Sunday 11 October 2015

connected to multiple yous: the question of continuing identity

Sometimes chunks of my life seem disconnected. 

I feel less connected to myself when I was a child than I do to my closest friends or family. I have a shared identity with the people around me, in that we create each others' identities and live in a mutual world of culture and shared experience. It's a product of simultaneity; we exist in a parallel tract in time, and so share languages, values, experiences, sights, tastes, sadnesses.

My connection with myself is always linear. I can never experience the simultaneity of my own mind, to view my mind and self from outside of me. Every experience I ever have emerges, as I do, as me, insofar that I am what I do. I move my body through this world and every experience crashes onto my consciousness like the cresting of a wave on a reef. 

Continuous, even in sleep. In dreams. Especially in dreams, sometimes. 

And yet, when I observe myself as a child (what an absurd thought!) - through the eyes of a camera, which is really an attempt at capturing the viewing of another mind, I think, absurdly, "Who is this tiny person?!" I feel so disconnected and yet there is an ache inside of me that remembers.

And then I wonder: At what point do I stop experiencing this continuity? The point at which I'd look at a photo or video (our closest approximation of the view of oneself from the outside) of myself and think with my guts first, "That is not me." 

I am who I was an hour ago. And certainly the hour before that, I remember the experience well. Surely, I am who I was yesterday. Furthermore, my friends and family often affirm my identity for me, and I theirs.

(I picture Zeno's paradox illustrating the alleged impossibility of movement, but instead of a room there's life and instead of an arrow there is living.)

At what point do you stop being the you that you currently are?