What are we?

We often ask ourselves in times of change or difficulty who we are, and quite rightly so. However, the question of this post is not asking who, but what we are. This question might at first seem unnecessary at best, but we often tend to overlook the more basic questions when we try to come to grand conclusions, and I dare say we are far the worse off for it, for how can we possibly assume to be able to tackle grand questions of meaning and existence when we haven't even considered the most basic tenets and preconceptions upon which we base our arguments, or question the assumptions we make in the course of making those considerations? If we are all so expert in the science of life and the art of living that we presume to know the answers to these questions without having need to properly sit down and think on them, why is it that we are so often feeling unsatisfied or unhappy?

The simplest and perhaps most obvious answer to the posited question is that we are human, but this answer is not nearly satisfactory, and merely raises more questions. "What is it to be human?", and "How do we know?" for example. But even those questions are built upon a more basic presupposition which needs to be explored; before we can ask what we are, we must ask if we are (and presumably, if everything else in the Universe is), or, in other words, if we exist.

This again seems like a question that has a self-evident answer, an answer so self-evident that I dare say few people will even bother to provide a response. This in itself should be setting off warning bells that we are far more ignorant in our considerations than perhaps we had supposed, and this is a situation that must be remedied as soon as possible if any progress is to be made here.

"Do you exist?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"I just do."

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"Twenty years ago, did you exist?"

"I suppose not."

"So before your body existed, you did not exist?"

"No."

The temptation here is to equate our own existence with that of our bodies, but clearly more consideration must be given when one considers exactly one begins to exist. This tends to be a major sticking point in the debate about abortion. Though it is not my intention to enter into the politics of that particular issue in this post, some of the issues which I intend to address are crucial to the debate, so please excuse me, reader, for dabbling briefly into politics.

"Your body existed at birth, did it not?"
"It did."
"And one day before birth?"

"I suppose so, yes."
"And one day before that?"
"Yes."
"What about at the moment of conception?"

"It would appear so."

"It certainly would, wouldn't it? But what was your body at the point of conception?"

"A single cell, a zygote."

"Hardly a body, I would say. It would seem to you or I no more a body than a single cell of skin or muscle, I imagine."

"But a single cell of skin or muscle won't grow into a fully formed human, will it?"

"No, it will not."
"So there is clearly a difference."

Again, there is a temptation at this point to simply say that because the fertilised cell can in time grow into a fully formed human, it is a human, but even the logical underpinnings of the argument defeat it - if the cell will in the future become a human, the implication is that now, at the point where it is a single cell, it is not a human. Even so, the matter of potential development is one which must be addressed, and so the discussion continues.

"What exactly is the difference, then?"

"The difference is that one will grow into a human, one will not."

"So it is a question of potential?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"But how does one measure potential? A single sperm cell has the potential to eventually become a human, supposing it meets an egg. Is this sperm human? No, it is merely a single cell with the potential, given certain circumstances, to become human at a later point. How is it different to your zygote? In chromosomes alone. Does your humanity lie in the number of your chromosomes alone?"

"Of course not!"

"Then this zygote is no more a human than a single sperm cell."

This is something of a simplification, though. If your DNA is in that cell, then there is at the very least something of you in that zygote. Even so, it is still a mistake to go on to equate a human being (with all the rights that status enjoys) with this single cell, no matter its genetic make-up, purely on the basis of a nebulous idea of "potential".

However, the question then arises as to when exactly a collection of cells becomes human. It may be after conception and before birth, but beyond this we have little idea of when it is the case. This is because we have yet to pinpoint what it is to exist. We know that we do not exist before our body does, but we have established that we, as people, do not strictly exist for some time post-conception either. Again, there is a temptation to return to the body for an answer.

"Consider that you have died, and your body is lying before me. "

"If you say so..."

"Am I looking at you?"
"Unless there's something extraordinary going on outside the window, I imagine so."

"Can I converse with you?"

"For your sake, I hope not."
"Can I play sport with you?"
"No."
"If I'd never met you, could we form a bond of some sort? Become fond of each other, even friends?"
"That would be absurd."
"Indeed. Tell me, can you donate to charity, or assist the poor, sick and elderly?"

"No, I'm dead."

"Right now, do you consider yourself a good person?"
"I certainly think so."
"Do you do what I mentioned? Donate to charity and perform other works?"

"I do."

"So as I look at you lying cold on the floor, do I see a good person?"

"Yes."
"But you told me dead men cannot do those things which you say qualify you as good."
"But I did them in the past."

"In the past yes, but not now, as I look at you. So either you have become a person who does no good, or I do not see you."

"You cannot condemn the dead for being dead!"

"Of course not, which only leaves one conclusion. That dead body is not you."

This may seem like a perplexing conclusion, even paradoxical. But there is a resolution if we consider another avenue of hypothetical argument. Consider now two people, let's call them Daniel and Emily, of contrasting personality. They are put under the knife and, in a world-first operation, their brains are switched from one body to the other, with no complications and complete functionality. Medically speaking, this is entirely impossible, with our current knowledge of medical treatment anyway, but luckily we need not perform hypotheticals in real life to determine their outcome.

