What is You?

#consciousness #awareness #metaphysics

This is a pretty personal article exploring my ideas I’ve gathered and live by regarding the general ideas of self. They may be wrong since, I do not do philosophy or metaphysics but they’re fun and I am a self absorbed person. Anyways here’s a badly written rant about a very common metaphysical problem

Heraclitus famously said that no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. We oftentimes or almost all the time, treat our “self” as a fixed destination of a person but when you come to think about it… What even is you?

the Question…

Almost all my life and yours, we try to be a better “self”, a better version of ourselves, our lives revolve around this “self”. But we barely think about what that “self” is, and what is it that makes us, us. Your life revolves around your body, people recognise you by your face, your name maybe, but all of these are your physical self . But are these you, Science fiction constantly deals with mind swap and you come to realise that body isn’t really the you here. And come to think about it, was you at 7 years of age the same as you now? All your body cells have been replaced by now but it was still “you”. Every breath you take is a transition from a biological perspective so it cant be the body that is you.

The mind

So if it isn’t the hardware, it’s gotta be the software. Your mind, the controls behind the things you do. However, think about breathing for a second and focus, now you’re manually breathing. Yes, good… anyway, breathing is something you do not do control or chose to do every time you, you know, breathe. It’s something which is out of your conscious control.

Hence, there’s stuff that you do control and stuff that you don’t control. Things like breathing (examples fear, respiration blood circulation and all) are all things that you don’t control so it must not be you. But what about the things that YOU do, the things that you like and dislike. But did you really chose to like Brittney Spears over classical music? It was something else, it wasn’t really your conscious decision to like something and dislike something or else, we’d chose to like everything.

If you didn’t really chose your tastes, your fears or your _ then what is you? You might say I’m the conscious observer who thinks and decides the action. In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet, a _ psychologist, conducted various experiments around free will where he measured the EEG signals of the brain corresponding to different actions such as flicking their wrists or pushing a button. The conclusion he came to, was very _ , he found for all participants, the firing signal from the brain to flick or push was fired 300 to 500 milliseconds before the participant even felt the conscious urge to move. So this somehow means that your conscious self isn’t necessarily the initiator of these but a narrator. And oftentimes I have felt that people, including me aren’t that much in control of our decisions as we like to think, our preferences shape those decision and our conscious selves try to justify those means to the ends. The experiment, though definitely timed and flawed showed a very interesting behaviour in our kind. Of the dissociation of our self and our conscious self. That while we think we’re in total control, we are, in fact, very little.

the pattern of you

So after a lot of eliminations, you realise that this hardware and software of ours, isn’t really constant over any time and therefore, it isn’t us. But there’s something common about it, there’s a pattern of you. (add awareness text here) A thousand iterations of us, spanning over every years and decades… evolving every minute and every second. And that’s where I feel the answer of this question lies, the you lies behind all the hardware and software and lies inside the pattern of you…

the river…

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. - Heraclitus

For a long time, in my formative years and even as a young adult I am now, I have struggled with people, moving on from someone close and understanding why someone does what they do. Sometimes, you meet an old friend , who once may have meant the world to you, you realise that there’s not much of either you or them, while you’re physically present in all your full self. Trying to understand what happened you realise, you both must have changed a lot in this period and the new you’s are very different from your past selves and it kinda stuck with me forever since then. There’s these patterns of you, present there, the way they smile, the way they say that specific word, the way they laugh after a silly joke but you feel that it’s not you and it’s not them. But while the patterns of you are there, you are a new person as each smallest time passes you are a different you every time. Which somehow felt really comforting to me in such moments.

I think these ideas of self, the idea of a pattern of you and me, and the idea that we ourselves are these constant streams of changes through our own experience of this world makes it a little bit easier to think and feel through the changes we see in people around us.

Sources & Further Reading

If you’d like to dive deeper into the rabbit hole of identity, consciousness, and the “self,” these works provide the foundation for the ideas explored in this article:

  • The Fragments of Heraclitus – The source of the “River” metaphor. It explores the concept of Panta Rhei (everything flows) and the idea that change is the fundamental essence of the universe.

  • A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume – Specifically the chapter “Of Personal Identity.” Hume famously argues for the Bundle Theory, suggesting there is no “self,” only a collection of ever-changing perceptions.

  • Mind Time by Benjamin Libet – The primary source for the 1980s experiments mentioned. It explores the “Readiness Potential” and the troubling gap between brain activity and conscious awareness.

  • Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit – A modern masterpiece of philosophy. Parfit uses thought experiments (like teleportation) to argue that we are defined by Psychological Continuity (the pattern) rather than a physical or spiritual “ego.”

  • The Ship of Theseus (Plutarch) – An ancient paradox that asks: if every plank of a ship is replaced one by one, is it still the same ship? This is the ultimate “body cell replacement” argument.

  • Anatta (The Doctrine of Non-Self) – Found in various Buddhist texts, this concept aligns with the “River” theory, suggesting that nothing in the universe has a permanent, unchanging essence.

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