Who are we?

Yes, I’ve been obsessed with this question. I totally understand if you are rolling your eyes. But I think it is the key to unlocking a door that has been locked for a long time, maybe since humanity’s first glimmers of consciousness stirred. The story we tell ourselves is that we are the same from moment to moment, but that only feels true because we are the weavers of the story, just as we are the weavers of the tale about reality outside ourselves. The world we perceive is just a fiction. 

What about inside ourselves? Memories are the stitches that hold the weaving together. They are actually reconstituted every time we recall them. And they often change over time. Can you blame them? Getting assembled and reassembled over and over is bound to shake things up in there.

Then I read this:

Recently, research that has been steadily accumulating is challenging the assumptions about when life on Earth began. Our planet is 4.4 billion years old. New genetic DNA research suggests that the last universal common ancestor of all life (LUCA) existed approximately 3.9-4.2 billion years ago. That is significantly older than previously thought and is getting really close to the early Earth formation period. (Get into the weeds here.) Not only that, but it appears to have started out much more complex than expected, meaning, as Michael Moreman suggests, “our ideas [about the beginning of life on Earth] cannot rely on the power of chance at all.” For some, this may bring validation to the idea of a Creator, while for others, it conjures the speculation that the basics of life may have arrived from extraterrestrial sources, such as meteorites.

What does that mean for the notion of who we are?

It is stunning that we don’t think much about who we are. Like a newborn, we walk around accepting that we just are. Our awareness of ourselves is so very limited. As philosopher Alan Watts noted, our consciousness is like a flashlight in a dark room, only illuminating a small area at a time. It’s our perception that “we” (our conscious minds) generate our thoughts, but science tells us that we only become conscious of a thought after it has coalesced, and different thoughts can emerge from various parts of the brain simultaneously. It’s like having popcorn peppering your brain!

The majority of our thinking power is subconscious. So, the “you” that you are aware of is just a very small part of who and what you are. (See One Simple, Life-Changing Thought or You Are Not a Banana.)

What is the value of all this meandering thinking?

It casts a light on everything. Looking at ourselves as evolved creatures with multiple layers of nervous system (brains) allows us to see that we make decisions based on what gave us a survival edge, rather than on rationality. We are prone to taking mental shortcuts, such as groupthink or cognitive biases, to make emotional assumptions and judgements, and to follow leaders instead of critical thinking (which is perhaps why we “mistake” movie stars, football stars, and TV personalities for leaders). Critical thinking takes an expenditure of time/energy. The world is so complex, the task of critical thinking is ever more challenging. I don’t know about you, but I have little time to think about who I am. I am daily marking off hundreds of emails that I haven’t looked at as “Read.”

It’s much easier to ask AI for an answer, to let it be creative for us. And we are just at the beginning of that genie waiting to burst out of the bottle. Of course, the same concern existed when the internet sprang to being, and the world opened up to us. Search engines produced websites. Now, AI summarizes it, and we don’t even have to read the articles.

What is next?

Back to the Who am I question: I have a persistent fiction that the same person (me) lives from moment to moment through all the experiences I encounter. But that isn’t real. I just reconstitute that “person” based on memories (which are also reconstituted). This is a bit scary and disorienting to think about, as is the fact that we consist of biomes of bacteria, viruses, and fungi and bits of other people’s cells, and that our thoughts arise out of the midnight darkness of something that is “us” in every meaningful way but feels alien.

But in a strange way, this also means we (whoever/whatever that is) have an extraordinary power and freedom. We don’t have to accept that we “are” a certain way just because we recall having been that way in the past. We have the power and freedom in this very moment to create and recreate ourselves.

I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination. 

Feel free to explore my website and books (fiction and nonfiction) while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.