Why am I Me?

And Why are You You?

The question "why am I me?" is one which people rarely ask out loud. It’s one of those questions that children ask, but are eventually taught by adults to not ask. I know I was dogged by this question for almost my whole life, and for some reason I kept asking it. It became like a riddle or koan always lurking in the corner of my mind, and it always ramified into other seemingly unanswerable questions. In philosophy of mind this question is called “The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness” as distinct from “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”, which is the problem of how any physical system, such as the brain, can have internal experience.

The question at hand - “Why am I me?”, has led to many personal speculations over the years. Was there some vast pool of souls waiting to be born? If so, what determined what body they would get born into? God? How did God decide? Why am I alive now, in the twenty-first century, and not two-thousand, or ten-thousand years ago? Am I alive now because there are more people on Earth now and the probability of me being alive is higher in the twenty-first century than ever before? Have I lived before? Will I live again? And so on…

Before answering this seemingly unanswerable question it is important to parse it. What, if anything, is specifically meant by the question “Why am I me?” For me, as I have asked it over the years, it has meant, “Why is the unique essence that is me living the specific life that I am living?” If the question pre-supposes that a unique essence inhabits the physical body, and this essence is the real self, then the question becomes parseable. Obviously this essence goes by a familiar name in the West - the Soul.

The soul is a fundamental concept of Judeo-Christianity. The soul is the true essence of the person. It is our true identity, distinct but somehow housed in the body, the source of free will, immaterial, and not destroyed by death. According to Christian theology, the soul is what is saved or damned and is what exists eternally in heaven or hell after death. It will be reunited with the body in the Resurrection, but it is the true seat of our personhood.

The idea of the soul has deeply penetrated our culture. Most Westerners, I would argue, believe they have a soul of some kind, even if they are not religious. Without going too far afield it is worth mentioning the Cartesian dualistic assumptions that most Westerners hold, according to which there is physical stuff, res extensa, and mind stuff, res cogitans. Even if someone doesn’t believe in an eternal soul it is usually taken for granted that there is some kind of immaterial mind stuff housed in the body, which is the true, unified ‘self’ of the individual.

As an assumption, the belief in the soul rarely articulated, much less viscerally interrogated, as in the practice of meditation, but exists as part of the invisible bedrock of our Western, cultural operating system. This is not true in the East, under the influence of Buddhism, which has the concept and meditative experience of ‘no-self’.

Now with the assumption of the soul as described above, the question, “Why Am I Me?” can have a number of interesting answers. God could create the soul at conception and “ensoul” a developing fetus at some point during conception. Or the soul could somehow grow naturally with the body and then live beyond the the life of the body, or even die with the body but still be separate - somehow. Or, perhaps there are infinite souls waiting for some body to be born so they can become incarnated. All of these are potential answers to the question, however unproveable or fanciful.

But there is another answer which is altogether different and radically parsimonious - one which does not require a proliferation of entities such as gods or souls. Rather than simply spell out this answer let’s first hypothetically deconstruct our everyday experience of consciousness. In everyday consciousness almost everyone subconsciously assumes that experiences happen to “someone”. They assume, in other words, that there is some unique center of consciousness to which experiences occur, and to which the body and its experiences “belong.” But this is really just an assumption, based on our everyday experience and interpretation of the situation we find ourselves in. What accounts for this seeming “experience of a center?” A simple answer is that what we experience or interpret as a center of consciousness, is actually a simulation. Our brain hypothesizes and constructs a self, and experiencer, which we then identify with and take to be the center of experience. The self is real in the sense that it exists as a simulated entity, but it is not an ontologically real entity.

In fact, the self that we almost always believe in and identify with can be dissolved at will by the practice of non-dual meditation. In this practice one looks for the self and realizes that it is nowhere to be found - everything that one took to be oneself is in fact simply an appearance of sensation or thought in consciousness. Through this practice one begins to identify with consciousness itself rather than any appearance in consciousness. The shift in awareness is subtle but radical. From the perspective of consciousness the world is not “out there” and I am not “in here.” There is no outside and no inside - both are appearances in consciousness of equal weight.

In Western culture we are not trained to experience the world as consciousness. We are raised in a culture that is fully saturated with dualistic assumptions: self and world, body and soul, mind and matter. It was only when I began to experience non-duality through Dzogchen and other non-dual meditation practices that the answer to the question, “Why am I me?” became clear. Instead of being answered, the question dissolved, just as my sense of self dissolved under close inspection during meditation.

The answer to this non-question is simple: There is no “I” to be me, and there is no “you” who is you. There is no ontologically real self or center of consciousness who is my true self. There is no invisible essence who is really me, no ghost in the machine. I am a manifestation of nature, of that which is, just as every organism is. That which I experience as self is simply an activity that this particular organism is doing at this particular time and place. We never ask why a particular oak leaf is that particular oak leaf. Nor do we ask why a particular worm is that particular worm, or why a particular bird is that particular bird. The situation is no different for us - all we need to do is get over the uncanny feeling that there is an entity separate from our bodies to which experience is occurring, and this can be done reliably with certain meditation practices.

In physics the correct theory is almost always the most parsimonious - that is to say, the theory which requires the least number of ontologically unique entities or forces, is usually correct. In the case of the question: “Why am I me?”, the most parsimonious answer is that entity called “I” is a construction, and is not fundamental. However, this does not require us to deny our senses or believe a logical absurdity. All it requires is careful observation of all those elements we associate with our feeling of selfhood.

The question, “Why am I me?” has been called the “Even Harder Problem of Consciousness.” But if this question dissolves to become a non-question, might the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” likewise dissolve? Many philosophers of mind believe that it does. They insist that consciousness itself is an illusion, a story which we tell ourselves and not a fundamental reality. Might consciousness itself dissolve upon close inspection? I don’t believe that this is the case…but this is a topic for other essays.