Philosophical Friday

Are You Really You?

Although it may seem nonsensical to even consider, have you ever really wondered whether or not you are the same YOU from when you were born?

“Well, of course I’m me! I have the same eyes, same hair, same body... sure I’ve grown, but...”

NOPE. I’m going to spoil it for you right here. You AREN’T the same you from when you were born, you’re literally a physiologically different person. No, I’m not talking about the kind of “different person” you become after a weekend Bible retreat that your mom made you sign up for, I’m talking biologically different. You essentially get an entirely new body not just once, but several times throughout your lifetime.

The human body is pretty rad. Hair constantly falls out and grows back. Every 35 days the entire surface of your skin replaces itself, every 7 years the entire human skeleton regenerates, our cells chronically grow, die, copy, regenerate, and so forth. So where does this leave us? What implications does this have on our existential crisis of figuring out WHO WE REALLY ARE? Think about it. Your entire SELF, your whole body, every single cell and molecule of it as you sit here and read this mediocre article is COMPLETELY different than it was as short as a few years ago. How can you still be you if none of you is the same stuff that made you before?

We’re not the first to ponder this stimulating question about life. This little conundrum that we’ve begun to reflect upon is described in a thought experiment called “Theseus’s Paradox.” The paradox basically goes as follows: you’re sailing across the ocean blue like a happy little Captain Ahab, and every once in a while, a piece of your ship falls off into the ocean. Naturally, you fix the ship by replacing whatever fell off. Eventually, you’ve sailed around the sea for so long that you’ve replaced every single little piece of the ship with another piece. One day you look upon your grand junkyard-esque ship, and wonder: “Is this really the same boat that I started with?” Well… is it? There are countless ways to look at it. Dead philosophers have given a bunch of really boring names to what they consider to be their own ‘clever’ answers, but every postulation boils down to one determining factor — what one means by “the same.”

The Ship of Theseus

So unfortunately for ‘Mr. Romantic Idealist,’ we must admit to the fact that we are not the same identical cluster of super-organized atoms we were a relatively short time ago. We are, in a literal sense, a “different” person. This knowledge that we indeed are not ourselves, but an agglomeration of what’s around us, is — in a way — sort of beautiful. As we go on in life, we constantly add to the flow of the world, recycling our own atoms with those all around us, and remind ourselves that we are, in fact, the Universe!