Every time I think of a memory, I’m like “Holy Shit… that was once ‘the present’”. What the hell?
I had west Nile virus and it got into my brain and it was a mess.
Anyhow, during that years long Rollercoaster of a recovery, there was a period of apparently a week where I don’t remember at all.
Like, woke up in a hospital I’d never seen before. Wandered out to have strangers greet me as if they knew me… had to literally ask the question “where am I? How long have I been here?”
Anyways, the experience made it difficult to escape considering questions similar to yours. Who was that guy who was apparently walking around doing stuff and talking to people that week in MY body?
Short answer: always me. People have such little understanding of how at the mercy of chemicals and electrical impulses they are. You’re you when it’s all working, you’re still you when it’s not. Trying to tie something as foundational as identity to something as ephemeral as memory isn’t a good idea, unless you want identity to be something that changes second to second.
Oh man, I relate to this. I have a somewhat similar experience which I have recounted in a long comment elsewhere in this thread that you may be interested in checking out.
My conclusion is much the same as your own. In some ways, I think I had to believe that I was the same person, because otherwise, I’d be living out the rest of my life feeling like an imposter who had stolen another person’s life. I imagine it might’ve been harder to believe that I’m still me if I had experienced personality changes as people who experience head trauma sometimes do.
Oh wowza, good on you for sharing that! Super interesting and I feel a bunch of what you said right to the bottom of my soul.
I really appreciate the share as well because it’s PRETTY rare to get to talk to someone with an inkling of such a bizarre life event, how it changes you, and how you grapple with (and hopefully conclude in some way on) uncomfortable questions about the nature of life and identity.
I’d always felt comfortable with where I landed on this… but I’m finding myself surprised by the relief that someone else resolved these questions in the same way I have. I didn’t think I needed… I dunno, validation? Validation that my conclusions were reasonable? Maybe I just never thought I’d get the opportunity to exchange with someone who I trusted actually understood. Not sure, either way, I feel validated and I never thought there would be a mechanism for me to feel that about this topic, and it’s a welcome surprise and I appreciate it, so thank you.
I’m personally of the belief that you are largely the sum of your experiences, so yeah a total loss of memories would mean I am by some definition “dead”. That said, you could easily argue by that same logic that the “me” of a year, month, or even minute ago is also “dead”, since she lacks the experiences that makes me who I am now. I don’t even dispute that that much tbh.
Years ago a friend was in a horrible car wreck and came out mostly paralyzed and with no memory of the last few years. She didn’t remember her college friends and clung to her newly found relgious support group. She was never religious before. Her personality was completely different in numerous ways. She was effectively a different person and we no longer had anything in common. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I mourned the loss of a friend.
I’m a brain-injury survivor, so this question is something I’ve had to face.
Now, after my 3rd-wave of braindamage ( this one self-inflicted, as I tried to break will-to-live from my brain, with a cudgel, so that murdering my life could happen. Failed. it’s fine: it was just part of my hellish growing-up process, these past 6-ish decades ) I’ve BAD memory problems.
Here’s the key:
When you come-to in a dream, without your normal-life’s memories, are you still you??
Elegant, isn’t it?
Completely bypasses most of the dead-ends of the question…
“yes I’m still me, even without my memories, because…”
because why?
I’ve learned that it isn’t one’s memories that make one oneself:
… rather, it is one’s instincts which do.
IF anybody puts drugs into my body-life to alter my personality, and they alter my instincts, THEN they have obliterated the someone that had been inhabiting this-life, & induced a drugged-replacement for the someone who inhabited it, before.
IF any experience alters the instincts of the personality who inhabits this-life, THEN that experience has replaced the less-experienced someone with a ( somewhat? ) different more-experienced someone.
Even without memories, so long as my instincts are clean ( unadulterated ), & MINE, then “I” am existing.
So, even in dreams, when I appear/come-to suddenly in some random context, with no memory of any other life, my instincts make me me, see?
The simple fact that I still work to face-into karma, that I still work to challenge abuse, that I still work to make things right, that I’m still careful with meanings & words, relentlessly,
THAT is what makes “me” me.
It took decades of brain-injury to notice the fact that normal dreams oft have me not remember anything from my normal life…
But once noticed, then anybody who has such dreams can understand the principle/truth of it.
_ /\ _
People with amnesia are usually considered still alive, I expect.
This sounds more like a ship of Theseus style question
Is the person with amnesia still the same “person”. I assume the question would also need to enforce the type/extent of the amnesia
Maybe they just forgot they were dead. 🤷♂️
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Ima tell it to delude me a lil better tomorrow.
You can actually do this which is the wild part about memory and cognition. It’s basically what a lot of therapy practices are.
If I am a delusion, who is being deluded?
My name is Hououin Kyouma, Maddo Scientisuto.
Everybody loses their memories all the time.
You are not your memories, it’s not your memories which define you.
it’s not your memories which define you
it is your behaviour what defines you and if you lose the memories, it will affect the behaviour, so i am inclined to say yes, you are different person then.
it is similar to when you lose a loved one to a cult, be it maga or some religious cult. they are no longer the same person. you want to get back the person they were before, but right now, even if you kidnap them and lock them in your basement, they are not the same person.
or imagine some scifi future, where we have mastered the ability to transfer your consciousness into another body.
your spouse died, and they use their body as a vehicle for some other person, who suffered terrible accident, got hit by a train and only body part that survived was their head. after emergency surgery, their consciousness is now in your former spouse’s body. is that still your spouse? no, it is the other person.
our memories are not our values, our principles, our habits, our quirks, our capacity for positive experience or engaging interaction.
but they’re pretty closely tied into all of them. i’m not an amnesiologist but i imagine it depends on the specific case how much is ‘lost’ in a given case of amnesia and what’s able to be recovered.
