Im. Well. Old. I mean not super old but I have passed a half century. I have come to the realization that I have a been a different person throughout my life and I can’t say for sure if I even know past versions of me with clarity. I feel I need to point out that I am an unusually static person. Like while I physically change people will comment how Im kinda the same. Which kinda bowls me over when I think about who I was. When I was in gradeschool I could barely talk to other kids. In high school my look changed as I started doing what I decided to do in terms of dress and such and while I was not talkative with people I did not know was very talkative with those who I did but I would interact with other people and did drama and model un. In college I did a bit more drama and got back into choral things and mock trial. In the work world I give presentations and training seminars and between jobs I substitute taught. I got married and I mean I change a lot. But I also didn’t. There is some semblance of self and way of doing things that im pretty sure would be there even if my memory were wiped. I would over think things and gravitate to certain subjects and I bet my likes and dislikes would gravitate in the same direction. Without memories though I would not know my past selves. It makes me sorta get the buddhist thing about what comes forward in rebirth. Its something but its hard to say its anything tangible but it just may well be like the periods in the lives we live. We are the same but we are not the same.

I’m a brain-injury survivor, so this question is something I’ve had to face.

Now, after my 3rd-wave of braindamage ( this one self-inflicted, as I tried to break will-to-live from my brain, with a cudgel, so that murdering my life could happen. Failed. it’s fine: it was just part of my hellish growing-up process, these past 6-ish decades ) I’ve BAD memory problems.

Here’s the key:

When you come-to in a dream, without your normal-life’s memories, are you still you??

Elegant, isn’t it?

Completely bypasses most of the dead-ends of the question…

“yes I’m still me, even without my memories, because…”

because why?

I’ve learned that it isn’t one’s memories that make one oneself:

… rather, it is one’s instincts which do.

IF anybody puts drugs into my body-life to alter my personality, and they alter my instincts, THEN they have obliterated the someone that had been inhabiting this-life, & induced a drugged-replacement for the someone who inhabited it, before.

IF any experience alters the instincts of the personality who inhabits this-life, THEN that experience has replaced the less-experienced someone with a ( somewhat? ) different more-experienced someone.

Even without memories, so long as my instincts are clean ( unadulterated ), & MINE, then “I” am existing.

So, even in dreams, when I appear/come-to suddenly in some random context, with no memory of any other life, my instincts make me me, see?

The simple fact that I still work to face-into karma, that I still work to challenge abuse, that I still work to make things right, that I’m still careful with meanings & words, relentlessly,

THAT is what makes “me” me.

It took decades of brain-injury to notice the fact that normal dreams oft have me not remember anything from my normal life…

But once noticed, then anybody who has such dreams can understand the principle/truth of it.

_ /\ _

Depression struggled with me for several years, I lost my ability to recall events which happened in my life. I had knowledge of my life’s events, but I wasn’t able to actually recall any of them. My son’s birth, my parents’ faces, etc. I felt dead inside and considered myself already dead, even if my mortal coil still churned on like some kind of pale imitation of life.

Anyway, one day, a traumatic event from my past resurfaced itself, and I was forced to confront it. After that, I slowly began regaining my memories which had been locked away. I made the choice to leave an abusive relationship, I reconnected with my loved ones from my earlier life. I still sometimes hear the whisper in my ear to end it all, but it’s not as persistent, not as loud. I can touch the memory of the trauma without feeling like a pit just opened within me.

I guess what I’m saying is, I was dead when I lost my memories, and when I got them back, I am alive again.

Years ago a friend was in a horrible car wreck and came out mostly paralyzed and with no memory of the last few years. She didn’t remember her college friends and clung to her newly found relgious support group. She was never religious before. Her personality was completely different in numerous ways. She was effectively a different person and we no longer had anything in common. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I mourned the loss of a friend.

How deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole?

Do you trust your memory? Is how you remember it really how it happened? If someone else tells you it happened another way, is there any way to tell which one, or even if either, is correct?

If the memory happened long ago, how much of the body that was there then is still here now? Is any of it?

How much of your knowledge can be trusted? Do you still believe thunder is the sound of clouds bumping together, or some other old story from your childhood?

If you have a memory of a dream, or a hallucination, is it a memory of a real event? If you don’t remember that it was a hallucination, does it become real for you?

Step out of self-focus for a moment. What is a memory? The resonance between a perceived pattern and the stored pattern in the pattern-recognition system in your head. If the pattern isn’t perceived to trigger the memory, do you still remember? If the connection is malformed, and the smell of chocolate reminds you of the taste of cheese, what does chocolate taste like when it isn’t in your mouth? If the connection is fully broken, and you forget your name, who do you become? Who are you if, after living longer as this new self than as the old self, your brain heals and restores your memory of who you were?

