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On my bike ride home (I guess I do a lot of my thinking when I'm riding my bike) I was thinking about changing as a person. Well, specifically, how I've changed myself as a person intentionally and unintentionally.

I guess in most ways I think that if I'm truly dedicated to a change and I can convince myself it's important, I can make the change. (I don't know if that's true or not but it's how I've seen it for a long time) Maybe it takes time, but I feel like it's generally not an impossible feat.

Anyway, I was thinking about personality malleability and about time and how I like to say I'm a new person every moment. I guess because I tend to think of time in erm... like a bunch of stills rather than a video? Like this:

(This is from a music video by Nagi Noda that was featured at the EMP Museum. I don't like the music but the imagery was interesting)

...Where it's the "same" subject but you're seeing them in multiple moments at the same time. So it's like, for every instant, there's a copy of the subject, and it is the subject but it's also different and not the same as the previous instant. I've probably mentioned this before, it's something I think about a fair amount.

So yeah, all that. And this relates to malleability because I guess my thinking was that being inflexible/rigid, not changing, sort of implies sameness, but I don't have that sense of sameness about myself because I view "myself" as a ton of different ermmm stills that somehow just share this sense of continuity from one moment to the next. And it's weird I guess, to think of myself as being the "same" person all the time. Like I really have no idea why I'm the "same" person that I was when I was five or something. In the sense that I have a shared identity with that previous incarnation, I mean. Same name and so forth. People talking about being "a new person" or "not the same" as they used to be but they still have some continuous sense of identity despite that.

And I was thinking about bodies and cell turnover and how you get a new skeleton every... what is it, like seven years? Something like that, I don't feel like looking it up. And I guess it's kind of like you just have a whole new body after awhile. Except for neurons maybe? But some of those die and you do make some new ones, despite what everybody said when I was younger and my friend and I used to poke each other in the head and yell "I JUST KILLED A THOUSAND OF YOUR BRAIN CELLS!"

So like, your body isn't the same at any given moment, and your personality changes somewhat over time, and yeah, back to what I was saying before, you have this feeling like you're a single continuous entity, and that's weird to me even though I experience it too. But I was wondering why that sense of continuity is there, and what it even is. If your body dies and regenerates all the time then it can't be just a bodily thing, obviously, but I don't know why it would really be an entirely mental thing either because that doesn't just exist in a static state either.

And then there's that whole "essence" idea, like the "essence" of a person isn't contained in their body, and it's sorta mental in a way even though you don't feel the same way at all times, but it's also kind of not really a mental thing. Preferences change, feelings change, thought patterns change... And maybe you get severe dementia and you just totally change, but you're still the "same" person supposedly. And I feel like at that point the essence can't be mentally based because your personality and mental processes could be entirely different. Where is identity located? If you're brain-dead people will still call you by the same name and say you're the same person, but that kind of suggests that identity is a bodily thing, which, well, I think most everyone would say isn't the case. Plus I already talked about how bodies don't stay the same...

So the essence, the continuity, I guess that's what some people would call the soul, maybe? And I kind of believe in it and I kind of don't. Like I said before, I do experience some sense of identity/existence continuity, but the idea also seems pretty much bonkers to me half the time. At this point in my life I'm pretty much apatheistic, or agnostic-atheist if you really pushed me, but in any case I don't really feel like there's anything of us that lives on after death. Not from a first person point of view, anyway. So that's not the kind of soul I believe in. But yeah, I feel uncertain about the soul in the sense of continuity too.

Identity is sort of passed along, isn't it? By all the incarnations of yourself. So it's kind of like a package that's being handed down the line of all the yous in time, and it's not something inherent to any of the particular incarnations. And hm... I guess different yous add to it and society adds to it but even though it belongs to you it's also kind of separate from you and not really part of you, at least in this analogy. Identity is weird. And it's related to continuity but continuity is just... a part of identity? Or maybe it's close but actually something separate...? I'm not sure.

That's about as far I got with all this because my bike ride home is only fifteen minutes or so and there's only so much musing I can do in that time. I'm not really sure if all this makes sense to anyone else, kind of just wanted to get my thoughts out there since this is my personal blog and all. :P

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I feel pretty great!

When I was driving home from the crisis line tonight I generally just felt good, and Daft Punk came on the radio and it wasn't even a song that I like that much but I just felt like dancing to it, and I didn't because I was driving and I'm not stupid but yeah.

Maybe I'll be able to finish everything I have to do tomorrow after all!

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I feel like it has a really interesting theme.


Ooh I love my ugly boy
So rough and tough
Don't care about anything but me
Yes I just love him cause he's so crazy
Just crazy about me

Ugly on the skin
But you're lovely from within
An angel kiss from me to you
Always there for me when I'm feelin' blue
You say you'll stick with me and I know you will
I just get so emotional
When I'm down and feeling weak
With tears streaming down my cheeks
You say the sweetest things
Like material stuff don't mean a thing
But you take care of me to keep you safe

That idea that a guy who's unattractive will love you more, try harder, be more supportive etc. isn't really openly discussed too much, I think. I mean it's sort of implied in some contexts but you really don't hear people saying it. Usually people just say things like "beauty is skin deep" and that you should "love someone for who they are" and so on. Basically, don't be shallow. But then people get caught up in that and try not to let physical attraction factor in much at all, when it's not something you can really ignore (mostly, anyway).

---

Bleh, so much to do.

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Thank you for the book. I hope you are doing well.

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