Who am I?
This is a philosophical question.
In song, The Who asked ‘Who are You’? Black Uhuru asked ‘What is Life’? Frank Zappa said, ‘Help I’m a rock.’
Some of you have pondered this question, I’m sure. Others think it is silly because it has no set answer.
As some of you know, I have Lewy Body dementia. My brain neurons are dying, being killed over time by excess proteins. There is no known cure and its cause is unknown. But it’s the second leading cause of dementia after Alzheimer’s.
So the question for me is pertinent .
As I have written earlier I am literally, albeit slowly, losing my mind. Does that mean every day I am a little less of myself? Or that I am myself at all?
What if my perception of myself is widely different from what others see. It could be a horror movie: ‘Invasion of the Alpha-synuclein Proteins.’
Justin Caouette posting on the blog A Philosopher’s Take, asks if we rip a page out of a book, is it the same book? How about a chapter? How about if you blot every word out with Wite-Out?
Philosopher David “Hume says that all that “we” are is a bundle of perceptions at any given reference point, according to Caouette. “The ‘self’ for Hume, when perceived as something fixed through time, is an illusion. Strict identity claims are simply false when talking about ourselves as persisting through time. The bundle of perceptions changes with each experience, therefore, there is no one enduring ‘self’ that persists through each experience.”
So minute by minute we change. But is he saying we are not who we are two minutes earlier? Yes and no. I think.
Here’s more; “When I say “I will go home in an hour” I’m referring to the bundle of perceptions that is related by past experiences to the bundle that will walk out the door. I may be wrong in my claim that ‘I’ will leave in an hour (I may take longer or turn in sooner, but, I will leave at some point), the ‘I’ is simply a quick and fast way of identifying who will walk out the door.”
So I’m following this, sort of. He brings up Alzheimer’s (I wish Lewy Bodies would be mentioned in conjunction with Alzheimer’s as another leading cause of dementia.)
“One need not have a fixed memory or even a good one to be a person or a self on this account. This gets us around those who have Alzheimer’s. They are still persons on this view.”
That’s nice.
For me this is all a Catch-22 because I am actively losing the thing, my mind, which interprets my perceptions, of which I am a downsizing ‘bundle of.’
I may soon be asking ‘Who are you?’ to loved ones. But I won’t be meaning it in a philosophical way.
So before this part of me goes away, I am thinking a lot about who I am..
Will Durant, channeling Aristotle in his definitive ‘The Story of Philosophy’ said ‘we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.’
So who are you? Who am I?
Parent, weekend athlete, storyteller, son, daughter, music lover, prankster, hiker.
I do know this: