In my archive of things I start to write and sometimes finish there is a prompt labeled “Who Am I?” and only the short response “I don’t know”. I guess this means I will revisit that question in the future. In the meantime, I thought of a related question, instead of who am I, how can I know myself? The idea is to see if I can arm myself with a tool that will make it a bit easier to answer the original question.
First, the ‘not thinking’ answer that I would give someone in a sort of superficial conversation about who I am. I would say I am a curious person who enjoys asking questions and also reading about a variety of things. I would like to understand life better. On a practical note, I like soccer and hanging out with family and friends. I consider myself an investor and spend a good chunk of time getting better at that. Is that really who I am – am I those things? Somewhat obviously, no. If I gathered all those traits and put them in a basket, I would not be the thing in that basket – it’s just a collection of things. Even if I took several hours or days to make the list longer I think it would still just be a collection of things – not me. My gut feeling is whoever or whatever I am, I am one thing only. I am a single entity, not a collection of traits and characteristics.
So, why do we, why did I (and still often do in meeting people) answer the question in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense? Social glue probably. It works well enough if we are all in the ‘unsure’ room together looking for the light switch, or willingly sitting in the dark. Well, how did I come up with the superficial answer? After all, I listed concrete things like reading and soccer right. My answer is “I” reflected on my memories and general experiences; then, with the help of my brain I came to a conclusion based on those memories that yeah it would make sense if I say I like reading and soccer. This is very concerning, and I will share why.
From secondhand reading (consider first half of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb or psychology studies that have been repeatedly tested) it is too apparent how bad our memory is at recalling events accurately, to the point that I could at best give it a 2.5-3.0 out of 10 rating on reliability. Still, this is not the worst part. I can imagine a world where we video record every moment of our life as if it were a movie. Then, it would be a matter of rewinding, and fact checking would be possible which would basically solve this initial complaint that we don’t remember accurately.
The real problem here is my brain that I used in the first place. It is just too much of a black box. The universe, life, happens as an input to the black box, and the output is me and my experience of reality? First of all, the black box is not infinitely large. Despite how many neurons we have, we can’t take everything in. So, we immediately know our moment to moment life and existence is not whole, it is a miniscule and arbitrary proportion of the interactions going on in the world. Secondly, it’s not like the universe is even hand delivering this arbitrary slice of inputs (at least then there’d be something objective). Actually, we are doing that, too. Our brain filters for things it finds relevant, and it is on these little snippets that we apply our ways of thinking (often flawed per the paragraph above). Third, we still don’t know what the black box is even doing (why the same event would make me happy but someone else unhappy).
My hunch is who I am is this filter, the little filter that decides what inputs come in to be experienced as reality and the black box that does the operations – assuming they’re the same thing. What else could I be (sure in a literal sense I am the human doing the experiencing)? It’s the only naturally objective part of me even if the only thing it does is create subjectivity. Okay, cool. How can I get to know this filter and how it operates? I would need to observe it from the outside, and right now I am not able to think about how that might work.
It is almost as if to know ourselves, we cannot be ourselves, we need to be nothing, or God (aka know everything). This would not be too surprising actually if we had to understand all of humanity to know ourselves, it follows a similar / separate thought I recently had that to know one thing you actually need to know a lot of things which will be its own post. For now, this is a good stopping point until I have more insight. I usually try to end with a practical conclusion. Here, the ’for now’ answer is, I am a human with a human brain that works like this and that is all I can comfortably assert. Everything else, a byproduct of me being human.
