Who Am I?

There are some mornings when, peering into the mirror, I have a strange sense there is a disjunction between what I see and who I am.  I know that’s me in the reflection, but at the same time the ‘me’ I feel is younger.  It’s not about ageing and wrinkles, however, it is about mental age:  at those moments I still feel I am growing up, in my early twenties perhaps, or is that a little too hopeful?!  Away from the mirror, I start thinking about the four things that might be ‘me’: the physical person, the historical person, the connected person, and the ‘me in the moment’.

The physical entity seems straightforward enough.  You can see and touch this person.  The result of gestation, growth through infancy, childhood and adolescence, I am an adult human being, many but not all of my characteristics determined by my genome, contained in 23 pairs of chromosomes, and containing at least 25,000 genes with a total of around 3bn DNA base pairs: impressive!  Once I began reading about all this stuff, however, I discovered that the cells in our bodies do not all have the same chromosomes.  Mothers, for example are chimaeras, with different cells in their bodies as the result of the exchange of cells with a fetus through the placenta.  Reading an article by Nathaniel Comfort did a great job on making me feel, well, a little less comfortable about my physical self, especially as he has a great way with words:

Even in strictly scientific terms, ‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other … The genome, as the geneticist Barbara McClintock said long ago, is a sensitive organ of the cell.  Epigenetics dissolves the boundaries of the self even further. Messages coded in the DNA can be modified in many ways — by mixing and matching DNA modules, by capping or hiding bits so that they can’t be read, or by changing the message after it’s been read, its meaning altered in translation. DNA was once taught as a sacred text handed faithfully down the generations. Now, increasing evidence points to the nuclear genome as more of a grab bag of suggestions, tourist phrases, syllables and gibberish that you use and modify as needed. The genome now seems less like the seat of the self and more of a toolkit for fashioning the self. [i]

All this left me slightly amazed, and then I asked myself, ‘who is doing the fashioning’?

So the simple body that I thought was me turns out to be a complex cluster of human and non-human cells, with all those ‘microbial species’ a key part of ‘me’.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have started with the physical me!  Even before I read Nathaniel Comfort’s thoughtful article, I was well aware my body has never stopped changing: of the 75 trillion cells in the human body I read some are replaced every few days, some last months or years, while brain cells typically last an entire lifetime.  As I get older, I have the sense some bits might start falling off, too!

There’s another puzzle about the biological me.  Suppose I donate a kidney to another person.  Is that still part of me?  In what sense?  Or we can look at it the other way around.  Imagine I have received an artificial joint, a knee replacement, say, or the major part of my left tibia has been replaced with a replacement ‘bone’ following a nasty accident with a ride-on motor mower (not so fanciful, as that almost did happen a few years ago!).  That knee joint or tibia wasn’t me before, but is it me now?  Or is this a part of ‘not me’ I am forced to carry around wherever I go, like a tattoo on my wrist?  Actually, are tattoos me, or something merely written on me?  You might argue that something has to feel ‘me’ to be me:  but what about phantom limbs, which feel real, but aren’t actually there.  This ‘biological me’ stuff is getting complicated.

Enough!  Let’s move on to me the historical person.  Looking back is easy.  I can recall the various schools I attended from 4 years old until I was eighteen.  During that time I gradually moved more and more into studying science subjects, and especially geology.  University and a radical change in direction, from geology to social anthropology, alongside higher education and management!  Then there is a history of different areas of employment, teaching in universities, working in the corporate world, working for government, running organisations, going back to university teaching, and now, while still teaching and learning, also mentoring and writing blogs!

There’s a whole lot more, of course, and the details are fascinating (if only to me).  In a different sense, the historical me has also been a story about growth, acquiring skills and knowledge, and developing attitudes and interests.  It is also about friends, marriage, children – but we will return to that topic when we go on to connections!  On a good day I like to think that the historical me has become more than just knowledgeable, but wiser, too.  Certainly, I have a different perspective on the world around me now, in part from what I have learnt (like all that terrible stuff about tens of thousands of microbes inside me).  Some is a function of reflection, and the early seeds of interest in philosophy have grown to quite a large part of me today.  I am invested in trying to make sense of people, institutions, politics, with an ongoing fascination as to how we can make the world a better place.  Ah, yes, also I have an optimistic nature, most of the time!

But the historical me is also very strange.  Looking back, it is as if I am reading a book:  the information is there, but it’s lumpy and largely ‘outside’.  What does that mean?  First, it is lumpy because some parts of my life are hard to reconstruct now, images from some years are thin and out of sync, as if I am looking at some frames from a movie that has been cut up, with many sections thrown away.  If I try, I can reconstruct more, but often the experience is like reading another person’s well-written novel (of course, my story is very well written!).  Then there are other parts of the past which appear clearly, even vivid, and the feelings at the time are in some way still there:  I can remember that day, what was said, how I felt.  I know memories are reconstructions, but those vivid lumps of recall feel very true to me.  Yet when I look back, it is as if I am watching a movie of my life, photographs, or even some kind of immersive virtual reality.  Whatever I recall, I can’t actually be back there: it’s clearly ‘outside’ of me now.

If I try to think about it in a different manner, I ask myself, how did I behave?  What did I know back then?  That aspect of the historical me is also partially lost.  However, I can recall my confidence as a speaker, from a relatively young age, happy to get up in front of an audience and get on with the job.  I think I was always unwilling to memorise what I had to say, whether it was for five minutes of fifty.  I would have a structure in my mind, and the detail would emerge as I went along.  Only been in the last few years that I have had to work harder to remember the three key points I want to make, a sign the historical me isn’t quite the memory man I used to be!

