Simply the thing we are

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands of years of non-existence; he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true. — Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Vanity of Existence”

I am a billion trillion molecules in a million,

trillion trillion cubic light years.

A flower, and yet not a flower;

of mist, and yet not of mist.

Gusts of particle exchange in a gravity sink.

I began in a state of infinite density and no size.

Infinite possibility divided by the square root

of cooked cabbage and sweet Francis Ann.

I know who I am, and who I may be, if I choose.

I am the footprint of the All.

I am a manifestation of Brahma in the field of time.

This, by the way, is a fabulous honour.

The DNA in my body, unsnarled,

would stretch to the sun and back.

I am a god hidden from myself.

I must have had a good reason.

I am some sort of a machine

built by a message

to perpetuate that message.

And I still can’t remember who you are

or why you’ve come into my room.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

— My mother-in-law in her final nursing home room, give or take and more or less

Earl Fowler

Journalist Jim Holt winds up his terrific existential detective story, Why Does the World Exist?, with a bit of reportage stemming from his attendance in Paris just before the turn of the millennium at the 90th birthday celebration of the renowned French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Asked to say a few words, Lévi-Strauss — whose frail appearance belied the 10 remaining years of life accorded to him — gave a short, extemporaneous speech in a slow, stately voice:

“Montaigne,” he begins, “said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be 59, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today” — which, he adds, was one of the “most curious surprises of my existence.” He says he feels like a “shattered hologram” that has lost its unity but that still retains an image of the whole self.

This is not the speech we were expecting. It is intimate, it is about death.

Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the “dialogue” between the eroded self he has become — le moi réel — and the ideal self that co-exists with it — le moi métonymique. The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former, “You must continue.” But the former replies,“That’s your business — only you can see things whole.”

Lévi-Strauss then thanks those of us assembled for helping him silence this futile dialogue and allowing his two selves to “coincide” again for a moment — “although,” he adds, “I am well aware that le moi réel will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution.”

I’m a couple of decades short of 90, but like most of the people in their so-called golden years, I can easily concur with Montaigne’s observation that rust starts to show and some of the wheels begin to wobble as we age.

I don’t yet feel like a shattered hologram of what I used to be, but my memory is less reliable and my mind less agile than it was at the turn of the millennium. Oh, to be a Shropshire lad again before those blue, dimly remembered hills.

My 93-year-old mother-in-law didn’t say this bit. So I will: The freshly Windexed windows of the consciousness with which we are endowed at birth become cobwebby over time, the domain of many dead spiders, their bound prey suspended among ruined and drooping webs.

This is what she actually said. Or meant to say, anyway. I’m pretty sure:

I am hesitant about the distinction between inside and outside  the me and the not-me, the boundaries of self. Barefoot I make a threadless way down the strange lanes. Still, they say I can keep my existing phone number.

I am as depressurized as Oddjob. Magnum P.I., I urgently request your gun-toting assistance. Hardened solipsists always manage to take a wrong turn. I am woven in with the violets.

For untold millions still to come, what T.S. Eliot grimly referred to as “the gifts reserved for age” will inexorably include a gradual descent into a state of lower intelligence, fewer interests, diminished sympathies, an inability to act coherently in the social world, an enfeebled grasp of the actual … and ultimately, a steady diet of Fox News with a brain completely DOGE’d out of existence.

So the questions at issue in this little discourse — this cultivation and examination of the self, so brilliantly dissected in that revolutionary moment in world history wherein Shakespeare penned The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark — is simply this: What makes us the same person over time? And can we cease to be that person before our permanent assignment underground, expiring more like a desiccating tree in a drought than a prey animal suddenly cut down by the charging jaguar of death?

There’s this unsettling moment — maybe while brushing your teeth, maybe while scrolling slack-jawed through your phone — when you realize the person doing the brushing or scrolling is, in some deeply confusing sense, the same entity as the kid who wondered where the yellow went when he brushed his teeth with Pepsodent 60 years ago.

At other times, of course, that first marriage feels like it happened to somebody else because how could you ever have been so stupid?

What constitutes personal identity over time? Philosophers and scientists have been wrestling this slippery eel of a conundrum for millennia.

