What Makes Me Still Me

The idea

The Ship of Theseus is an old puzzle. If every plank of a ship is replaced, one by one, is it still the same ship? A person raises the same question with higher stakes. Many of my cells are replaced, my opinions shift, and my memories fade or get rebuilt (Memory and My Life Story). Still, I feel like one continuing person.

What I think (and don't know)

I lean toward the view that a self is closer to a pattern than to a fixed object: memories, habits and commitments that stay connected while each part changes. That is a working view, not a settled one. Derek Parfit argued that what matters may be this connection, not strict sameness. I find that freeing, and also a little unsettling.

An example

Imagine reading a letter you wrote ten years ago. Some sentences feel like yours. Others feel as if a stranger wrote them in your handwriting. Both reactions are true at once. That is the puzzle in ordinary life.

Where it connects

Imagining the selves I might have been (The Selves I Might Have Been) tests the same boundary from the other side: with a different choice, would that have been a different person? Habits (Small Habits Shape Who I Become) show how slowly and quietly a self gets rebuilt. And the question of what lasts after a life ends (What Lasts After I Am Gone) is the same question at its limit.

Questions I'm still exploring

• Is a self more like an object that lasts, or a pattern that keeps renewing itself?
• How much could I change before it would make sense to say I had become someone else?
• Does it matter whether I am strictly the same person, as long as who I was and who I am stay connected?

Sources and further reading

• Eric T. Olson, "Personal Identity", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Survey of the main answers to what makes someone the same person over time.
• Derek Parfit (1984), Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press — Argues that psychological connection, not strict identity, is what matters.