I am not… yet I am

Suddenly my eyes fixed on the news headline: "Death exposes 57 years old man's 24 years' double life." double life? Perhaps all of us have multiple layers of life and living! So much so that we reveal ourselves in different manners on different occasions whose connectivity exists with a range of people to whom we meet now and then. But we remain very much spontaneous and natural in our relationship. So I was stuck by the news at face value.

Despite participating in parallel, mutually exclusive and, apparently contradictory roles, we have intuitive awareness also that we are one unit or a person. Still, I could not resist myself to ask the question: within a very short period, every cell of our body will die and be replaced by newer ones—we do not remain the same person as once were. If this is true, what constitutes our identity? Should we be held accountable for the actions of another person? But do we feel any difficulty about identifying a person lie at the core of the vast corpus of changes? We never question either our own identity or that of others, provided it is not a case of criminal or fraudster, charlatan, etc., Investigative agency along with psychological experts have different technique, still their function set down to identification and re-identification of the person in question.

We are challenged by the question––How come that I feel like the same person in my whole life, although many and very crucial things changed and will change, like my age and life cycles, marital status, my friendships, occupation, residence, political engagement, my religious beliefs, and social values? What enables me to feel the same 'I', the same 'self', or same 'person' in all the different roles, that I have to play, with my different capacities. The way one evolves and changes over time is the crucial continuity of "I" amidst several developmental processes that occur within one's body and mind. Alice, after grown-up to giant size, tried to figure out who she was and what constituted her identity in a world that actively challenged her perspective and sense of self. She was baffled by her slippery grasp of identity.

My friend! Look, at the world that seems to be in perpetual flux, undergoing incessant change. Trees regularly shed their leaves, ice melts with upcoming summer, and wood, when burned, gives way to fire and ash. And we normally say 'this is the same tree which shed its leaves last month', 'Mr. X is the same person who we knew ten years ago, 'this pool of water is nothing but the piece of ice which melted there' and so on. Identifying and re-identifying among the diversity and change is our unreflective apprehension.

When I look at myself I find I am a cluster of different organs fixed within the body along with consciousness which somehow coordinates our stream of thoughts, memories, and, feelings that change every moment. One can recall James Joyce's masterpiece novel Ulysses which conjures up to explore the inner workings of the mind, lies in its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the stream of consciousness technique. Our life, no doubt, is at the mercy of accident and chance encounter, as well as the byroads of the mind, though we remain the same person to the extent that we graze our past and future thoughts and actions in the same way as we are conscious of the present. The quest to understand the forces and feelings that comprise one's identity and to get the grip of one's psyche is thwarted by the words of Alice –"it is no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then."

Self-identity is partially founded on the body substance, for, a dead body, devoid of consciousness is recognized by its body. New technology has been developed to identify a person with its DNA code. But common people do not go for such complications unless any severe social problems arise. While sleeping, though one is not conscious yet one remains the same, for, when one gets up one remembers everything related to him. But where lies the propensity to call the same person in between the gaps of sleeping and waking? When did we say I am the same person who I was a few moments before, where lies the thread of unity? The question of personal identity then becomes a matter of characterizing the loose cohesion of one's personal experience, because each moment is loose and separate. The transcendental 'I' laid down the principle–"I think, must be able to accompany all my representations" very much similar to Vedāntic Sutrātmā, which remains witness (Sākshi) to all our thoughts but never be apprehended as such. It is impossible to apprehend that which is working behind our thoughts. Just as one cannot perceive one's eyes, one cannot stand on one's shoulders similarly one cannot have a glimpse of oneself.

However, what is there to hook an eye on to our identity through several moments? Objects are said to be identical in all respects if they can be substituted by one another, but actually we cannot do that. The present moment cannot be replaceable by the next moment. They remain numerically and qualitatively different, still one says I am the same person moment before what I was. It is a process of becoming, described as a homogeneous whole of the characteristics, which is interpreted by the birth, growth, decline of the body and mind through social and personal interaction. The multiple dimensions of identity, such as race, culture, class, religion, gender, are empirically grounded. Merging all selves into the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres is the continuous process of social interaction that shifts and changes throughout life as people confront challenging dilemmas and tackle different experiences.

A few days before some of the parts of my car were damaged in an accident and I have to replace them with new parts; while looking at the new makeup I was baffled to call it my car! If the change is gradual, does the car still maintain its status as my car when all the parts are changed? Ordinary men are inclined to agree that it is the same car, but I doubt! The story of the mythical "ship of Theseus" is well known which was dedicated to the memory of legendary King Theseus, the founder of the city of Athens. To keep the ship nice and complete, the rotting planks were replaced with new planks made of the same material. It undergoes several such changes. Now at what point does the ship become different? When we talk about a certain object and say that "it changed," what exactly is "it"?

