I don’t know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I’m trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can’t stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren’t they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can’t bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don’t know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I’m bored, stressed or relaxed.
Your past selves aren’t dead. You just evolved into what you are now. That’s what we do.
What do you mean by “evolve”? I think my past selves is dead because I can’t experience the exact same consciousness of the past selves of me again. Doesn’t that count as being “dead”?
By that rationale, wouldn’t other people then also be dead, as you cannot experience their consciousness?
I’m not trying to dehumanize other people but yes. That’s how i see it.
It’s a very intersting viewpoint, pardon me for exploring further. So future you (or me) is also dead until the brief flash of life where yours and his consciousness finally overlap, before lapsing into nothingness again.
It’s very reasonable even, to think everything not experienced this very moment is totally alien to us.
Thanks for stretching my grey matter on this dull day!
You’ve probably hit upon a good metaphor for what’s happening.
I believe each time we sleep parts of our personalities are torn down and rebuilt slightly differently.
Whatever the mechanism, you aren’t really the same person you were years ago, you’re a different person with many of the same memories. The “self” is a useful simplification of reality. At the fundamental level, its not possible to define “you” and “not you” at a moment in time, much less across spans of time.And they aren’t even the same memories. “You” just thinks they are, but every time “you” remembers them they’re slightly different because you don’t remember the facts of the memory only whats important to “you” and “you” is constantly changing.
If therapy has taught us anything, it’s that we can also change and direct that change while conscious. So past you is probably slightly different than now you for any value of past and now.
Now, the only reason I see to feel bad about that is if you leave a worse person in charge than was there before. Focus on self-improvement, and improvement of the world around you, and maybe the end of past you isn’t so bad a thing.
I went through a period of this when I was younger. I did not find a satisfactory way of dealing with those thoughts, but they did eventually recede.
There’s quite a bit of philosophy out there abut this. It might help to read about it. Some physics topics are related, like the Planck scale. If you want to read about what others have thought on the topic, here’s a starting point.
So: yes, you’re not alone.
I have their memories, so how can they be dead? Personalities change over time, so it’s only natural to see your past self differently.
I’ve always thought of that as renewal of the self instead of the self dying.
Your personality is based largely upon your human experience.
As you get older and experience more, you have more things from the world around you to use to orient your thoughts and feelings on the world, and because thoughts and feelings are what the human experience is at its basest level, it will change your personality continuously.
I experienced much the same through and up into my mid twenties. I have found that upon reaching my 30’s that it does not happen as much, or at least it takes much more thought and feeling to change my personality.
You too will reach a point where you obtain a certain confidence in who you are and what you actually believe in, and after that, you will not experience the feeling of being a different person every couple of years as much.
My advice to you since you recognize this in yourself is to pay attention to it. If you can realize that it is possible you could be a different person in a couple years, who would you want to be? What would make you happy?
Focus on that, use it.
Because of the nature of time, the universe is in a constant state of becoming something else. Everything is changing all the time. But, because of the Laws of Conservation of Energy and Mass, there is always part of what was before persisting in what is now. For example, a fire burns logs, releasing the kinetic energy as heat, water vapor, carbon dioxide, etc. The heat dissipates because the atmosphere is very large, but it doesn’t dissappear, it just gets diluted. The water vapor is released into the atmosphere, and those molecules become moisture in a cloud and turn into rain, continuing in the water cycle. In a metaphorical sense, your past selves have “burned” and “released” what you are now. You may consider your past selves dead, but the molecules that made them continue to exist as your current self, even if those molecules are rearranged or are slightly different (we eat food and excrete waste, so our molecules are regularly being exchanged with other molecules in the environment). Those same molecules were once inside the sun. Before that, those molecules existed at the beginning of the universe. So, in a way, yes we are constantly dying and being transformed, but the stuff that we are made of can never die. We are just constantly changing, along with the universe, because we are part of the universe.
Good, I hate those past me’s
Not a fan of the current guy either
Well yeah that’s what we call personal growth. Middle school you is dead because present day you is too adult to act like that and have a child’s priorities again.
And in a couple years from now you’ll probably have given up some aspects of your current day life because they aren’t fulfilling you any more for any reason.
Yes. I think you might like this article and other musings of this guy https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/p/im-a-different-person-now
Some folks apparently consider this depressing, but I found it helpful to accept that I’m just a pile of atoms drifting through the universe.
I’m ‘alive’ in the medical sense, so there’s lightnings going between the piles of atoms within my brain and another pile of atoms continues to wobble in the appropriate way to pump a soup of atoms.
But I’m not alive in a sense that inflates meaning into it, which we do a lot:
- the completely religious ideas, like heaven/hell or being reborn (in a sense that isn’t just parts of your pile of atoms being reused in other living piles of atoms)
- the widely accepted but undefined ‘souls’
- some elevated meaning of ‘consciousness’ (which does not just mean your pile of atoms has some concept for recognizing piles of atoms as individual objects)
Similarly, the past and the future don’t exist. They’re concepts we’ve made up. The whole time traveling brouhaha in science fiction might make one think that they exist more concretely, but that nonsense foots on a missinterpretation of Einstein’s theories.
So, there’s not a meaning to your past self being alive or not. It really is as simple as it just not existing.
And ultimately, without inflating the meaning of being alive, there’s nothing to be sad about either. Because, while it’s fancy when piles of atoms do the lightnings and the wobbles, it doesn’t matter which concrete atoms are part of that fancy pile.
You can even stop thinking about your pile of atoms and rather consider yourself part of the big pile of atoms which is the Earth or the whole universe. That big pile of atoms is quite immortal.
Yes, often.
We as thinking beings consider ourselves to be constant. The trail of memories leading from our childhoods to today make it feel as though we are still that person who lived through all of those times, but we aren’t. We can’t be.
I have memories belonging to an 8 year old boy in my mind, he had the same name I did and lived with parents who also had the same name as mine, but I am a much older person - older than his parents, even - and I share almost no common ground with this boy. How can we be the same person, when we are so obviously different?
I am physically a different person to this person of my memories, and I can’t be sure he exists or existed. He may simply be a figment of my imagination, a story I tell myself of where I have come from but made up from whole cloth.
Alternatively, your past selves are immortal. They can’t be harmed. Nothing that didn’t happen to them can ever happen to them.
Personally, I’m glad that fuck-up is dead.
The questions you pose are exactly the type of thing one can explore through various forms of meditation.
The thing we usually associate with self can not, in fact, be it, as it is just an appearance in our consciousness. It is a sort of thought, really. Our consciousness, however, is just the sum total experience of the present moment. Everything before is no more, everything after may only be.
I hope my ramblings made sense.