There Is No "I" In "Me"

"I think, therefore I am... I think."
Nordom, Planescape: Torment

When I was younger I was terrified by the thought that every night when I went to bed, I was killed in my sleep and replaced by a clone with identical memories. To go to sleep was to create a pause, a space, an interruption in the continuity of my consciousness: How could I know it was still me that took up where the previous me left off? I would wake in the morning, and lie in bed as I went over my memories, pondering: are these mine? Am I still me?

"All is flux; nothing stands still."

Heraclitus

Heraclitus said that no man can ever step in the same river twice, because he is never again the same man, and it is never again the same river. The passage of time is the passage of change. Even as I write and even as you read, change is happening. Our cells shrivel up and die and are replaced - the body that you had when you were born has by now been entirely replaced by food. The neural network that is our brain processes information and is forever altered by the information: neural paths are closed and new ones are created. We live second to second as if in an animation. The transitions seem to flow smoothly and naturally, but slow it down, freeze it frame by frame and you will see the minute differences; the tiny alterations of you. You are not the same person from one frame to the next.

Change is not an illusion, as Parmenides and Zeno argued - rather, it is the state of being which is the illusion. Permanence is a human lie - everything in this world is transient, temporary. Including the notion of you.

So it would seem my younger self's fears weren't entirely unfounded. When I wake up in the morning, I'm not the same person as who I was when I went to sleep the previous night. I have changed. Zahir A has vanished, and Zahir B has stepped in to take his place. If anything, my younger self was being entirely too naive. The change is happening not just when I sleep, but at all times, during my sleeping as well as my waking hours, all without me realizing it. An iteration of me is lost and replaced with each moment to the next. I die a million deaths every day.

"I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam!"

Popeye the Sailor Man

Who is the "I" that lurks in the darkness behind our eyes? It has been documented that people who suffer massive brain damage can likewise experience massive changes in personality - the self and the physical form are not so easily separated as one would like to think. And yet if you were to take a human brain and disassemble it, piece by piece, you would not find a soul. You would not find an "I". All you would have left is a dissected brain. In searching for it, you have destroyed it. So what is it then? Some intangible value? Something beyond the senses?

Yet we do sense it - don't we? You feel like you. You feel that there is a "you". Don't you? What does it mean to say, "I don't feel like myself today"? Is it simply that our behavior has diverged from some established mean? But human behavior itself is hardly consistent - we act differently in different environments. We can be animated and talkative among close friends, yet quiet and withdrawn among strangers. We can be kind and compassionate to our mothers, yet cold and distant to an acquaintance. If even daily behavior is so fluid, how can we lay claim to a concrete identity?
 
Perhaps it is so difficult to define identity because identity itself is something that is vague and indistinct - a haphazard collective of a person's thoughts and feelings and memories and beliefs? All of which are constantly changing. In one instance to the next, new memories are gained and older memories are lost or overwritten (are you absolutely certain you correctly remember everything that has happened to you? Barring an eidetic memory, I think not). Our beliefs and perceptions of the world are constantly challenged and changed by new experiences. If identity is memory and perception, then we change identities each time we learn something new or forget something we once knew or change our views about something that we once held as unshakeable truths. There is a reason why a change in one's opinion is called "changing one's mind".

Who, then, is this person who is sitting at his keyboard typing this right now? What is this thing that is thinking these thoughts right now? A person with a soul? An automaton that thinks it is thinking? The nth iteration of something that exists only within the frame of a second, erased by time and replaced by another iteration the very next moment? Is there really a me, or am I simply some random assortment of living cells, bound together in symbiosis and fooling itself into thinking it is a single entity?

Does identity have a meaning, or are we all simply figments of our own imaginations?

Antipocalypse

Antipocalypse: When the world fails to end as scheduled.

Stealth Blogging

I realize that I have been stealth blogging. I have told absolutely nobody that I have resumed blogging. I've even changed the title of my blog. From what I can ascertain absolutely nobody reads this blog. As far as I can tell, I'm blogging away in the darkness, ignored and unbeknownst by the denizens of the internet.

I suppose if I keep at it, I'll eventually level up into a Ninja Blogger, capable of sneaking into your home and editing your blog post while you are powerless to stop me, then slipping away unseen.

*looks over shoulder nervously*

Was that a... did that shadow move? Or am I imagining things? Did...

Oh, never mind. There are no such things as Ninja Bloggers! What a ludicrous postulation. Forget I ever mentioned it. Seriously, just forget it.

