Paul asked:

Who am I?

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Well, if you don't know...! I suppose you ask this question having read all the philosophical arguments
on the subject of personal identity, and found that there are no ready answers.

Perhaps not. So firstly, you are not your body, because simply to be a body without consciousness
would be insufficient to provide you with a sense of "I". Consciousness is essential to personal
identity. Secondly, you could wake up in a state of awareness of a completely different body, so there
is no particular body which makes you you. Furthermore, we can conceive of disembodied
consciousness, so it is not necessary that you have a body at all.

Consciousness looks essential to personal identity. But the question arises what it is about my
consciousness that makes me "me". If I lost all my memories, I would still be me. At any particular
moment there is no particular thought about anything which makes me "me" except a subjective
awareness of the moment. This seems to reduce the idea of "I" to "here" and "now".

This approach gets us nowhere. There is nothing to do but abandon the idea of "me" as my mind or
body, and take it as both. It must be a necessary condition for a sense of "I" that I have both a mind
and body and am aware of myself as different from others and objects. It also appears to be
necessary that I can at least think about myself, and take myself as an "I" and so I must be a
language user. In order to be a language user, there must be a community determining the rules of
use for the language. If we are able to conceive of a disembodied consciousness with a sense of "I",
it is because we are already physically embodied language users in a community. Given that this so,
any real sense of who you are is gained by being embodied and having experiences, but it doesn't
matter which body or which experiences.

Whichever body and experiences you have, you are a conscious subject with a unique perspective on
your body who has thoughts and experiences.

But the idea of a conscious subject as substantial has been abandoned by philosophers. It is now
accepted that there is no such thing as the Cartesian "I". There is nothing that we can grasp as "I"
beyond the experiences and the contents of the thoughts we have. There is a school of philosophy
which holds, with Jacques Lacan, that "Where I am, I don't think, and where I think, I am not".
Thinking cuts you off from "being". Once an individual is able to think, to distinguish others and use
language, the self — what it is to be — disappears. What you can see, experience and think about
are common to all persons, and all there is content, what the experience is of or what the thought is
about. You cannot grasp what it is to be — you can have no direct awareness of yourself — prior to
gaining the ability to think because as soon as you think the self disappears.

The place of "being" is held by Lacan to be where thought is not, and given that being must be
internal, it is located in the unconscious. This doesn't get us anywhere either because we have no
direct access to the unconscious.

More positively, we could ignore these two approaches, and look at the self in Sartrean terms. In the
words of Phil Washburn: "The true self is what you do spontaneously, naturally, by instinct. If you
have to think about who wants you to do something, or about the consequences of doing it, or what
people will think, then you are not expressing your real self. We are born with a unique potential, in
fact many potentialities."

Rachel Browne