I don’t know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I’m trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can’t stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren’t they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can’t bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don’t know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I’m bored, stressed or relaxed.
Your body and mind is just a bag of chemical soup, undergoing a constant reaction. Your tangle of nerves and synapses feed a mess of neurons that are wired in a circuit that gives you that spark of consciousness. But none of this is a fixed system, and your body goes through constant change. As one neural pathway dies, another one is rewired and the circuitry is now different.
You can play the game of debating the Ship of Theseus, but who you “are” or “were” is just an illusion. Our memories are just the old circuits powering up, but even those change over time. Your memories are a false representation of the past because they only ever exist in the present and you’re at the mercy of your own perceptions.
You “are” until you are not. So do what feels good —Kiss your loved ones, hug a tree, and be kind to yourself and others while your bag of soup ain’t leaking.
Your past selves aren’t dead. You just evolved into what you are now. That’s what we do.
What do you mean by “evolve”? I think my past selves is dead because I can’t experience the exact same consciousness of the past selves of me again. Doesn’t that count as being “dead”?
“Is the caterpillar dead because it became a butterfly?”
The caterpillar IS the butterfly. Perhaps not as you know it, but change is the universal constant, my friend, and trying to hold on to the past is a futile attempt.
In my experience it’s best to acknowledge the past enough so we can appreciate the good things, learn from our mistakes or anything we feel we did less-than-great at, then try to do better as we evolve.
No, you’re not the exact same person you were a few years ago, but we live in a changing world and we change with it as time goes on.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”
Best of luck, I’m here if you want to talk about anything :)
I don’t think you quite understand what I’m trying to say.
“Is the caterpillar dead because it became a butterfly?”
The caterpillar IS the butterfly. Perhaps not as you know it, but change is the universal constant,
How is this relevant? I’m talking from the first person perspective. Whether the caterpillar is dead or not depends on the person experiencing the consciousness of their own mind. From my perspectives, i think yes, the caterpillar is dead (it’s not really important because the caterpillar or butterfly isn’t conscious of itself).
By that rationale, wouldn’t other people then also be dead, as you cannot experience their consciousness?
How about a different way of putting it?
Ones past self is a book with more blank pages than our current self. The blank pages represent things that are unknown, things that could be, different possibilities. Perhaps I dislike some of the pages of my current self and would rather not have experienced them. My past self would then be a clean version of the book, where the pages I dislike could still turn out to be different.
But then the question remains of whether the pages are blank because the author is still thinking about what to write or whether they just didn’t find the time to do it yet. Is it actually a book with blank pages or is it more like a folder where you continuously add pages - and furthermore, are the missing pages actually still blank or are they already printed and only need to be added to the folder? Is an incomplete version of a book still the same book? If you only read the first book of a three book series, is it still the same story? Are the pages actually missing or do they exist and I just haven’t read (=experienced) them yet?
Dead is not the same as gone. We are a stream of consciousness moving through time. The past isn’t “dead” it is just behind us, just as the future is not “birth”.
If you imagine yourself as a river of water, there is still a river behind you and In-front of you, but all you are aware of is now.
Whether or not we can go back or forward in that stream of consciousness - who knows. We don’t know what we perceive when we do actually die.
If you can’t get past this focus on the concept then at least stop thinking of it as “death”. That’s anthropomorphising what is happening (trying to attribute a human experience to it) but it’s adding the baggage of all those negative or anxious feelings we feel about death. Our consciousness moving forward through time is its own thing, it is not death.