Having completed this hypothetical surgery, we ask ourselves this: Who is Emily, and who is Daniel? If the body we might recognise as Emily's comes up to us and begins acting in a manner entirely at odds with her character, speaking in a different way and about different things, taking no interest in foods or activities she previously adored, and so on, but instead acting, speaking and eating just as Daniel would, by what merits can we call her Emily instead of Daniel? If we've never met Daniel, this "Emily" does not even have a singular memory of us, and will probably not even like us. To call her Emily instead of Daniel would seem to be a mistake, for it is not her. It does not think like her, it does not act like her, it is nothing like her except for the bodily form she once possessed, and the same can be said for "Daniel".

So identity does not exist in the body. Where then? The brain? Well, let's change focus slightly back to another of our early questions. We began by asking if we exist, so let's now ask how we know. That you can see, hear, touch, these in and of themselves prove nothing. But that we know what seeing, hearing, touching are, this is paramount. To cut to the short answer, we know we exist because we are self-conscious, a fact summed up nicely by Descartes in his declaration, "Cogito, ergo sum." or, in English, "I think, therefore I am.". All sights, sounds, and other sensory inputs prove nothing, for they could be non-existent; synthetic representations fed directly to you, akin perhaps to The Matrix. But the fact that you can process them, whether they are real or not, indicates that you must exist, if not in the world of the inputs then at some higher plane of existence. If you did not exist, you could not process the input. Of course, you must then question how we know that a non-real entity cannot "think", and in order to do that we must question what it is we consider to be "real". However, this is only a short blog, and many great men have spent their lives on those questions, time which we, needless to say, do not have here. I do not think it is entirely unreasonable, however, to take Descartes' declaration at face value, at least for the purposes of what I would call the philosophical equivalent of "rough working". If we do continue presuming "cogito, ergo sum" to be a true statement, and thus taking thought, representational of self-consciousness, to be the proof of existence, it follows that self-consciousness is also prerequisite for knowledge of existence.

Now, what is it that makes you you? In other words, what constitutes your identity? It cannot be what you do, because I'm sure that many others have done, or at least can do, what you have done, perhaps not exactly, but then nobody else can have the exact same experiences as you; such is the nature of the Universe. This detail is irrelevant though. I kick a ball exactly 10 metres. Another person kicks a ball exactly 10 metres in exactly the same fashion. Is it the fact that he did not do it at the exact same time or place what makes him essentially different to me? No. The same reasoning follows for all things external and experiential. With this excluded, all that is left is the internal, or rather, that which is internal to the mind (the mind being holonymous to thought). Though further exploration is possible, it satisfies me that, given that all people have different identities, and given that what distinguishes one identity from another is (or at least seems to be) the mind, and that the mind is individual to its possessor, the mind is fundamental to identity, or, in other words, it is your thought and intellect, your consciousness that makes you you.

This has profound implications, the most pressing one being that before a human develops its consciousness, it does not have a distinct identity. In humans, consciousness does not typically develop until the age of one, which means that before this point, the child was merely a body. This is not as confronting as it immediately seems, but it does mean that we have not yet come to a conclusion about when a body becomes human, only when it develops an identity. Since I do not want this post to be political, I will not further explore that issue, as it is not only time-consuming, but rather tangential and not essential to our question. After all, we said that we were human, but did we not mean that our bodies were human? And have we not already discounted our bodies as being determinant of what we are, the primary question at hand?

So, let us recapitulate. We know we exist because we are conscious of our existence, and our existence, that being the existence of us and our identity, resides in the mind. Thus, before the mind (not the brain) functions, we do not exist, and the same is true for after the mind has ceased to function.

"But wait," you interject, quite rudely. "What about life after death? What about the soul? If identity exists not in the body but the mind, is there not the potential for us to survive bodily death?" The allure is certainly there, for those who wish to draw that conclusion, to do so. I would argue that such an action would be premature. Those despairing for some comfort, unable or unwilling to confront their mortality, might cling desperately to such a prospect. As for a soul, this is more of a theological question, as certainly no evidence of souls has come to be, but as for a mind, this is something which can be discussed.

The brain and the mind are not one and the same. But with this said, the mind is dependent on the brain. If one shuts down the rational centres of the brain, the mind can no longer function rationally, something which becomes evident in certain cases of brain trauma. A clearer example comes from split-brain patients, whose corpus callosum is severed, leaving both hemispheres of the brain unable to communicate. In these patients, it is not unusual to see two distinct personalities develop, two minds, as it were, one corresponding to each half of the brain. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that with the whole brain dead, so dies the mind and, subsequently, you.

So no, your mind will not survive death. If you wish nevertheless to believe in some sort of soul, beware that it may not resemble the mind at all, it may not correlate any form of nous at all, it may not be conscious, and it may not be you, not at least as you know yourself. However, this is not a question I have to struggle with; I see no reason why a spirit or soul should exist within me. As far as I'm concerned, if there is such a thing as divinity, the mind is as close a thing as a fragment of it as can be found, and I've no need for more than that. And at the end of the day, think of it the way Mark Twain did: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."