This post is the first in a sequence, which also appears on my Substack page, where I'm working to clarify my views on personal identity and consciousness. It begins with a short piece of fiction, 'Change,' which aims to illustrate the ways our identities and core beliefs transform over decades, serving as a concrete example of the sorts of experiences we've all had. This is meant to inform the further discussion in the second half of the piece 'Identity', which tries to take a more analytical approach to the issue. While some of the foundational concepts explored, like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, will be familiar to most people here, they primarily serve as a springboard for the subsequent discussion within the piece, and future posts in this sequence. Feel free to skim or skip those sections.
The particular discussion I'm most interested in begins at the end, with "Our Parts Have Independent Histories", but the rest seems important to be able to have that discussion.
The view that I'll be exploring in the series is one that sees the boundaries between people as more permeable than we generally give them credit for, that our connections with each other are stronger than we think while our connections with ourselves (our past selves, our various aspects) are weaker than we think.
a story about life and time
Roger walked into a cafe and casually ordered a latte. He was thinking about the chess game he lost last night. The cafe was less a space of tables, chairs, and people and more a blur of brown floor and white walls that melded together into an abstract space as he passed through it. Last night’s chess game was large and vivid in his mind, while the space of the cafe was only a few bits of information, color and noise without shape or form.
He sat down at a table, barely aware of its existence.
“Roger!” The sound of his name brought his awareness back into the external world, which began to take form around him. A woman he didn’t recognize was walking toward him.
There was something strangely familiar about her face: a sharpness to her nose, an asymmetry in her smile, that tugged at something deep in his memory.
“It is you, isn’t it?” She said as she moved closer.
Suddenly it came to him. A strange feeling, like two separate objects clicking into one. Like looking at a small, nearby lamppost and realizing it’s actually a lighthouse off in the distance. The sudden frame change was jarring.
“Liz?” He blinked.
She smiled broadly, “Wow! How long has it been?”
“Twenty years?” He asked, calculating in his mind, “No… twenty-two…”
They were in ninth grade together, but his family moved away the summer before he went into tenth.
They had started to become close a few months before he moved away. Every day in English class they’d sat in the back of the room and talked about religion. She was a devout Catholic, while Roger was an atheist, but their discussions had been excited back-and-forth conversations rather than arguments, each interested in the perspective that the other offered. They were young and inexperienced in the world and they knew it, discovering its mysteries from different perspectives, with ideas and viewpoints based on what each had been taught by a different set of people they trusted, and they both found the other’s different worldview enlightening and mind-opening.
Roger remembered reading Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World” and being powerfully affected by it. He was awake until three in the morning the night he finished that book, and the next day he walked into Liz’s math class in the morning to give it to her to read.
She’d been as taken by the book as he was, though she was less accepting of its conclusions. They spent the following weeks in English class (when they were meant to be doing the assigned reading) whispering about Sagan’s words.
It was funny to Roger, looking back. The way he looked at the world back then seemed so simplistic to him now. Over time his atheism had slowly shifted beneath him without any single moment of change, but instead a slow shift into a sort of vague spiritualism. It was the cumulative impact of a hundred books, a dozen nights spent in conversations until dawn, a thousand experiences and moments of revelation. But if he had to trace it back to anything, it would be to his father’s death.
It wasn’t some immediate transformation. It was just a few words his sister had said at his funeral. Roger had softly kissed his father’s forehead, then stepped aside to give his sister the space to do the same. “No. He’s not there,” she’d said, “Dad’s somewhere else now.”
The words came back to him often. When he’d fallen while hiking alone in the mountains, scrambling over an exposed rock face. His ankle had broken, and he was there, exposed and alone in the wilderness. His father seemed to be with him, then. His words speaking themselves in his mind, telling him to keep going as he hobbled his way down the mountain before the cold and exhaustion could take him.
His father’s spirit seemed to be there, somewhere, in the world, and not just in some metaphorical sense, but in a very real one. He could feel him, talk to him, inside his mind. His advice, his particular ways of thinking, were ever present, even when Roger most strongly rejected them. What was that, if not a soul?
