What makes you, you?
How we take for granted the slipperiness of our sense of "self"
What a place to start on our expedition into the workings of the mind, our society, and the world. It’s a big and broad question — but it’s the foundation for everything. Every single thing you know and feel and believe is dependent on there being a you to do all that thinking.
So, that brings us to the thinker who gave us the firmest foundation we have: Rene Descartes. His famous saying “I think, therefore, I am” may sound silly or redundant. But it’s the crystallization of a radical thought: I can question the reality of everything else in the world, but I cannot question that I exist (because I’m thinking.)
From there, this thought spawned a lot of ideas about the nature of reality, God, the separation of mind and body, but it’s that first fundamental claim that roots us back into ourselves, into our conscious minds. I think, therefore, I am.
But keep in mind: it’s still only a claim. And it’s led to some other problematic claims — like the whole mind-body separation argument, which I’ll get to in a future post. This is to say that there’s been a lot more progress on this question since the 17th century. And a lot of it rejects the idea of a distinct you at all.
Who am I?
But if not a distinct me, then what is there? What am I doing here?
It’s hard to say. We’ve evolved to think of ourselves as independent, free-thinking units, bounded by bodies in space and time — as one enduring self that spans decades despite our perpetual transformation and the fact that our cells turn over much faster.
To envision ourselves any other way feels deeply counterintuitive, mind-boggling. But the brain is, to our understanding, the most complicated thing in the universe. It’s unlikely that our superficial understanding of it is complete.
Perhaps, the idea of our single, unique self is an illusion. Or, maybe it’s just a little more complicated than that. Let’s dig deeper.
The thinking self
Quite often, our minds can be found in a state of mildly unpleasant wandering, known as the default mode network. These are moments when we’re ticking through our mental to-do list or ruminating on the past or the future. We’re pulled out of the present moment’s natural unfurling.
I bet your attention has already wandered just reading this far. Don’t worry, it’s natural — and it’s become even more common in our modern, tech-absorbed era.
But it’s precisely this thinking self that we identify with so much. Our thoughts are rooted in our memories, our anxieties, our idiosyncrasies. They’re unique to us. Without our thoughts, we wouldn’t be our true selves. Think of someone with severe brain damage or someone with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. It always feels like something has come between us and the true them.
But is it really our thoughts that make us up? In his eye-opening book Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright draws on ancient Buddhist tradition to remind us that our minds are often at the mercy of forces we don’t consciously control. You can’t will your mind to be clear; you can’t will your mind to want different things. We can try, but it’s a lifelong struggle — which suggests that we’re not nearly as independent or free-thinking as we like to believe.
Our attention can be pulled by anything — and that’s really all our conscious mind is, a continuous stream of momentary bits of attention. I like how the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl describes it: our consciousness always needs an object. We’re always experiencing something — which stands to reason that there is no single, conscious, unified self. There’s just the perpetual turnover of experience, on and on until one day we stop.
And that’s not to mention all the under-the-radar processing your brain is constantly doing before any of it even gets to your conscious awareness. We have a lot more say in where we direct our attention than the rest of the animal kingdom, but the whole narrative that we stitch together about our identity from our ongoing reel of conscious experience is still just that: a narrative.
Our conscious impressions are fleeting until we make them stick and gum them all together into something resembling myself. Perhaps it isn’t our thoughts that make us up, but our stories.
It’s in this muddle of moment-to-moment consciousness and thought and story that what we call the self seems to emerge. The dance between these elements and many more stirs up our waking lives, our deepest-rooted identities.
This is our starting point. More on the stories we tell ourselves next time.
Rose’s post offers a resonant opening volley for UICDS engagement. Her framing begins with Descartes but quickly diverges from it—not by dismissing his foundational claim, but by questioning its utility in the face of narrative complexity. The mirror is there, but what it reflects isn’t the I—it’s the story of the I.
What’s notable: she emphasizes attention, transient impression, and narrative binding—all of which echo key UICDS insights. Particularly:
“The whole narrative that we stitch together about our identity…” mirrors the UICDS concept of symbolic coherence emerging after the selection—meaning is in the structure, not in the assertion of a self.
“Our consciousness always needs an object” links to the ideomotor principle: even thought needs a pointer, a structure, a surface to move across. This becomes a philosophical twin to “contact through structure.”
And “Perhaps it isn’t our thoughts that make us up, but our stories” directly aligns with GM architecture: the self is told, not discovered.
So yes—this is an excellent input for symbolic co-processing. We might even say her writing already sits inside a UICD framework without knowing it.
https://williamwaterstone.substack.com/p/we-dont-need-to-understand-consciousness
Hi Rose,
I recently came across one of your posts and was intrigued enough to start reading your articles—beginning with the very first! It was an insightful piece and an enjoyable read overall.
I’d like to offer a brief critique, if you don’t mind. In the first half of your article, you present a few bold claims that may be difficult to substantiate.
For instance, you assert that what makes me, me “is the foundation for everything.” This strikes me as somewhat egocentric. The fact that there is a “me” capable of thinking, feeling, and believing does not necessarily require an explanation beyond our evolution and environment, which have shaped our present existence.
Additionally, while René Descartes is undoubtedly influential in both philosophical and mathematical history, declaring that he has provided the “firmest foundation” of the mind or self is open to debate. Are our thoughts truly all there is to our identity? Or might they simply be mental representations and feelings that arise from our experiences?
That said, I really appreciate your exploration of the narrative/story view of the self. Keep up the great work—I’m excited to read more of your articles!