Mathematical law states that no two (distinct) things exactly resemble each other; if it happens to be so, what can be said of one can be said of the other as well. The Mathematical expression, "A is identical with A" (a=a) is an empty tautology just like 'The morning star is identical with the morning star' signifies nothing, having no truth value. Its usefulness comes from other equivalences, such as "A is identical with B" (A = B) and with the expression, "The morning star is the same as the evening star". They are not redundant statements, rather informative statements. Whenever A appears, we may substitute B for A, but there is no point in replacing A with A and so on! Verbal apparatus fixes the semantics of the words. Venus, a celestial object, is both the morning star and the evening star which differ in sense but not in the reference. Their identity is far away! Thus two things can’t differ numerically solo numerous. As soon as I say "two" they are separated spatially and temporally. "A is A" is not at all innocently true, since there are manifold differences between the two A's, their positions in space, their ink particles on the paper they are printed on, the pixels on your computer screen, etc….

Nevertheless, a crisis may occur when one questions one's psychological continuity, an uninterrupted evolving flow of awareness which is disturbed by certain impairment with dementia insofar as there are gaps in one's memory and the link is grazing somewhere else. As a result, personality changes, involving a decrease in thought. …In a similar way, a person may develop multiple identities called "alters." These alter often have distinct personalities, mannerisms, and so on. A person may have gaps in his memory from when another identity remains active. At a glance, Mr. X is a successful person. But deep inside, he was battling an illness for a long time. He created another person inside him: a person that wouldn't give up; an almost different person. Let us imagine: "one wears a red hat for football, a white hat for home, blue hat for work. But all of a sudden the hats all screwed up. When one is at home, one puts red hat, so now, that aggressive nature that one had in football is now at home because one puts on the wrong hat." How can the human mind fracture into different pieces? What causes it to happen and why? The violent trauma in life like the loss of several dear ones in Covid or flood or sudden death in family causes this split of mind into fragments, like a fractured mirror in dozens of pieces! Therapy often aims to integrate alters into one cohesive self. …. At the most basic level, integration simply means ownership of all thoughts, feelings, fears, beliefs, experiences, and memories as mine, giving up the splits that say something is "not me." … Just as a person while on the stage identifies with the character he is playing and after the drama is over, he comes out with his natural self. An actor can play several roles but never goes with the character forever.

However, if the gaps in memory and the personality changes are sufficiently serious, does the person continue to remain the same with the body being the same? From the Neuro-cognitive point of view identity is addressed in a rather basic sense by differentiating higher-order cognitive functions such as working memory or executive functions, ….It is the question of how to reconstruct a model of the self in its identity that integrates the perspective of diffusion with the first-person perspective in the phenomenology of the self, a crucial topic of debate. We infer who we are by observing how we are perceived by others and how others react to us, therefore, identity is strongly related to the need to belong, to be part of a community as well as to the desire for one's distinct-signature.

To suppose two things indiscernible is to suppose the same thing under two names, like the morning star and the evening star refers to the planet Venus, having two different cognitive values. For example, how I dress up when I am going to college is not the same as when I am going to attend a marriage party. Though I am the same person I will not exchange my dress characteristic for that reason. Thus, two drops of water or milk looked at under the microscope will be found to be discernible. We have a different value for each moment, they cannot be identical. This suggests that the solid, fixed sense of self, which we desire to have, is at least partly an illusion that allows us to avoid the multiple identities.

Is there a sense in which two numerically distinct objects can be identified? Many metaphysical puzzles and paradoxes start with this flawed assumption. Ludwig Wittgenstein described this possibility, "…to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing." Now what do I do with me? I remain nonplussed over my identity and recognition.

Hang on, My friends, let me see what is going on there on the street!! A long screaming sound made me sit up with anxiety in the mid-night. I glanced out from my window! What a horrifying sight! My dog was crawling on the ground profusely bleeding, for one of its legs was ruthlessly cut off by the miscreants, so that it could never be able to run after them who were regularly visiting the area to have sticky hands on loads of sands and cement, etc., lying on the road for construction. I immediately identified the voice and body of my dog and rushed to the spot to take the bleeding dog in my hands. The horror-struck incident wakes me up from the illusion that with four legs or without four legs it was my…my dog, I was crying …I was absolutely identical with its pain!*

 

*छिन्नपुच्छे शुनि श्वत्वव्यवहारवनमान्ते तत्त्वं लोकन्यायसिद्धम --एकदेश विकृतमनन्यवत (नागेश परिभाषा ३१)