What is the Who in "Who am I?"

Consciousness and Your Many You’s

When speaking casually, we often use the term “you,” as well as its derivatives “me” and “I,”  to refer to very different things. The way we talk about the various you’s impacts how we think about ourselves and others. This is perhaps most obvious in the therapeutic context. In discussions with a therapist, there’s the you you think you are, the you you’re discovering through the therapeutic process, the you your therapist thinks you are, the you you want to become, and more.

Identifying the many you’s and examining how context modifies the meaning of you terms is not only philosophically clarifying, it’s practically useful. If you can conceptualize yourself in a more granular way, you can understand yourself more comprehensively and change yourself more efficiently.

Consider the following statements:

1. You are a patient person.

2. I am hearing the train passing by.

3. Tomorrow, when you get to the intersection, turn left.

4. You had a mustache three years ago.

5. “I know you,” says Ben.

6. Ben doesn’t know the real me.

7. You have put on a lot of muscle.

Every you term in the statements above has a unique meaning. There are seven distinct core types to identify. The first statement’s you term refers to your moral self, the second your present-at-the-time self (I’ll explain), the third your future self, the fourth your past self, the fifth your biographical self, the sixth your autobiographical self, and the seventh your physical self.

Please see the bottom of this post for descriptions of each core type of self I identify as well as some compounds.

Most of the types can modify each other to create endless conceptual compounds. For instance, the time-based types can serve as modifiers for themselves. You can – okay, get ready for this – think about what kinds of things your future self may think about your future past self in the future present.

Furthermore, the biographical and autobiographical types, as well as the type-based types, can function as modifiers for the moral and physical types to create compounds like your “biographical future self” (someone else’s perception of your personal future) or your “autobiographical past moral self” (the story you tell yourself about the character traits you tended to embody across situations within a past time frame).* There are other hybrid possibilities, but they are all formed through the multiplication of the seven core types.

It is often hard to talk about you since the term “you” has so many different possible meanings. This linguistic ambiguity can render statements about you opaque, even incoherent. For instance, say someone claims, “The you is but an illusion. There is no self.” There is no way to know what is meant by this without additional context. Which you is an illusion? Which self doesn’t exist?

On one hand, the different you’s represent multiple different people. Your past self may bear very little resemblance to your future self. You are many because there are multiple different viewpoints of you and because the various types of you tend to change over time.

But, on the other hand, the different you’s all represent a single entity. You are one because all variations of you refer to instances of a single thing. To claim that future you and past you both represent the same fundamental being, just in different ways, is to claim there is some property of you-ness that never leaves.

This property, this elusive you-ness that must underly all types of you, is consciousness. When we talk about a specific person, we are talking about a representation of a specific consciousness. The body in the picture is only your physical self if it has been inhabited by your consciousness. A future self is only a potential version of you if it is mentally assigned your consciousness.

I prefer to think of consciousness as your actual present self because consciousness only ever operates in the actual now. When a consciousness, or actual present self, is represented, it has already become a present-at-the-time self. Since it necessarily takes time to represent the present self with thoughts or words, the actual present self can never be represented. In other words, you can’t ever refer to the actual present self because it is the actual present self doing the referring. We can therefore only really talk about present-at-the-time selves.

Your consciousness can’t be a you since it is what makes a thing a you. In the show Altered Carbon, human bodies are called “sleeves.” A person’s consciousness is stored on a cortical stack, a special kind of disk that can be inserted into any available sleeve. The show illustrates how a person’s body only qualifies as their body if it has the equivalent of their cortical stack.

Since we can’t physically (or literally) perform consciousness transfers, we don’t need to worry too much about tracking a single consciousness across multiple distinct bodies.† (A couple exceptions include identical siblings and masters of disguise.) It is the strong correlation between a particular body and an individual consciousness that leads people to mourn over dead consciousnesses through mourning over dead bodies. Actions to bodies frequently serve as proxies for actions to consciousnesses.

However, we still mentally (or metaphorically) transfer the same consciousness to different objects. We ascribe it to all the varieties of you. We impute it to bodies, to hypothetical future people in our imaginations, to our perceptions of others, and so on. Words like you terms and names are social constructions created to track a consciousness and its transformations in a manner that accounts for context.