“Do you have time for a coffee?” As he spoke, the feelings he’d felt back then started to come back to him. Never shy about his ideas, Roger had been very shy about his emotions, and so the feelings he’d had for Liz had never made their way into words, except perhaps for the excitement with which he’d start their conversations every day. But for those short few months, his thoughts slowly seemed to take on a flavor of her. When he ate his breakfast, he’d wonder what she was having; when a cold breeze cut through his t-shirt as he walked to school, he’d wonder if she liked the feeling of the wind on her cheeks. When he had some inspired idea or noticed a moment of beauty in the world a thought always arose: how would he tell her about this the next day? The landscape of his mind was like an autumn forest, the leaves of his thoughts slowly changing color as she invaded them one by one.
Liz put the cup of coffee in her hand down on the table as she pulled up a chair, “Already have one.”
He smiled.
The conversation started slowly but he began to catch up on her life, and she on his. The version of her that lived in his mind was deeply curious about the nature of life. He imagined her studying philosophy or history, traveling the world, maybe learning to speak Turkish, exploring ancient Greek temples.
Instead, “I’m an accountant,” she smiled, “the pay is good and the work is pretty straightforward once you’ve been doing it for a while, and when I get off work I can spend time with my kids in the evenings.”
It was strange listening to the story of her life. The things she’d done, the person she’d become. She’d fallen into the same groove that everyone else seemed to have fallen into; the little mundane choices of life had stripped away the sense of wonder, the ambition of the spirit that he remembered so vividly from those few months they’d spent together.
That’s when it struck him that the same thing seemed to have happened to him.
“It’s funny thinking back on those ridiculous conversations we used to have,” she said, “we were so excited by pseudo-profundities. It’s sort of embarrassing to think about how important we thought religion and philosophy were.” Then she smiled, “But actually, I’ve always wanted to thank you for starting me on the road out of that nonsense. I think I can trace it back to reading that book you gave me, the one by Sagan. I started to realize that I had all these beautiful ideas I held on to so tightly, but that they just weren’t true.”
“So you don’t believe in beauty anymore?”
“Well, I mean, there’s beauty and then there’s beauty, right? A flower is beautiful, but it’s still just a flower. That feeling you get when you look at it is just a feeling. I used to imagine that signified something more, that there was a whole world underneath and inspiring that feeling, but I’ve come to realize that it’s just some neurons firing in my brain. It’s just an arbitrary feeling assigned by evolution to a sight that signified a good fertile place for our ancestors to look for food.”
Roger was shocked. Wasn’t this the sort of thing that he was always trying to convince her of, back then? Maybe not quite so bleak, but looking back from where he was it seemed that she’d reached the end of the road that he’d been walking. Yet, while she called her former self naive for believing in the spirit in the world, he felt the opposite. He saw his former self as naive and blinded. In spite of all that humankind has discovered, Roger believed, we live in a world of powerful mystery, and when understood in context, our knowledge only enhances the spiritual power of the world.
People in the past may not have understood the nature of the soul in a scientific context, but he’d come to believe that their understanding was much deeper and even more accurate than a naive view gave it credit.
“But wherever our sense of beauty comes from, you still feel it, don’t you? It shouldn’t matter where that feeling comes from when it comes to the question of its significance.”
“Of course.” She paused for a moment as she looked at him, his broadened shoulders, the wrinkles around his eyes, seeing now all the little changes that had come with the passing of the years. An odd sadness came to her expression, as if she’d just lost something she cared about. “But the truth still matters too, doesn't it? It’s fine to have beautiful ideas, but the reason that they feel so powerful is that they’re ideas about the world. If you thought your ideas about God or souls were just stories, they might be beautiful stories, but, I mean, they wouldn’t mean as much to you, right?”
Roger nodded at that. “Sure, but ‘just stories’ is doing a lot of work there.”
“I don’t know; I used to believe a lot of things because of how they made me feel. But you helped me to see that I had to confront the question: is it true?”
Liz looked at her coffee for a moment. She stared at it quietly for what felt a little too long, as if seeing some long ago scene in its black surface.
