Who Am I?
What is the self? What makes a person who they are? Are we identified by our physique, our minds, how we perceive the world and ourselves, how we act, or our thoughts? When you eat bacon for breakfast, do the meat molecules become what you call “me”? At what point does your sweat stop being a part of you? What parts of your experience do you identify with? Do the words and sounds you hear become the soundtrack of your being? When we ask ourselves these questions, we can begin to come to a deeper understanding of who we are at the most subtle level.
You cannot reduce yourself to a single concept.
At least not accurately. A phrase or idea such as your name, gender, occupation, or favorite meal are all combined factors of your personhood. If I say “I am Luke,” I am identifying myself with both a sonic speech pattern and the visual representation of that sound. However, I do not feel like my name is the wholeness of my being. If I say “I am a student, brother, son, grandson, and human,” I am defining myself based on my actions and relationships. I go to school, I have a sister, parents, grandparents, and live alongside non-human animals. Theoretically, exercising disciplined creativity, I could continue trying to define myself by my actions, names, or relationships for days. However, I could not come to a singular, permanent definition of myself.
What do philosophers think about "I," the self?
Philosopher René Descartes states, “I think therefore I am” in an effort to define the truest nature of self. His view pins the self to his conscious train of thought (Eckhart Tolle “You Are Not Your Mind” 15). Yet, philosopher Eckhart Tolle wholeheartedly disagrees with that view; he writes that attaching one’s sense of self to the thinking mind catalyzes the illusion of separateness (Eckhart Tolle “You Are Not Your Mind” 15). Instead, Tolle believes that the self is that which observes our thoughts. Acting in accordance with Descartes’ statement creates a false dualism between the self and others from which a suffering and lack of empathy flows.
Other thinkers concur with Tolle’s vision of interconnectedness. In Book 2 Episode 4 “The Swamp” of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a wise character explains to the protagonists, “We are all branches of the same tree” (Tim Hedrick). Just like the setting of the episode, a large swamp that is really just one tree, our individual experiences are all expressions of the one unfolding drama of life and death. Similarly, Alan Watts makes the claim that just as an apple tree fruits, so too does the universe produce people (Alan Watts “The Myth of Myself”). Thus, we are all together in this paradox. I, like you, experience a unique, individual life, but we grow from the same tree.
I am a part of the water cycle
It is easy to understand the concept of interconnectedness if we track our material bodies over time. When I drink a glass of water, part of it becomes my physical body, and part of it moves on to the toilet, to the sewer, then, as is common knowledge, to the ocean eventually. I got the water from my tap, but that water probably came from some treatment facility, and it was likely groundwater or rainwater before that. At some point one of those molecules might have been sweat evaporating off a person’s skin. I am a part of the water cycle.
So are the water molecules only me when they are in my body or are they me the whole time? I do not think I can answer this question using the concept of an individual self that stops at the edge of my skin. The question ends in paradox. However, if we understand the self as just a fruit on a branch of a tree, we can see how the water both is and is not me. I am just one part of an interconnected organism. Though, that leaves more questions than answers. No pun intended.
To conclude, I am not satisfied
To introduce this website, I have put forth several ideas for your consideration. The self is very hard to define, and I cannot do so in a way that feels accurate and whole. In addition, it seems that each of our individual thought patterns play a large role in our concept of “I,” often leading us to attach the ‘self’ concept to those thoughts. If not our thoughts, then we attach our sense of self to our specific relationships, to “others.” Yet, if we examine our collective experience, we see that we are all united in some ineffable way that necessitates analogies to trees. All this contemplation does not leave me satisfied.
Who are we?
Click on the next page to see how the Buddhist philosophical tradition handles this question.