To You, Yourself

The idea of you is something that you think you know. In reality, I think that it is safe to say that most people never pursue the idea to its roots. That is, it seems everyone is walking around with some fuzzy conception of who they think they are. Defining "self" has been the goal of many philosophical debates cascading over many centuries yet like so many discussions the conclusions have varied. I offer yet another idea:

If you are you, then you are human, which means that you are a member of a bipedal family of primates (depending on the definition you conclude to be the true meaning of human).

But what if you are not bipedal? What if you have an extra chromosome, or what if you are missing an eye, a limb, or half of your brain! Does it matter that you are conscious? What if you were born Anthony and you had 2 arms at birth but later lost one in an accident? Are you now slightly less than Anthony?

To me the idea of self is fleeting. You are not exactly the same as you are one day to the next. You are not the same from one hour nor one second nor one millisecond to the next. A person is a collection of atoms, of energies, of vibrating strings, or whatever the fundamental building blocks of matter are. But you are certainly not a rock or a pineapple. You have a consciousness, you feel, you move yourself, and you change your environment at your own free will, so what makes you different from all the other collections of matter that we call pineapples, rocks, swords, bubble gum, clouds, etc?

Lets start from the top. Though we may find it hard to agree what exactly a human is we can reasonable agree that humans are collections of matter that are more similar in respect to the definition of what a human is than they are different from every other collection of matter. You have chromosomes, hammers don't. You have arms, sharks don't (thank god). You have the ability to reason (some to a lesser degree). If evolution is true then determining what is human may be like trying to define the exact point at which the mountain and the valley meet. Still we have a sufficiently reasonable idea of what human means, so what is self to you?

You are not the same as every other human. You are unique in appearance, usually. What if you are a biological twin? If you are a twin then you have the same genetic makeup as your brother or sister. What makes you, you! A crisis of identity seems possible in such cases however we know that twins exist and that though they have the same genetic makeup and same upbringing as their duplicate yet they are still capable of behaving and creating different things and ideas. They think for themselves and will surely assert they are a person that is unique from their sibling. At the very least they are made up of different amounts of atoms and we can say that they are not made up of the same exact atoms. They have different experiences and different thoughts.

Still, there is more to this puzzle of self. The very matter that you are composed of is constantly moving and changing in amounts. You eat, you drink, you create waste, you bleed, you cry - so you lose and you gain. You have grown and developed yourself from your very conception and eventually someone stuck a label on a collection of matter that popped out from someone's belly. You are not the same person you were yesterday. You have progressed or regressed both mentally and physically throughout your life, such that when you say you are you, you mean that you are Cinderella version1827364932743646.

Nothing is outside the realm of change because nothing is outside the realm of motion. You are Albert Gregory McCoy and you are 99.9999999999999999999999% similar to the Albert Gregory McCoy you claimed you were a minute ago. You are Albert Gregory McCoy and you are 92.683947437372% similar to the person you claimed you were 3 years 5 months and 18 days ago. You are so much more similar to that person than anything or anyone else that everyone else will accept your claim as Albert Gregory McCoy who grew up on Appleton Street in Cooper City, Michigan so you can go on claiming you are Albert Gregory McCoy and that you know yourself.