cheers, John

Keith Russell

What is the self?

Frank Zappa knew.

You Are What you Is.

Keith.

fwh

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day;
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play;
Lest we know where we are:
Lost in a haunted wood---
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.
(W. H. Auden)


Seb_Maya

We are attempting to answer your question "Who am I?" in the only way we have been taught to approach a problem. And that is the long-current scientific principle of seeking to explain a whole --Seb Maya--only from your parts. This is reductionism; it has been wildly and spectacularly successful. We then are forced to resist the impulse to distinguish what we can not divide--your self--. We assume that systematic investigation consists in the reduction of whatever we are investigating to its minimal physical units, because we have come to believe we must separate physically in order to distinguish mentally. Using the principle of reductionism alone; I don't think we have any satisfactory answers to your questions.

VivaHedone

You are the sensations you experience. These are entirely indescribable and inexplicable (try explaining sight to a blind man).

Demosthenes

A difficult question, one of the greatest questions ever asked by the human species. The answer's still forthcoming, but we can say with some reasonable degree of confidence that each of us is the result of our experience and memories. Without them we won't be who we are. Your self can be thought of as an ecology arising from the simple interactions of the fundamental elements that makes up your brain and body. It's like a river whirlpool, it has a definite existence in a river but it's being continually replaced by the rushing water. The identity's all that matters, the constituent parts are largely irrelevant.

abe smith

"the self" is another one of those linguist's-human-fictions which probably we who have moved up from the sophomore (= "wise
fool") class ought to be willing to relinquish.
The fact ,if it were a "fact" , that we can invent a fiction and (spend time to) discuss it DOES NOT cause that fiction to exist. As I keep asserting, , assertion is not demonstration. Hence this assertion of mine proves nothing! Isn't it time to start peeling vegetables for the soupe du demain?