Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories?

theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

It depends on how you define yourself

I am me. Not my memories, not my body, not my knowledge, not even my mind

At the very center of my being, there’s a driving spark. My most fundamental self. It’s the desire for understanding in a very specific flavor, and the form of it is reaching out to touch something with your fingertips. It’s like a fractal that has endless meaning the closer you look at it, it contains many understandings of the truth of the nature of things and how things fit together. And within those truths is everything that I am

That’s me. I am not the animal I inhabit, I act through the animal. I freely share my understandings with the animal, and so the animal can see clearly and know truth to find new understandings in all things.

One day the animal will die, and everything but the understandings will be burnt away, because the animal is afraid of being left behind.

I’ll have understandings of people, but memories are a physical thing. I’ll have understandings of how the world works, but knowledge is in my mind. I’ll have understandings of beauty and emotion and the full spectrum of the human experience, but my nature is not human

So it all depends, who are you? Are you a person who acts a certain way? Are you your relationship with others? Are you your memories, skills, and experiences? Are you your physical body?

Have you awakened your spark? Have you looked deep inside yourself to learn from it and add to it? Is it you, or is it something that whispers to you? Are you the combination of the spark and the animal?

Or do you walk another path? Are you your blood? Your legacy? Will you die when your name is last spoken? Will you live on for the rest of time through the ripples you made on the world?

It’s a question you have to decide for yourself. I think maybe the most important question

But that doesn’t have the truth of understandings, so I guess it’s just my opinion

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