Roger was about to speak when she continued, seeming to have come to a decision, “I remember the day. I think it was only a few weeks after you moved away. I was missing those conversations we used to have,” she was still looking down into the cup, unwilling to meet his eyes, “I went for a walk by the river. Up on the bridge, high over the water, I stopped and looked out at its rushing currents. It was beautiful and powerful. I imagined myself being carried away by it, seeing in its strength how tiny and insignificant I was, like the leaves floating there, completely overwhelmed by it. I started thinking about God. I imagined myself in a conversation with you. It was like I could hear your voice, passionately talking about the things Sagan said about truth. We argued there, you and I, about what matters.”
Roger felt a chill run down his spine. He remembered those passionate arguments. He wouldn’t have believed that they’d meant as much to Liz as they had to him. It had been years since he’d felt that excitement to keep pushing at the edges of what someone else believed so that he could see the next level down, and maybe get some new insights there. Right or wrong, it had felt like there was always something to learn. That particular kind of curiosity, he realized, had long since faded. The memory brought with it a faint pang of loss, a feeling he couldn’t quite articulate.
“But this time was different,” Liz continued, “because you weren’t really there. I wasn’t defending my ideas anymore; there was no one to lose to, no one to hide from. All my armor was gone, my flesh laid bare to the sharpness of your words, my emotions finally free to be fully felt, as your words cut through all the soft flesh of my soul.
“As your words played through my mind, I struggled with myself and what I truly cared about. If God matters to me, it’s because he’s real. He’s out there somewhere, with love and care for us. But is he? Or do I just wish he was? Am I really seeing the meaning in the world, or am I trying to force something into it that just isn’t there? The more significant God is to me, the more I care about beauty, the more it matters if those things are real.
“I wanted to confront the world as it is, not just as I wished it to be.”
Several waves of unexpected emotions washed over Roger. Liz’s feelings toward him, back then, touched something that had died long ago, and for a moment he felt from that place a deep sense of guilt. He’d never intended to dismantle her faith, only to offer another way of seeing. Now her stark honesty left him speechless.
The silence grew awkward, but Roger was too dismayed to speak. He didn’t even notice as Liz wiped tears from her cheeks with the paper napkin that had been placed under her coffee cup.
By the time he’d recovered, the moment was gone, there was nothing left to say.
Liz had collected herself faster than him. “Anyway, that was a long time ago,” she said, “I’m so happy to have finally run into you again! What have you been doing all these years?”
They drank their coffee and chatted for a while. She was a kind woman with a nice smile. She loved her children and was good at her job.
She still liked to read, as did he. They talked for a little about authors they liked and what they’d been reading recently, but their interests didn’t seem to overlap much. She gave an embarrassed smile when he mentioned what he’d been reading. He could see the words “pseudo-profundity” trying to hide themselves behind her eyes.
It’s not that her interests were superficial; they just weren’t things that Roger was drawn to, anymore. The conversation died relatively quickly.
He realized that in twenty years the two of them had both changed so much, been changed by life and by their own impulses, by introspection and external influences, that the woman sitting across from him was a stranger. That girl who had left a piece of herself in his soul twenty years ago wasn’t there in the cafe that day.
She’d died somewhere along the way, and from her ashes this stranger had been born. But while that realization had materialized momentarily, it wasn’t the thing that Roger was thinking about as his heart began to quicken its pace. He realized, with a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, that the same thing had happened to the boy who’d talked to her each day with such excitement.
He remembered the way the two of them had been so excited to hear views completely opposed to their own. He recalled the curiosity and joy that had pulsed through him, the desire to learn about everything. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that. So many people were just wrong and he had no time to waste on listening to their absurdities. Life was too short. It was strange to think that at the same time as he’d gone from an atheist to a mystic he’d also transitioned from an explorer, discovering the world, to someone who just felt bored with it, as though he knew it all already and there was nothing interesting left to discover.
They left the cafe. She suggested they exchange phone numbers, which they did, and parted with a brief embrace.
Roger felt an odd sadness as he walked away. As if someone had passed away, there, in that little coffee shop. But the person he mourned wasn’t Liz.
———————————————————-
a discussion of what we are
Who, exactly, did Roger mourn? If it was ‘his younger self’ this seems to imply that’s a separate individual from the person he is today. But is that true? Is it possible for a person to die even while their body goes on living? Was a new person born in place of the old?
