I Attempt To Answer The Age Old Question "Why Am I Me?"

(If I wrote for some big site they would have made me title this "Why Are You You? Here's Why" but thankfully I do not (thankfully in this instance, not in general; let's not get crazy here) and as such it was titled something more appropriate/honest)

Have you ever asked yourself "why am I me?" "Why am I not someone else?" I certainly have. Many times in my youth and adolescence (and once or twice in adulthood) I have wondered to myself this very thing. At 32 years of age I found myelf pondering this once again but this time an anwer came, almost immediately actually. It's that immediacy that makes me think I might have it, but each time I get close to accepting that, I dunno.....it's like an eel escaping a predator's grasp- one second it's there and the next it's gone. I am just about to emotionally connect to the idea that I am right when suddenly I don't feel so sure and I start saying things like "wait, what?" and "No, wh- hmmmm....wait, what?"

Well, I am writing down my thoughts in the hopes that I can finally figure this out and maybe have a good discussion with somebody online.  I will do this as though I were responding to someone.

"Why am I me?"

Well, I think each "us" may ask why am I 'me' (as I have many times in my life) and I think the only real answer is you are "you" because when your parents procreated, your consciousness developed as a necessary result of that process. Each one of us is a 'me' and it's only after we came to be that we would even think to ask this question but the question itself is kind of pointless because rather than a consciousness being dropped into a body consciousness is the result of the biological entity processing information. If you weren't you there wouldn't be a you. In order for you to ask about yourself there must have been a you in the first place. If any conditions had changed, you would not have existed. Therefore, you are you because the conditions that made you were what they were. If your parents hadn't conceived you when they did you wouldn't be, well, you. So to say "why am I not someone else" is to essentially say "why am I, a thing that came to be as the result of my parents being together exactly when they were, not that other thing who is a result of totally different circumstances?"

I think the anthropic principle might be applicable here- the idea being that when one is examining the universe the universe MUST be congruent with that beings' existence and this congruence cannot be used as evidence for something in an argument as it would apply in ALL cases. So for example, if someone wants to point to the remarkable number of conditions that must have come to be exactly the way they are for life to be as we experience it now and use this as evidence for a god the only correct response to that is to point out that in order for life to be here things had to be a certain way, and would be so regardless of HOW it came to be, so you cannot point to this congruence between life and the universe and say "see, god!" If humans came to be 100% without any gods, things.....would be exactly the same, otherwise there wouldn't be an us.

This topic makes my head hurt.

The Answers Lie Just Out of Reach (post 2 for the Day!)

The answers lie just out of reach....

He turned to her, and in a rare moment of immodesty and uninhibited vulnerability, he laid his weary head on her bare shoulder, and, taking in the smell of her perfume (he couldn't place the scent, but he knew it was cheap, and this only served to widen his despair) he spoke.

''The truth lies just across the pond, and the water is shallow; however, I have not the energy to wade that chasm, for its depth is deceptive. The answers will take that pond and render it an ocean, one I have not the means, nor the will, to cross. And so, at the risk of remaining ignorant, I must stay on land, and watch as both my feet and my resolve dry up and whither away to a fine dust, which, with the first cool breeze, will be picked up and strewn across that very pond, in the ultimate act of irony. For you see, there is irony in death, and the ironic thig is, I welcome that loathsome state, for with its barreness and melancholoy, it brings the thing I crave least, and most: rest. Rest for the weary head I know rest upon your overburndened and sun kissed shoulder.

I love you, Melinda, but I also despise you, and you me.

Come with me, if you will.''

And, rasing his weary head, he held out his hand. Without waiting to see if she would grasp it, he waded out into the body of water, and, as she watched, sheltering her eyes from the sun which glistened brightly, almost obscenely, off of its serene surface, the body of water opened up and swalloed him whole. The cavernous maw of irony had taken him, and she knew that it was for the best. Sighing, she waded in after him.

Don't ask. This was just a random, impromptu thing I typed up in the middle of a conversation about finding answers and wading in the dark, stumbling around blind until your way is illuminated by knowledge, and how sometimes the journey is so difficult we don't embark upon it.....or we do, but we do it reluctantly, and sometimes wish we didn't have this passion residing within us. How easy it would be! To just forsake the truth for whatever explanation pampered us.

How easy, indeed.

Oh, speaking of easy.....