Why is it hard to answer this question? Perhaps because we never answer questions like it at all. It’s a unique question. Plus we think of ourselves more than being in the moment we are in. Not just our life is what defines us. It’s also the history before us, the history of our people. The history of the planet before humans and animals were here, its history before life existed. The history of our sun and of the whole universe ultimately too. This is why people like to originate everything in cosmology. The tendency to make such theories is what produces religion, ideas of the soul and the supernatural in general.
The answer that I have right now is this: I am a self-aware process that can think.
It’s interesting to refer to myself with ‘that’ and not ‘who.’
Ask yourself: Who am I?
Invariably the internal answer will be autobiographical – an identity based on the past. It will be a description of a continuity from childhood through adolescence to adulthood which is all past memories and no longer exists. Memory is the mirror and we live on the wrong side.
Seldom will anyone answer the question of Who am I? with: I appear to be the process of reading this page.
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February 24, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Will E.
The process doesn’t matter.. everyone reads the page.. does that make us all the same?
I’m the final painting that comes from the process of drawing and coloring, only that I don’t know how I’ll end up.. but I’m sure I’m not the color of this instance, I’m all the colors that have been drawn and the colors that will be drawn..