Or else...

A Piph About A Piph About A Piph

A PIPH is a mini-epiphany - a sudden, striking realization about something that isn't really all that important and certainly doesn't warrant its own blog post. Used within the context of this blog, it is also:

1. A convenient excuse for me to make a micro-blog post about some random thought that has spontaneously manifested in the chaotic morass that is my mind.
2. A blog post label that wil be used henceforth.
3. A means by which I can give myself the false assurance of my own productivity, not to mention artificially inflate my blog post count

A sudden piph whilst in the midst of this description of piphs: An e-piph would be a piph that is transmitted electronically. Or even, a piph that arises whilst in the midst of engaging in an online activity such as blogging. That's right, I just had a piph about a piph at the very moment I was epiphaning.

I really should stop before this turns into the Babblings of a Certified Loon.

I Am Madman, Hear Me Ramble

 Famous First Words:

It was supposed to be "Ramblings of a Madman"

Preramble: A Clever Play on Words, A Summation of What Happened the Last Time I Engaged in Blogging, and A Defiant Show of Rebellion

When I started this blog, more than - what, two years ago? - in my inaugural post I said that I wanted to name my blog "Ramblings of a Madman" because it fit me all to well, but I didn't because I had discovered other, numerous Madman Rambling blogs out there in the wild. Thus I dubbed my blog "The Observer Affection" and sallied forth into the blogosphere.

Eight posts later, my blogging got swallowed up by chronic procrastination ("yeah, I'll get to writing that... later") and I promptly fell off the face of the blogosphere for two whole years.

(For those who care, in the interim I got a baby and finished my Masters, which is evidence for an interesting negative correlation between blogging and real-world productivity - but I'll leave that aside for the nonce)

And now I'm back. And you know what? The first thing I'm doing is changing the name of the blog. I was never comfortable with "The Observer Affection". It was like one of those brand-new shoes that you buy that your feet don't feel entirely comfortable in, but you think, I'll get used to them eventually after they've been worn in, and they'll feel just like the old shoes I'm wearing right now, but they never do and you shamefully leave them to gather dust in the shoe cabinet while you resume wearing your old worn-out shoes. Well, I wore the title of this blog for about half a year (yes, I'm well aware this speaks ill of my blog stamina) and it never felt quite right.

But "Ramblings of a Madman" still fits. It fits, dammit, I don't care that other people have been using it and are using it still! I want it, it fits me, it fits me, I'm using it, and nobody can stop me! Do you hear that, Blogspot?

You. Can't. Stop. Me!

Just Write: Justifications for a Most Malign Malady

You might be wondering what I'm doing back. I mean, clearly, the blog experiment was a failure. There are a couple stuff I wrote in there that I'm actually kind of proud of writing, but ultimately my blog stamina ran out and the writing screeched to a halt. So why come back to it?

The simple reason is that I miss writing. It's been far too long since I've sat down and purposely wrote something that wasn't for work or study purposes. It's been far too long since I've dedicated myself to writing something just for the fun of writing, and I miss that.

Looking back at my blog posts, I notice now that towards the end, before I lost interest completely, I was writing blog posts simply for the sake of writing blog posts. I now realize that was my mistake, that this was the real reason why I stopped writing. The blog had ceased being a means to an end, it had become the goal itself. And this is just wrong. The reason to write should be so that I can have written. Writing should be its own end. The blog should simply be the (perhaps unfortunate) byproduct of the process of writing.

And the fundamental truth is... I can't stop writing. I don't think I could stop if I tried. I've been writing since I've known how to write, and before that, I was writing stuff in my head. When I was four or five, I wrote a "novel" involving Autobots and Decepticons and a heart-wrenching tale of loyalty and betrayal, all told in four pulse-pounding pages. In primary school, I was inventing superheroes in my head and writing about them (accompanied by horrifically amateurish pictures) in the classroom until one of my stricter teachers found the notebook, shamed me in front of the class, then threw it out. In high school I wrote and "published" (as in, printed out at home and then sent for binding at the mamak shop across the road) a series of sci-fi/fantasy "novels" for subsequent distribution among my friends (that stuff is still lying around the house somewhere, I know I should burn them but I just don't have the heart). I wrote during Matriculation, during university lectures, and in the office when I was supposed to be doing work.

Now do you understand? Writing is a need, an itch, an addiction, an unstoppable inevitability.

I. Can't. Stop. Writing.