If you’d been walking the streets of Ephesus in 500 BC and run into Heracitus, the pre-Socratic patron saint of flux, he might have offered this gnomic pronouncement:

“You cannot step twice into the same river.”

A poetic way of saying: Why are you so sure you’re the same person from one moment to the next, if literally everything about you is shifting?

If indeed it’s true, as novelist Gary Shteyngart observes in 2010’s Super Sad True Love Story, that at “every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, that drooling kid in the sandbox.”

Modern scientists, who often prefer their metaphors with fewer spiritual sparkles, acknowledge this shape-shifting unity. The physicist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine once remarked, “We are far from equilibrium beings,” science-speak for “we’re a dynamic mess, but an interesting one,” even as our bodies begin to shed, slacken and shrink.

Heraclitus’s insight has been borne out by modern research showing that about 330 billion of the nearly 30 trillion cells in a human body are replaced every day. The average age of all the cells in your body is seven to 10 years, though muscle and fat cells can take up to 70 years to renew. Fat cells are pretty much our lifelong pals, whatever Oprah says or the Ozempic people promise.

What keeps us aging, though, is the persistence of cellular DNA throughout our lives as cells divide and pass on their genetic inheritance to the next generation. So in that sense we’re sort of like a rebuilt automobile every seven to 10 years, with only our transmissible hereditary software — modified though it may be by the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to — persisting as the ghost in the machine.

My mother-in-law wasn’t completely off-base in suggesting that we’re machines whose purpose is to pass on a message. That message being: Build more machines. But as the great Paul Simon has taught us, cars are cars. Human beings are more than our bodies, surely?

Skip merrily ahead to the 17th century, and we come upon French polymath René Descartes indulging in his method of “hyperbolic doubt” — concluding that while he can’t be sure he isn’t dreaming the toothbrush that he sees before him, he does know for certain that he exists because he’s thinking. He thinks, therefore he is.

Descartes moves from there to many stronger claims, including his certainty in the existence of God and the world as it manifests itself before us (because God is good and he wouldn’t deceive us). The so-called father of modern philosophy also concludes that people in essence are immaterial thinking beings, pure subjects of consciousness, distinct from our physical bodies.

A century later, German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg raised the eminently sensible objection that all Descartes could legitimately claim was that there were thoughts. How does anyone know there is a thinker or an “I” behind them?

(Dickens toys with this notion in Hard Times, where Mrs. Gradgrind — no novelist ever had more fun in inventing names — observes from her sick bed: “I think there is a pain somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.”)

The great Scottish empiricist and historian David Hume recounted his own introspective experiment in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), expanding on Lichtenberg’s conclusion:

When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. … If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.

(It always has struck me as incongruous that Hume falls back into common parlance to assume there is an “anyone” out there to challenge this, instead of mere bundles of perceptions and emotions bonded together by Krazy Glue, but let’s move on before this gets any stickier.)

So what about those bundles of perceptions, thoughts, intentions and memories? What, if anything, really makes them cohere into some kind of incorporeal unity, some sense of enduring personhood?

Hume’s Enlightenment predecessor, John Locke, considered it obvious in his landmark Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689-90) that memory is the stitching that binds the self together:

For, since consciousness (memory) always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.

Persuasive. Yet does this reminiscence-based criterion of identity come apart at the seams — quite literally — when our memories commence unravelling in the vast and silent waiting room of time?

Holt delves into this in Why Does the World Exist?

But what happens if I undergo amnesia and lose all my memories? Or what if a fiendish neurosurgeon manages to erase all my memories and replace them with your memories? And what if he performed the same operation on you? Would we find ourselves waking up in each other’s body?

If you’re reading this, Timothée Chalamet, I’m willing to swap bodies right now if you’re up for a thorough swabbing at an Arizona hospice in 20 years or so. But really, this sounds more like another excuse for a Who Wants to Be a Methuselah? lifeline call to my mother-in-law:

I spent my whole life thinking I was finally coming into my own.

Now I’m ebbing out

without ever knowing what it was

I was coming into.

I signed a form, you see,

giving them permission.

I sit in a chair by the bed.

Life pays me off the books.

I am a way for the cosmos to know itself.

