When Your Sense Of Self Is Broken - Exploring The Hardest Question Of Life [ IFC S2R15 ]

As I began to think about the topics that I want to cover in this article, I began to notice that even though I have a lot to talk about, I don't know in which order should I place these topics because every single one of them is connected with all the other ones.

"Who you are," is by far one of the deepest and most complex philosophical and existential questions ever, because what it ultimately hints at (after several hours of discussions and debates) is the question of consciousness and mortality. Not just consciousness in humans, but in all kinds of living creatures.

This whole question of "who you are" is so incredibly deep that the more you try to solve it, the more complex it gets. It's like a well with no bottom; you can keep falling forever because there is no perfect answer for it, and I've talked about it before how I love asking these kinda questions so let's just dig in right way.

Before I start this, I wanna request you all to please participate and answer the following questions in the comments according to what you believe to be the answer as we keep the discussion rolling, okay? Okay.

We'll ask the most basic question first:

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Question 1

What is life and how would you define it?

For the most part, the definition of life we usually get from others (and ourselves) is just not convincing at all. We don't know how to define life because we don't understand what exactly it is. We just know that it exists because we can experience it, and more importantly, think about experiencing it.

At our very best, all we can really do to define life, is to break down its fundamentals into little pieces, define them individually, and then combine all those different little definitions and hope that they somehow make sense as a whole.

That's our first clue. Hold on to that.

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Question 2

How can you prove that you are alive?

This one seems pretty simple to answer, doesn't it? Spoiler alert, it's not. You may argue that you can show us your voluntary movements of your body, or by showing human emotions like laughter or crying or whatever, but let me remind you that ALL of that (and more) will be super simple for an AI of the future to replicate.

An android intelligent enough to learn things on its own and make more of itself without needing a human, can easily do everything we humans can do including showing emotions. Now that changes everything, doesn't it? Because now we have to re-define what it means to be a human first so we can answer this question.

See? I told you in the beginning how everything is connected to everything else. This is just the beginning part of it. Stay with me here because things are about to get weirder and harder to explain.

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Question 3

Are you your body?

Let's say I'm a crazy scientist. I bring in different parts of a human body from the fresh corpses of different dead people and arrange them all in exactly the same manner as a normal human body structure, including every nerve, bone, tissue, or whatever.

Will that "person" come to life? And even if he does (which he will not btw), who will he be? What will be his identity? Will he be John from whom I took the heart, or will he be Jacob from whom I took the brain, or somebody else from whom I took some other body part?

Most people argue that your brain is the most "you" part of your body because it does all the thinking and planning, and that's reasonable, but still far from sensible because humans don't just think, we feel too, and we feel a lot. Our entire freaking body is covered with skin that makes us feel literally for our entire lives.

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Question 4

Are you your memories?

We're getting a bit more philosophical with this question. In his/her awesome entry, @plushzilla highlighted the idea that most of who we think we are and our perception of self, is based on the collection of our memories that we collect and store over the course of our lives.

But could that really be the full story? Because as we get older, we began to lose and forget about some of our memories from the past so to make room for the new ones. So does that mean that our sense of self keeps renewing overtime? It could be the case, but the answer still isn't fully convincing.

If our sense of self is something that changes constantly overtime, then doesn't that mean that whenever we try to explain who we are, we'll always end up wrong no matter how hard we try because our perception about ourselves is always changing? Maybe, or maybe not. This needs a discussion.

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Question 5

How can you prove that you are conscious?

This question is what I've been waiting for. But before we dig deep, let's first define what consciousness is. But where do we start exactly? We don't even have anything to compare consciousness with. We can't compare it with death because we don't know much about what happens after death either.

If you ask me, the best thing I could come up with is this:

The evolved form of consciousness (the one which we humans have), is the quality through which a living creature becomes able to make sense of its surroundings and becomes aware of its own awareness.

Yeah, I know that's probably not even 10% of all what consciousness really is because we don't know what it is made of, but stick with me here. In really simple words, consciousness is when you first go, "Oh, I'm alive!" then you go, "..and now I'm thinking about my own thought of being alive!"

That definition isn't enough but let's try to work with that anyway because we literally have nothing else. So, how do we prove that we are conscious? Well, the answer for this one could either be something like what we discussed in the question 2, or we can simply say that we don't need to prove it because we all have some sort of idea what it is, even though we can't explain it.

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Now Let's Put Everything Together!

Alright, now that we have collected all that info, let's try to answer the question we started with of "Who you are." A little heads up though, whatever I'm about to say could be completely wrong. I'm not a scientist, but a curious person just like you guys.

Okay, so, we've established that life in itself can't be explained, right? But we also discussed how we can sort of break it up, define the pieces and then put 'em together. Well then in that sense,

Life is that unique pattern of arrangement of all the little biological processes that, when put together, form a unique chemical structure among different groups of organisms that somehow gives them the ability to be conscious and show behavior.

NOTE: The definition we came up with above refers to what life is in an individual living being i.e. the phenomenon that makes and keeps creatures alive. Life as a journey, birth to death, is a whole different concept that we will leave for some other time.

Not gonna lie, I'm a bit mentally exhausted right now lol but I'm having fun so let's go on anyway.

Now that we have a rough idea of what life is, let's differentiate it from consciousness, because yes, they are two separate things. Hang on there because I'm about to blow your mind.

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The Mind Fuck

Your cells, for example, can be called alive because they carry out biological activities and show behaviour by killing themselves to make room for new ones (except for cancer cells that don't want to die and hide from the immune system to stay alive) but they can't be called conscious because they are not aware and can't make sense of their own surroundings.

They carry out activities because they are biologically programmed to do that, not because they want to or have to do that. They help your body grow because it's literally all what they know how to do. They are alive, but they are not conscious.

An android in the far sci-fi future however, can kinda be called conscious because it can make sense of its surroundings and is also aware of its own awareness but can't be called alive because it is not made from any biological processes but only mechanical ones, BUT it can still show behavior which again changes everything.

If we want to call them "alive" because they show behaviour, then we have to reconsider if biological process is the right requirement for something to be called "alive."

This could, quite literally, mean that we might one day have to give our robots the same stage and the same rights we give to ourselves as humans. If that is true, who we are as humans is nothing more than puppets in a play, or characters in a video game.

But that's all thinking too far too soon. Who you are is something that you have full authority over and that you term yourself to be. For me, at my core, I am one of the mediums through which the universe shows that it is breathing, and that's enough for me.

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