Who am I?

Worth watching for those who know nothing about philosophy.

What is it that makes me me throughout my life? We might say the self, but what is the self? My body changes throughout my life. My interests, intelligence, pre-occupations and so on change throughout my life.  So shouldn't my self too literally change throughout my life?

In order for the self not to literally change and avoid the conclusion I am literally a different person at time A than at time B, then the self has to be something distinct from all these things. I suggest the self is the author, or the experiencer, of one's thoughts, interests, and more generally of one's experiences. That is to say that in addition to experiences, there is an experiencer that has them.  Experiences don't just exist without an experiencer, or self, to experience them. It is this author/experiencer/self that we can hypothesize remains unchanged.

Note that materialists can not believe in such an author/experiencer/self.  This is because the materialist would have to identify any such self with some physical thing or processes.  But physical things and processes are in a constant state of change, and certainly our bodies are.  Hence, there is nothing unchanging which they can call a self.

They can of course believe in a sense of self.  But the sense of a self differs from the actual self in a similar way to which a sense of a table differs from the actual table.

See the following blog entries by me:

Is a "life after death" conceivable?   Part 3: What is the Self
Does the self as opposed to a mere "sense of self" exist?
The self and its experiences

The self and its experiences

Is helpful to distinguish between the self and its experiences. What is the self? I suggest it is that underlying reality making one the very same individual from when one were a toddler, to the present time when we are adults, to when one is drunk and so on and so forth. Throughout these different times our interests, intelligence, behaviour and so on all change . Therefore these latter attributes cannot constitute the self since that would entail that the self quite literally changes after, for example, one has had a few alcoholic drinks. The self changes when one is drunk, but only in a comparable manner to which a table might change if we paint it a different colour, and not change in the sense of smashing the table up and replacing it with a similar one. 

Think of a container and lots of objects filling that container. Compare the container to the self, and the objects within it to one's personality characteristics. Just as the objects themselves are not the container, so our experiences, intelligence, interests etc are not the very same thing as the self. Moreover, the objects are all different shapes and not any shape will fit into any container. Likewise not any personality characteristic will go with any self. The nature of one's self will limit the possible personality characteristics.