man-man Posted:

I wasn’t alive 20 years ago (nearly, but not quite), and I’ve certainly changed since 10 years ago, but there’s a continuous line of minute changes from me in the past to me now. I’m not identical to my past self, but I don’t think we can sensibly deny being the same person on a moment to moment basis, and being the same person across a longer span is an extension of the same idea. The key is similarity – those persisting brain patterns again I guess. If there were a sudden discontinuity, where a mbumive part of my personality changed in a single event, then I think you could make the case that somehow I’d become a different person, but again… there’s enough permanence there, I think, to posit a single “me” across time, barring accidents.

For myself, 15 years ago I was a psychotic kid who was planning on starting a cult when I grew older in order to kill as many people as possible before killing myself. I was sick all the time, very much alone and picked on as well as a little ball of emo pain and rage. Sure I can trace how this affects my current outlooks, but that is not at all who I am now. My goals, aspirations, health, emotional states, desires, all are so very different now and I would act then in ways I would never consider to now. I would never say that that is me at this point (beyond what our language necessitates for clarity)

So many little changes which lead to a completely different individual. Every single cell in our bodies is replaced every ~3 years or so (my recollection could be off on that very easily) so from a materialistic standpoint, are we the same? Memories are altered, forgotten, false ones implanted. For years I remembered someone in my clbum accidentally sticking a pencil through their nose and mentioned the incident one day only to be told was was a weirdo. Might have been a misremembered dream or just popped out of nowhere. Either way it gets to the point where the only thing that we might have shared (a history) is no longer even shared since both the physical and the mental no longer overlap with each other.

With changes so gradual and small where can a line be drawn? Either no lines at all leading to a continuous self or a line drawn at every instance leading to no real self. Though it theoretically holds ethical importance and certainly does matter in psychology, I would say that it becomes a matter of preference of belief in all other areas of life.