When I talk about “I,” you infer which self I’m referring to based on context. If we’re at the gym and I gesture towards a fit boi and say, “I wish I looked like that,” you infer that I’m talking about my autobiographical physical self. If you call me an asshole and I respond, “I am kind of an asshole,” you infer that I’m talking about my autobiographical moral self.

It is relatively simple to infer what other people are referring to when they use you terms. It is deciphering what we mean when we use them about ourselves that’s challenging. Take the question, “Who am I?” What does “I” refer to? Which I? Which self are you inquiring about?

A considerable amount of useful contextual information often gets lost when speaking about a particular kind of self because you terms do not directly discriminate among the types. People are ambiguous to themselves in part because they lack a granular linguistic toolkit. They try to answer very specific questions about themselves using very general language.

Words are tools; language is a psychotechnology. Things are fuzzy when we lack the words to describe them. I believe that which is linguistically ambiguous is literally ambiguous. Self-understanding is one of life’s most difficult and rewarding projects yet we have so few linguistic tools at our disposal to help us progress.

If you wish to communicate to yourself and others more precisely about the particular you to which your statement refers, try using one of the terms in the taxonomy below. The next time you ask yourself “Who am I?” try subbing in a more specific self and see if that helps.

Whether it does or not, I’d love to hear about your experience.

The Taxonomy of “You”

1. Moral self

   • The characterological you

   • Character

   • The collection of positive and negative character traits (moral habits) that a person tends to embody across situations within a particular time frame.

2. Present-at-the-time self

   • The recent you

   • Experiencer of the present that just happened

   • Every representation of the actual present self.

3. Future self

   • The potential you

   • Desired and feared personal outcomes

   • A single idea or a set of ideas depicting who a person could be at some later point in time.

4. Past self

   • The old you

   • Memories or origins

   • A single memory/idea or a set of memories/ideas depicting who a person was at some earlier point in time.

5. Biographical self

   • The other-constructed you

   • The Other’s story about a person

   • The collection of attributes the Other ascribes a person based on the Other’s experiences with, knowledge of, and presumptions about that person.

6. Autobiographical self

   • The self-constructed you

   • The story a person tells about himself/herself

   • The collection of attributes a person ascribes himself/herself based on that person’s experience as, knowledge of, and presumptions about himself/herself.

7. Physical self

   • The material you

   • A body

   • A self-organizing organic system that reacts to stimuli and creates constraints in the actual now which alter the conditions from which future stimuli arise (the latter capacity is free will). Also, the material which comprises that system once it stops functioning.

Examples of compound types

• The (autobiographical/biographical) (past/present-at-the-time/future) (moral/physical) self

• The (past/present-at-the-time/future) (autobiographical/biographical) (past/present-at-the-time/future) (moral/physical) self

• There can be an infinite number of these compound types because there is an infinite number of points in time (or time frames, in the case of the moral self) that can be represented as a present.

Actual present you

• The phenomenological you

• Consciousness

• The mysterious consciousness which perceives and holds ideas together in the actual now. This consciousness cannot ever perceive itself because it is that which perceives.

*When explicitly unqualified, the moral, biographical, autobiographical, and physical selves are interpreted by default as having the implicit qualifier “present-at-the-time.” When I talk about “John’s good character,” I’m almost always talking about “present-at-the-time John’s good character.”

†I don’t believe it is even theoretically possible to create technology that transfers consciousness given that consciousness and the human body are mutually constitutive. Your diet impacts your consciousness through your gut’s functioning. Where consciousness attaches itself impacts your body through the placebo effect. You can learn a lot about the nature of someone’s consciousness by examining their body and vice versa. This relationship is literarily represented with scarring. Fictional characters often acquire a symbolic physical scar during a period of psychic transformation. Think: Anakin Skywalker, Prince Zuko, Sandor Clegane or “The Hound,” Scar from Lion King, Joker, Harry Potter.

Note from Marshall - This post was much improved by the constructive and thoughtful feedback offered by my stepdad, David, who productively challenged my conceptualization of consciousness.