Think about the aspects of your character that define you. Perhaps it’s your kindness or your determination in overcoming obstacles. Maybe you have some particular insight in your understanding of the world that has over the years ossified into a fundamental aspect of who you are. If you are a Christian, or an atheist, a socialist or a libertarian, how much do those things define how you see yourself as a person? If you stripped away your religion, or perhaps something even deeper, your compassion or your sense of humor, would you still be you?
When did you first come into existence?
Was it on the date which is printed on your passport or birth certificate — the day you celebrate each year as your entry into the world?
How much of who you are wasn’t yet present on that day? Imagine a parallel history of your life, one where you faced different challenges, learned different lessons. After some decades of life, a person shaped by those experiences would exist, but would you even recognize them?
In order to attempt to address some of these questions, let’s begin by looking at a classic philosophical thought experiment.
The story is probably already known to you: The Athenians sent the Ship of Theseus on a ceremonial voyage every year. Due to the religious and mythical importance of the ship, it was important that the same ship was sent each year, so it was never replaced. It’s documented in the historical sources that they kept up this custom for centuries. After so many years at sea, the ship must have undergone a process of damage and decay. The hull decayed from the years spent in the water necessitating the replacement of the most deteriorated boards. The decking was damaged by storms. The sails were torn.
As the years passed more and more of the ship would have been repaired and replaced. Eventually a day must have come when not a single piece of the original ship remained.
Yet it had been sailing on those waters continuously for all that time.
Is it the same ship, or a different one? If different, how did it change without their noticing it?
If the same, how can that be, when none of the original components remain?
For the ship, this question is perhaps not so important. It’s certainly not an existential question, because we are not ships, and the ship itself is not asking the question. It’s really just a matter of definitions. If we define the ship as the sum of its parts, then this is not the same ship. That was slowly disassembled board by board over the years of its journey.
But if we define it as the continuous pattern of those parts, a pattern into which a new part can be fitted as an old one is taken away, then it is the same ship.
And, having made such a definition, it seems like we’re done. The question has been answered.
For the ship, that’s certainly true. A problem about the nature of words can be solved by clearly defining words.
But when we look at ourselves?
If we ask the same sort of question about a human, there’s a similar answer. Over time the atoms of your body are replaced by the atoms of your food. As the years pass, every atom in your body is exchanged in this way. Sometimes it’s suggested that there are parts of us that aren’t so replaced, but this is a misunderstanding. It’s true that some of the cells of our bodies aren’t replaced by new cells (though most are, over time) but the atoms that make up those cells are constantly cycling through us, via our breath, food, and the water we drink.
If the new atoms occupy the same configuration as the old, if the pattern that defines you remains unchanged, this poses no more of a problem than the problem of Theseus’s ship. From the Athenians’ perspective, that was still his ship, even after every board had been replaced. And from your perspective, perhaps you’re still you, even when all your atoms have been replaced. It certainly doesn’t feel like we lose a part of ourselves each time we exhale, or gain a new aspect with each meal.
You sit on a surfboard, waiting for a good wave. Finally, the perfect one approaches, smooth and powerful. You watch it coming and you think that the thing moving toward you is water, but it’s not. There’s certainly something coming toward you, and as you begin to paddle, that thing overtakes and carries you along with its momentum, pushing you toward the shore. But it’s not water that’s propelling you forward. The water isn’t moving that way: it’s moving up and then down.
The wave is the thing that moves toward the shore.
If you’ve ever been a part of a human wave, you know what I’m talking about. You’re sitting in the stands at a football game and see the wave approaching. Timing it just right, as the wave arrives, you stand, raising your arms as the people around you cheer. Then you sit again, and the wave passes by. But at no point did you leave the area of your seat.
That wave is made of people. But its motion is perpendicular to the motion of any individual within it. The motion of the wave is an emergent property of the motion of the people, but the wave is a distinct thing, with a motion and momentum that is different from that of its component parts.
Back on your surfboard, you start to stand, playing with the feeling of grace and power. You can feel the strength of the thing beneath you as it carries you along. If someone told you it wasn’t real, you’d laugh. It’s something we can feel and measure. But it’s not the water, it’s the pattern that moves through it.