Memories do define me tho.
I need the memories of all the betrayals, by individuals, and organizations, and governments, otherwise I’d get betrayed again. Memories are important to know who to trust.
issues
Im. Well. Old. I mean not super old but I have passed a half century. I have come to the realization that I have a been a different person throughout my life and I can’t say for sure if I even know past versions of me with clarity. I feel I need to point out that I am an unusually static person. Like while I physically change people will comment how Im kinda the same. Which kinda bowls me over when I think about who I was. When I was in gradeschool I could barely talk to other kids. In high school my look changed as I started doing what I decided to do in terms of dress and such and while I was not talkative with people I did not know was very talkative with those who I did but I would interact with other people and did drama and model un. In college I did a bit more drama and got back into choral things and mock trial. In the work world I give presentations and training seminars and between jobs I substitute taught. I got married and I mean I change a lot. But I also didn’t. There is some semblance of self and way of doing things that im pretty sure would be there even if my memory were wiped. I would over think things and gravitate to certain subjects and I bet my likes and dislikes would gravitate in the same direction. Without memories though I would not know my past selves. It makes me sorta get the buddhist thing about what comes forward in rebirth. Its something but its hard to say its anything tangible but it just may well be like the periods in the lives we live. We are the same but we are not the same.
Theseus, that you?
Well yes, but actually no.
Hah! A classic Theseus joke
I believe that the entire concept of “self” is just an illusion. There is no “you” back there behind your face looking out into the world. There’s just consciousness - the fact of experience and its content. The sense of self is just an appereance in consciousness. Not something that’s outside or separate of it.
it’s a mark of existence in buddhism, your belief is shared by many.
It depends on how you define yourself
I am me. Not my memories, not my body, not my knowledge, not even my mind
At the very center of my being, there’s a driving spark. My most fundamental self. It’s the desire for understanding in a very specific flavor, and the form of it is reaching out to touch something with your fingertips. It’s like a fractal that has endless meaning the closer you look at it, it contains many understandings of the truth of the nature of things and how things fit together. And within those truths is everything that I am
That’s me. I am not the animal I inhabit, I act through the animal. I freely share my understandings with the animal, and so the animal can see clearly and know truth to find new understandings in all things.
One day the animal will die, and everything but the understandings will be burnt away, because the animal is afraid of being left behind.
I’ll have understandings of people, but memories are a physical thing. I’ll have understandings of how the world works, but knowledge is in my mind. I’ll have understandings of beauty and emotion and the full spectrum of the human experience, but my nature is not human
So it all depends, who are you? Are you a person who acts a certain way? Are you your relationship with others? Are you your memories, skills, and experiences? Are you your physical body?
Have you awakened your spark? Have you looked deep inside yourself to learn from it and add to it? Is it you, or is it something that whispers to you? Are you the combination of the spark and the animal?
Or do you walk another path? Are you your blood? Your legacy? Will you die when your name is last spoken? Will you live on for the rest of time through the ripples you made on the world?
It’s a question you have to decide for yourself. I think maybe the most important question
But that doesn’t have the truth of understandings, so I guess it’s just my opinion
I have (had) two relatives succumb to dementia (Alzheimers) before they passed.
In one case, that person reverted back to the memories which were at the time of my early childhood. We reconnected in a way that shed off the later traumas for both of us, and while I still could not love that person, I appreciated them for who they were (or thought they were) at that time. And I could grieve their passing.
The other person was pretty much dead to everyone anyways, so yeah, once their memories were gone, they were already dead before their mortal coil passed.
Sorta. Its why you sorta lose a person to demetia. Even with retrograde amnesia I have heard a persons personality. Likes, dislikes, etc. Do not change. So there is something a bit more to a person.
Imagine if the world was created last thursday but with your and everyone else’s memories already filled just like current so nobody noticed.
OR IS IT?
vsauce intensifies
Depression struggled with me for several years, I lost my ability to recall events which happened in my life. I had knowledge of my life’s events, but I wasn’t able to actually recall any of them. My son’s birth, my parents’ faces, etc. I felt dead inside and considered myself already dead, even if my mortal coil still churned on like some kind of pale imitation of life.
Anyway, one day, a traumatic event from my past resurfaced itself, and I was forced to confront it. After that, I slowly began regaining my memories which had been locked away. I made the choice to leave an abusive relationship, I reconnected with my loved ones from my earlier life. I still sometimes hear the whisper in my ear to end it all, but it’s not as persistent, not as loud. I can touch the memory of the trauma without feeling like a pit just opened within me.
I guess what I’m saying is, I was dead when I lost my memories, and when I got them back, I am alive again.
I hope this doesn’t sound trite, given that I’m just a random stranger on the internet, but I’m proud of you. Whilst I haven’t experienced depression in the way that you describe, I know how suffocating of an experience it is. It takes a tremendous amount of strength to endure that, especially when there are concrete life circumstances exacerbating things, as you describe. I am glad that you get to be alive again; you deserve it.