Like many people who enjoy speaking in public, in social situations I am rather introverted, preferring to chat one on one with another person rather than networking, working to make sure I contact every person in the room.  That was something I had to do at times, but it was a requirement, not a preference.  I believe it is well know that many university teachers are INTJ on the Myers-Briggs inventory:  I for ‘introverted’, which means energised by spending time alone; N for ‘intuitive’, an interest in ideas and concepts rather than facts; T, ‘thinking’, using logic and rationality to make decisions; and J, ‘judging’, preferring to be planned and organised.  Yes!  Oops, is it possible I just interpreted those four dimensions to suit myself?  Surely not!

Has my history shaped a wiser outlook?  Wisdom comes from knowledge and reflection.  Much of our adult life is busy, filled with work, family and friends.  To stand back and mull over things we have seen, think about comments we have heard, and ponder behaviour we observed, there is little time for such activities.  But there is time:  we find it in reading, watching a movie, or while savouring a glass of wine after dinner.  Growing older, almost without our noticing, we seem to become a little wiser, or we think we are.  In reviewing my past, I can remember key events, but when did I begin to understand more, or more clearly see the effects of implementing a plan.

I’ve been very focussed on me, as if who I am is contained in this body, memory, and thoughts.  The third perspective is about connectedness, so well explained in John Donne’s 1624 poem:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Yes, humans are connected, social animals.  It’s not just that without society we wouldn’t be human (although we wouldn’t), but rather who we are is a function of our links and associations.  Wives and children (a few of both!), friends and colleagues, managers and assistants, I am both shaped by all these people, and defined by them.  For example, part of me is a father; the style of father I am was created out of mutual interdependencies.  Not just each child, nor even the whole family network, but many others, teachers, doctors, neighbours, and so the list goes on.  Some of those connections were brief, now lost to the past, but many remain, even if the other person is no longer there, not even still alive.  If I can understand myself as a biological collective, with all those bacteria, so I am a social collective, too, molded and shaped by a multitude of people.

There is a sense in which any of those previous ‘persons’ miss the point, as the me I feel and know is none of these.  I know I am a physical, living being, and understand how complicated all that turns out to be.  I know I have a history, a biography, that has described me year by year.  I am well aware of that network of connections that surround me.  However, none of that touches on the me looking at the person in the mirror; the thinking me, the conscious me, the me in the moment.  That me is very familiar, and yet oddly very strange.  It has to do with time: the me that existed a few seconds ago has gone, and I can’t sense it.  I can recall what I was doing, but it is already in the past, and one second ago is no different than a week ago, or a year, or a decade.

I can look forward, but that is equally odd.  I have decided I want to stop typing and make my afternoon mug of decaffeinated coffee.  I know what I will do, and I can even rehearse what will take place.  But it’s just imagination, because I don’t know what will actually happen (I might get so excited about blogging I forget to make a coffee, or trip on the carpet, or change my mind and have a cup of tea instead!).  More to the point, there is no more of ‘me’ in a minute’s time in the future as there is in a fortnight’s time.  The only me I can experience is the me in the ever-present but always ephemeral current moment, in the ‘now’.

I suppose part of this has to do with how we think about the nature of time.  In our world of clocks and other timepieces, time is an unfolding continuum, a spatial model of time, if you like, with a lot of time behind us, divided up into equal units, and time continuing in front of us, also divisible into the same units.  It’s not how we feel it, although time is like a path, on which we can look back and see where we were, and we can look forward, too, anticipating where we might be next.  Seeing time like a path is very Western, it turns out:  in the Scientific American I read, “In Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal Australian community, past and future are determined by cardinal directions, with past times to the east and future times to the west. In Yupno [Papua New Guinea], as Danda’s gestures made clear, the future is uphill and the past downhill.” [ii]

But wait a minute, we don’t need esoteric examples like this.  Surely our view of time is  a product of our life world.  Most of us live in the mechanised, organised world where linear, evenly-spaced time is the underpinning of work, production and the assembly line.  If we could return to living in rural farming country, the image of time would become circular, the seasons, and the cycle of birth, growth and death.  It took Einstein, (he was a troublemaker of the worst kind!), to throw the whole thing into confusion, with the idea of the space-time continuum, and all the stuff about one twin going off in a high speed rocket, and returning seven years later to find his twin on earth was older (or was it younger?) because of relativity!  Somehow, I had a better grasp on this when I saw Inheritance, the play in which an egg-head Marilyn Monroe explained relativity to sensual Albert Einstein using two toy trains, two torches and an orange!

Let’s get back on track!  All that scientific stuff about the nature of time is intellectually interesting, but doesn’t change my sense of time existing ‘in the moment’.  Outside of the moment, physicists and playwrights can have fun, but conscious time is only now. [iii] Abandoning coffee, I stopped typing a little while ago, and went off to look at myself in the mirror once more.  I can see the physical person.  I can see the effects of time as a historical thing (yes, that body’s showing considerable signs of ageing).  I can smile at myself as I think about how my son looks somewhat like me, and my daughters have escaped that fate.  But try as hard as I can, I still can’t see me in the mirror:  the ‘me’ in the moment is where?  Who am I?

[i] How science has shifted our sense of identity, Nathaniel Comfort, Nature 574, 167-170 (2019).  Also worth reading is Bill Bryson’s latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants: Doubleday, 2019

[ii] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-we-make-sense-of-time/

[iii] This avoids the problem of consciousness, of course.  As a believer in non-physical consciousness, at least as portrayed by some enthusiasts, I liked ‘Consciousness is real’, Massimo Pigliucci, Aeon, December 201

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