We are like the wave, not the water.
What happens to our understanding of the ship, though, if we alter the circumstances slightly? Imagine the custom was maintained, not just for centuries but for millennia. Imagine the Ship of Theseus were still making its yearly voyage today. And imagine that the Athenians were technological progressives.
At the same time as Theseus’ ship was decaying, new ship designs were coming out. Advanced materials.
Someone comes up with a steam-powered rotor design.
It’s important to the Athenians that the ship make its voyage safely each year. It needs to get there on time for the rituals. It would be a disaster if it were sunk in a storm.
Instead of simply putting new wooden boards in place of the old, they use steel and aluminum. They replace its sail with a motor. Eventually the ship is not only made of new materials but an entirely different shape, propelled through the water by a new source of power.
Is this the same ship?
Over time you change, not just in the sense that the atoms in your body are replaced by identical atoms from the food you eat and the air you breathe, but also in the way in which they are arranged. It’s not just the water that’s changing, the nature of the wave itself evolves as well: your body transforms as it grows. Bones become more or less dense, muscles develop or atrophy. You cut yourself and develop a scar. You get a tattoo. You hurt your back helping a friend move, and the pain seems to come back every time you take a long flight. Your hair beings to grey.
You move to Spain and learn to speak Spanish. You start to cook local dishes, learning about the spices that they use there. You develop experience at your job and the new skills that go with it. Your heart is broken and you develop a more jaded outlook toward love. You help a friend through a hard time, finding the feelings of closeness that develop deeply rewarding, and become a more caring and generous person as a result.
You meet a diversity of people, and each leaves an indelible mark on who you are. Their words echo in your mind as you move through life.
The experiences of life change us in myriad ways, some superficial, but others cutting to the bone (literally or figuratively), altering the very nature of who we are. These changes accumulate and build upon each other, crystalizing into the habits of how we live our lives and see the world.
Some of those changes are in the nature of slippery slopes. A child steals a candy bar for the first time and gets away with it. He enjoys the thrill of the experience and the lack of consequences emboldens him to do it again. Developing a habit of minor thefts, he notices that social rules can be broken with impunity if you’re careful, leading him to break other social taboos as well.
When I was young I lived for a few months in the cheapest room I could find for rent in Vancouver. The house was a place of chaos and danger. I knew the other occupants more by their addictions than their names: the meth addict, a struggling musician; the heroin addict, who thought people in the mirrors were trying to kill him; and the cocaine addict who once said to me, “The worst thing you can do to a person is convince him to try cocaine for the first time.”
The cycles of change can, of course, be either positive or negative.
I think we’ve all experienced them. These cycles, with their unpredictable turns, help to explain why even individuals with similar upbringings can diverge so dramatically. This mystery is evident in research on personality: a portion of our personality is explained by inheritance, another by “shared environment” — all the common experiences you share with your siblings like socio-economic status, neighborhood, schooling, and parenting style. Yet, even after accounting for these, as seen in twin and adoption studies, a significant amount of the variation remains unexplained. This is termed the “unshared environment”, but that’s just a placeholder because every attempt to measure it, it’s remained mysterious. While peer group influence was once considered an important factor, this has largely been ruled out. What seems to remain is mostly happenstance: a stray word, a moment of revelation, the way the light filters through the leaves of a tree one morning when you just happen to look up, and sparks an idea.
Small, often unnoticed moments in our lives have a profound impact on who we later come to be.
Often, such moments depend upon how we interpret them. They are not just the grinding, overpowering effect of the environment through the years, for those things would be noticed and could be measured. Those aspects of our formation are certainly there. But the unexplained part remains, and that aspect is found elsewhere — in little moments of insight that stay with us even as they shift our perspectives.
These moments are so hard to measure because they are not caused merely by the world outside, but by our interaction with it. We live in relation to the world. And in our complexity, and the complexity of the world, as we go into conversation with it and with each other, small shifts lead us down complex branching paths. That complexity arises from within us, because of our intricate natures.