Is the body that holds this memory you? Where are the edges of that object? Materials move constantly in and out of the visible bounds thought of as your flesh, through lung tissue, through skin, through disgestive tissues, eyes, teeth, all of it to varying degrees. Nothing is impermeable. When oxygen is absorbed by your skin, carried to a neuron that forms part of the pattern that tells you you had a chicken sandwich last night, is chemically bonded to another molecule and expelled again, when it is part of you? Is it part of the memory?

Research shows ones personality can be changed by as little as how long it has been since lunch. Are you a different person when you are hangry?

How much of you is your memory? If your memories go away, how much of you remains? Does any?

Is there even a you? The you you are now is clearly almost nothing like the you you were as a child. Are you still the same person? If yes, how? If no, when did the transition happen from one to the other? If information is part of what makes you you, are you even the same person you were when you started reading this comment?

If there is no real separation between you and the things that move in and out of you, is memory anything more than a cycle of reactions, matter and energy triggering chemical changes triggering chemosyntesis, chemotaxis, osmosis. Do even those things exist, or are they merely more patterns of information found to assist the pattern of matter that stores them in the function of preserving that information?

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, PHILOSOPHY RABBIT HOLE!

I had west Nile virus and it got into my brain and it was a mess.

Anyhow, during that years long Rollercoaster of a recovery, there was a period of apparently a week where I don’t remember at all.

Like, woke up in a hospital I’d never seen before. Wandered out to have strangers greet me as if they knew me… had to literally ask the question “where am I? How long have I been here?”

Anyways, the experience made it difficult to escape considering questions similar to yours. Who was that guy who was apparently walking around doing stuff and talking to people that week in MY body?

Short answer: always me. People have such little understanding of how at the mercy of chemicals and electrical impulses they are. You’re you when it’s all working, you’re still you when it’s not. Trying to tie something as foundational as identity to something as ephemeral as memory isn’t a good idea, unless you want identity to be something that changes second to second.

People with amnesia are usually considered still alive, I expect.

The Apple TV show “Severance” is mind fucking presented as entertainment.

It imagines a process whereby you can be made to forget all your personal history. Employers use it so they can have workers who don’t care about anything except the company and their jobs. At the end of the day the ‘original you’ comes back for 16 hours.

I can think of some other science fiction that deals with the same idea.

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Well, you’d be interested to know that people with amnesia and cannot form new memories still become accustomed to people are are friendly around them despite not knowing who they are or why they feel friendly. It’s in a different part of the brain. Also some forms of muscle memory are literally stored in your muscles.

My point of view is that the entire “you” concept needs to be constructed in the first place because it isn’t a self-evident, easily-defined thing. There are centuries of philosophy on this topic, none of it conclusive. Ergo: it’s kind of your call if you are even “you” when you wake up each morning, or just a fresh iteration with your memories that believes it’s “you.” Having hit my 50s I’m quite confident that the person in all my pictures from college is not “me” in any meaningful way. All the memories I have from that time are unreliable reconstructions anyway - stories my brain tells itself.

I have (had) two relatives succumb to dementia (Alzheimers) before they passed.

In one case, that person reverted back to the memories which were at the time of my early childhood. We reconnected in a way that shed off the later traumas for both of us, and while I still could not love that person, I appreciated them for who they were (or thought they were) at that time. And I could grieve their passing.

The other person was pretty much dead to everyone anyways, so yeah, once their memories were gone, they were already dead before their mortal coil passed.

This was my grandfather’s axe; the head’s been replaced twice and the handle three times since he owned it.

It’s the same pizza we had last week. / Eww! Shouldn’t you have gotten rid of it by now? / No – I mean, it’s just got the same toppings! We ordered it last night!

If you could swap memories with another person, which body is “you”? Well, that depends on what the meaning of the word is is… Mr. President.

An annoying amount of philosophy “problems” are really just equivocation about different kinds of equivalence.

These ramblings brought to you from my aging – though not yet lost – memories of long hours of procrastination during my sophomore year in college…

I’m an amnesiac and one of the first things I learned is that memories don’t really matter. The past is over, what matters is what you choose to do and not what you did. Obviously people do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things. I can sympathize with people who can’t let stuff go, but I personally just can’t be bothered by it anymore though. I have and will offer support to even my abusers.

To me, a person is how they act and what they want in the present. Lived experience affects everything a person does, the parts of a person’s past that are relevant reveal themselves in the present through how a person is.

Sorta. Its why you sorta lose a person to demetia. Even with retrograde amnesia I have heard a persons personality. Likes, dislikes, etc. Do not change. So there is something a bit more to a person.