Identity isn't what changes: ten years on

What are we? The paradox of the diary you no longer recognize

Anyone who opens a diary written in 2016 and rereads it a decade later does not recognize the author. The experience, so common that hardly anyone thinks about it, forces the question of what remains when the body, the thoughts, and even the self that signs them have changed. One school of analysis answers that what is real is the observing presence, the unchanging void. Another, blunter one settles it: we are flesh and bone.

The Ship of Theseus and personal identity

The old paradox of planks replaced one by one until none of the original remains fits here perfectly. If all our cells and memories have been replaced, the self is more like something we do than a stable object. From there to claiming that the only true self is the one in the present, and that earlier selves are impostors stealing our energy, is a step some take without breaking a sweat. Consciousness, the argument goes, would be a fractal of the universe experiencing itself.

Agency as an industrial illusion

The most conspiratorial reading cuts to the chase: individual agency is a hymn to keep us consuming. We would be cities of atoms, objects with the appearance of decision, and the animating force that decides would be common to all particles. At the extreme, an energy harvest watched over by superior entities. The backdrop doesn't matter: the underlying question remains whether the journey makes sense when it leads nowhere.

There is no consensus. While some find meaning in the very awareness of change, others settle for simply being present. And no one explains why the firmest verdict comes from a five-year-old: "I am who I am." Is anything more needed?