It greets me like a stray dog,

ribs showing earnestly as Simone Weil’s.

I am breaking down proteins at an astronomical rate.

A sort of solvent meditating on the lotus feet of Vishnu.

I have located the substrate of my seeming consciousness.

It is a quasi-quantum effect in the microtubules of the cortex.

OK, not very illuminating at all. But it does bring us back to the “I am my brain” theory, where the ever-changing stream of consciousness in the theatre of our minds is irrelevant to our identity.

Twentieth century philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel were advocates of this take on what we are. Nagel went so far as to argue that even if an exact physical replica of your brain could be created, stocked with all your memories and plugged into a clone of your body, the result wouldn’t be you.

That person (would he or she still be a person?) would think he was you, though. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could just send in the clones whenever we didn’t feel like doing something? Then they’d finally have some memories distinct from ours and we’d have Andy Griffith Show binges they’d never find out about.

One way out of all this identity brouhaha is to take to heart the Buddha’s contention that there is no “I”, no moi réel, “only a conventional name given to a set of elements.” If there is no enduring spectator watching as the movie of life unfolds on the big screen, then the question of whether we remain the same person over time simply dissolves. Alice doesn’t live here anymore. Never did.

Which of course leads us back to Hume, who believed much the same thing but complained that the conclusion left him “in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, first Schopenhauer (the German philosophical pessimist much influenced by Buddhism, who kicked off this essay) and then Ludwig Wittgenstein (a highly influential Austro-British logician and philosopher) compared the “I” to the eye, which cannot directly see itself.

To Schopenhauer, the notion that the subject experiencing consciousness could simultaneously be the object of consciousness is “the most monstrous contradiction ever thought of.”

Wrote Wittgenstein: “The I is not an object. I objectively confront every object. But not the I.”

If that sleight of mind were true, where did Lévi-Strauss’s sense of becoming a shattered hologram of his former self come from? Why do we nod in agreement with Montaigne’s creeping awareness, more than four centuries ago, that getting old sucks?

And for that matter, why does the self, the I, whatever it is, seem to stand at the centre of the world for every person who has ever lived? As the unrepentant poseur Parolles boasts in Shakespeare’s play All’s Well That Ends Well, even before my mother-in-law weighed in with her own version:

Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great, ’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more; But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart, Let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass. Rust, sword? cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live Safest in shame! being fool’d, by foolery thrive! There’s place and means for every man alive. I’ll after them.

So perhaps identity isn’t a static thing but an ongoing practice — a place and means. A project. A verb wearing noun-pants. Something like a long-term DIY renovation: always in progress, occasionally confusing, strangely meaningful, and held together with more narrative duct tape than we like to admit.

In the end, what makes us the same person might simply be that we keep showing up to the project — rewriting, revising, contradicting, remembering badly, and generally trying to maintain a coherent line through our own chaos as we shuffle toward extinction. I’ll after them.

Or, as novelist James Baldwin put it with his usual precision:

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.”

Philosopher Derek Parfit — who spent a lifetime cultivating untameable, madcap hair while dismantling the idea of a solid, unchanging self — offered a strangely liberating image of what happens when we stop insisting on being a single metaphysical nugget:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel. … But when I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared.”

The glass tunnel, in this metaphor, is the self-centred belief in a fixed, isolated self, hurtling willy-nilly toward death. In his 1984 book Reasons and Persons, Parfit wrote that when he emerged from the tunnel into an “open-aired” existence and began to see identity as a series of interconnected moments, he was able to stop fretting so much about his own self-interest and become more empathetic toward others.

“What matters,” Parfit concludes, isn’t personal identity but rather mental continuity and connectedness. If identity isn’t a fortress but an open landscape, then that continuity is less about what we are and more about how we keep moving through that landscape, moment by moment.

As our “moi réel” slides toward decrepitude and does less, moves less and thinks less, that continuity is broken bit by bit, and the creative, ambitious, ideal “moi métonymique” vanishes into the mystic.

But in the meantime, maybe the “same person” isn’t something we are, but something we do. And in doing it, we become — continuously, imperfectly — a facsimile of our early childhoods and the owner of a life that feels like ours.

Whatever that is.

For as long as we can.