We make choices. The interactions we have with the world are not like a rock being pushed down a hill, because when someone pushes you, you move. You respond. You are an agent, taking part in how you are influenced by the world, and how you conceptualize its affects on you.
The world’s impact on you is not like a person giving a lecture to a passive audience: you are an active participant in your own growth. Feedback loops ensue. Yes, our minds are shaped by the world, but in complex, often contradictory ways, more like a conversation than a monologue, as we shape and orient ourselves in reaction to these things.
This truth about our natures has been understood across cultures and throughout history. It is echoed in spiritual texts, such as The Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna explains how changes in perspective and orientation can have a pivotal impact on our natures:
Even the heartless criminal,
if he loves me with all his heart,
will certainly grow into sainthood
as he moves toward me on this path.
Quickly that man becomes pure,
his heart finds eternal peace.
Arjuna, no one who truly
loves me will ever be lost.
All those who love and trust me,
even the lowest of the low -
prostitutes, beggars, slaves -
will attain the ultimate goal.
Here, Krishna reminds us of the ultimate power of the soul; the power of change and growth and ultimately of transcendence. There is an opportunity within us for the most profound sort of metamorphosis, if we orient ourselves toward the right ideal.
We can also see the same basic principle in much more mundane, day to day, changes. Any small shift in your behavior can have large, unforeseen effects when projected into the future. When I was in 8th grade my older brother “tricked” me into reading a book he liked. I wasn’t a reader then, so after he lent it to me, the book sat on my shelf for months, until one day he took it back, reading it aloud to our younger sister. Her excited enthusiasm, or perhaps a touch of sibling jealousy, drew me in one afternoon, and I sat in on their reading. Within an hour, I was hooked. When my brother stopped reading, I wanted to know what happened next, so I picked up the book and didn’t stop until I’d devoured the entire ten-book series.
Prior to this I only read the things assigned at school. But from that day onward, a lifetime habit of daily reading began, one that has stayed with me decades later. A small act can lead you down a different road in life.
As those changes add up, we take on new forms. But at what point does such an extreme change in form mean that you are no longer the same person?
And now the crux: what does it even mean to say ‘the same person’?
Perhaps some clarity can come from looking at the question in reverse. Instead of wondering if your younger self is still alive in you, as we have been, we might consider if you existed within him?
We were not born fully formed. Yes, some aspects of ourselves — our personalities, talents, proclivities, and traits — are inborn, present at least as potentialities when we’re children. But there are other aspects of your character that came later, that came from somewhere. We absorb the lessons of our culture, and they form us into who we are. That culture is rich and complex. You oppose slavery and support women’s liberation, not because you were born with these beliefs but because you live in a context where you were exposed to them, and perhaps through wrestling with the complex environment of ideas in which you exist, you found some compelling and others weak.
You embraced some of those ideas, brought them into your soul, and they shaped you and became a part of the framework with which you examined the next idea that you encountered.
But each idea has a history. It didn’t arise yesterday. It has existed, in words and thoughts and as ink on a page, for decades, centuries, or millennia. And now it’s made its way from the page into you. These ideas, these patterns of thought, are not static. They are forever moving, through us and between us as we interact with one another. They’re not like statues made of stone, dead and unmoving, but instead like waves on the ocean, dynamic and alive.
As the Ship of Theseus illustrates, it’s not the physical stuff you’re made of that defines who you are, but patterns within it. But if this truth is expressed too simply, it risks sounding mundane and uninteresting. We need to grasp its true depth.
If we are like the wave, rather than the water, we see how a wave is transferred from one region of the ocean to another, incorporating the water there for a moment, then passing on as it moves along its trajectory.
We are more than just a simple wave crossing the waters. We are more like a symphony than an individual note, our complex parts played out by a multitude of individual instruments, each with its own unique sound: A hundred little habits, a dozen fundamental ideals, a collection of idiosyncratic ways of thinking — all interacting in each moment to produce our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
Each of these things is like a wave, moving through us. These words are waves that moved through me, but which now collide with the ‘water’ that is you and their momentum becomes a force within your mind.
This perspective on identity, as a dynamic, composite entity made of parts with their own histories and trajectories, often semi-independent of the individuals that they form, leads into the next post in the series.