I Am, I Will: Part 1

If you're an adult and you think you're the same person now that you were at the age of eight years old, one of the following is true:

1. You are a delusional person who actually feels like he/she is experiencing life from the standpoint of an eight-year-old child,
2. somehow your inner subjective experience was mysteriously put on hold at the age of eight and has just been reactivated, or
3. your notion of 'the self' includes the notion of enduring personal identity.

A rational person would assume 1 and 2 are not true, with 1 being possible but highly unlikely, and 2 being seemingly impossible, which leaves 3 as the only viable option. Now, by viable, it is meant here that it is most likely true that this is the way you think about yourself and your continuing experience.

However, by being an entity with an ongoing inner subjective experience, one is constantly being bombarded mentally by sensory experiences which challenge beliefs, give rise to a greater understanding of the world, and shape ways of thinking about it and our interactions with it. If you can at all remember what it was like for you to be an eight-year-old, how much of what you experience these days gives you the sense of what it was like to hold the attitudes, beliefs, and desires you held back then? Some of those attitudes, beliefs and desires must have persisted, but what percent of your inner subjective experience these days is like the inner subjective experience of the eight-year-old you? If you're honest, I suspect you'll answer, Very little.

The way experiences with the world create enduring impressions in one's mind (which endure as long as the mind of the subject of experience hasn't been degraded somehow) leads to a propensity for creating a narrative, a fiction of the mind that allows one to believe that all those experiences are connected in some meaningful way that shapes the experiencer, indeed defines the experiencer. Yet, we know that new experiences change ways of thinking brought about by previous experiences. Sometimes we undergo such profound changes in thinking that we end up holding negative attitudes toward those experiences which led to beliefs and patterns of thoughts we now eschew. Are we to think of such experiences as bad? Are we to think we were mistaken to have let them inform our thinking in the ways that they did? Or, should we accept all experiences as motivators for change within, to help us learn and grow? Do changes in thinking brought on by experience necessarily foster growth? Whether the succession of experiences we undergo has a fundamental cause or is pure randomness, we don't know.

All of your experiences change your beliefs and attitudes toward different people, places, things and ideas. New experiences are happening right now, to you, an entity which holds beliefs and attitudes toward different people, places, things and ideas that it didn't hold years before. This entity we call 'the self', what is it?

What are you right now? You are a momentary expression of an ever-changing unity of mental states, such as beliefs, thoughts, desires, perceptions, and imaginings. Right now, you are the one who knows what it's like to be you at this moment. And what it's like to be you now is certainly not what it was like to be you when you were eight years old.

What it's like to be you now is not what it was like to be you before.

Yet, we hold on to the past and remain fascinated by our own personal stories.

What vain creatures we are.

Coalescence

That one piece missing from the region down in the bottom right corner, you're sure that's it.

And it is. And you press it home.

Thinking for sure that you'd lost it, you breathe a little easier.

And then, your breath catches in your throat. That one piece, put into its proper place, makes the overall image clearer than you could have imagined...

Another portal to the past opened. Such time travel has been known to you since the beginning. Since that time when a large-enough accretion of your sensory experiences allowed you to think for the first time, Here I am...

Before that, there was the laying of the foundation. Try as you will to see into that period of the past, it remains hidden from view.

Here I am.

But, who are YOU?

"...According to this line of criticism, the sense of self is an evolutionary artifact, which saves time in the circumstances it evolved for. But sense of self breaks down when considering some events such as memory loss, split personality disorder, brain damage, brainwashing, and various thought experiments. When presented with imperfections in the intuitive sense of self and the consequences to this concept which rely on the strict concept of self, a tendency to mend the concept occurs, possibly because of cognitive dissonance." [source]

Looking back down at the puzzle, you become aware of another missing key piece. The collection of unplaced pieces seems to have grown, and somehow you're almost convinced that that key piece isn't to be found within it. Maybe the cat ran off with it...

Is there any lemonade left in the fridge?