The question: Who are you? Has a long and illustrious history that begins with the earliest philosophers.[1][2] But for now, I’d like you to just humor me and suppose that fundamentally, who you are is your consciousness, your mind. Further, suppose that your mind, a totally private and ephemeral entity, is created by your brain, a physical entity in objective reality. The chemistry and physics of your brain are now reasonably well understood by science.[3] Your brain operates according to the laws of physics, including quantum mechanics. In this respect it is no different than any other physical entity, like a sun or a river. However, your brain is more intricate and complex than any other entity in the known universe. Science understands a lot about your brain’s physical structure and its molecular level operation, but how it creates and interacts with your mind is still a mystery.
At the physical level your brain is unique, in the entire universe there is not another brain just like yours. [4] Furthermore, the memories stored in your brain are the result of your unique moment-by-moment experience from the time you took your first breath to the present moment.
Nature has arranged it so that your own mental images of ordinary things, for example, of a chair, is essentially the same in all human minds. So, you naturally think that most of the other mental constructs in your mind are the same as other people’s. You’re surprised when you discover they are not. You shouldn’t be. Think of how different your life experience has been from other people’s. The contents of your consciousness, and the way it is currently set-up to deal with objective reality is quite different from other people’s. “OK,” you say. “This is all obvious.”
Perhaps. But there is more. Since your nervous system is the control center that keeps your heart beating, and your lungs pumping, what your brain constructs as truth is not easily altered. The same goes for your feelings and behaviors. This is who you are. The fundamental processes of nature have so constructed you. You can change, you can willfully modify some of the concepts in your mind. But you won’t seriously do so unless you’re certain that doing so will enhance your life in some way. Why should you do otherwise?
Notes
[1] “… in ancient Greek philosophy, we could not find any systematic articulation of the concept of self. What we can find when we study the ancient Greek’s conception of the self are questions like … ‘What defines the fundamental identity of an individual?’”, Philo-Notes, Plato’s Concept of the Self, https://philonotes.com/2022/05/platos-concept-of-the-self retrieved 07/30/22.
[2] “Aristotle’s concept of the self is more complicated [than Plato’s] … Aristotle’s narrative of the soul … guides us in understanding his concept of the self, that is, the human person is a ‘rational animal’”, Philo-Notes, Aristotle’s Concept of the Self, https://philonotes.com/2022/05/aristotles-concept-of-the-self ,retrieved 7/30/22.
[3] Nature Reviews Physics, The physics of brain network structure, function and control, https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-019-0040-8 ,retrieved 7/30/22.
[4] There is no direct evidence for this assertion. Considering that the human brain houses 100 trillion connection points (synapses, estimated from physical counts by neuroscientists) that themselves are molecularly complex and constantly changing as your moment-to-moment changes, the probability of this assertion being false is humongously small.
Frank and Friends 