What are the minimum required characteristics that make you "you"?
Asked by
hominid (
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February 7th, 2014
(Related to this question I just asked).
If your cognitive, emotional, and physical characteristics were systematically removed one-by-one, at what point would you cease to be you?
Nearly all of us would feel that a loss of some or all of our limbs or physical ability would not result in a loss of self. But what about cognitive ability? What if damage to the brain resulted in something like prosopagnosia (face blindness), retrograde amnesia (memory loss of previous events), or anterograde amnesia (inability to create new memories)? What if an injury to the insular cortex resulted in changes in emotion and compassion?
At what point would you stop being “you”?
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7 Answers
Taking away just one is all that would be needed to change who I am today.
I believe I have a “core” self. I believe it is more malleable than I would like though. Throughout time I can see how (probably because of co-dependency) I have hid a lot of it. So far hidden down that it’s hard to reach.
When I was 26 and had my nervous breakdown due to PTSD, Panic Attacks and the onset of my Bipolar Disorder is when a huge chunk of my core self got blown off.
I mourn that nearly everday. I haven’t found away to get those things back. Nor have I found a way to “re-invent” myself. I miss the person I used to be. I am lost.
In the sense that I think you mean—What is necessary and sufficient to sustain a sense of unique identity?—I’d say that all that is required is a story. A sense of unique identity resides only in a particular narrative. That narrative isn’t even localized within a particular brain; it’s socially distributed. There’s a certain amount of neural and physical infrastructure needed to support a story, of course. Memory would play an important role, as would the neural correlates of consciousness. But the memories needn’t be at all accurate, nor the narrative faithful to reality; it never is beyond a superficial level anyway.
There can be consciousness without such a story (briefly), but there’s no sense of individual self associated with that, just an undifferentiated awareness. And you can have a vivid sense of individual self that’s completely disconnected from your circumstances, as when you dream. The story is the nucleus of that localized sense of self.
A healthy brain will do regular reality checks to make sure that the story doesn’t drift too far from the facts at hand, but there is always some drift. There are also times when the facts at hand require a major edit of the story for the story to remain sustainable. These events are experienced as existential threats because they compromise the integrity of the story. Some people cope by just allowing the story to go untethered to the facts. It’s easier to maintain the sense of self that way.
Take away my humor, verbosity, wit and I would be a mere shadow of myself.
Genuine traits, burned through most of my ego identification years ago.
I do not identify myself with my body, thoughts, work, etc. but I do identify with my natural personality style.
Just cracked up my daughters new guy room mate.
Told him if he skipped out on her that I would hunt hmm down and give him a wedgie he’d never forget. I’m in good now. lol
Remove my stupidity, and I’m not myself.
It only takes a senior jelly a short time to find out that characteristic of mine.
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