How do you understand yourself?

4 Comments

I am interested in how people come to understand who they are and what it means to be a person.

What are some of the ways you come to understand who you are? I don't want to influence your ideas too much, but here are some things you might say:

- Biology, the stuff inside your body, the tubes and meat and parts that connect you all up. Perhaps knowledge of how your biology works helps you understand who you are.

- Society, the ways in which you interact, the ways in which people like you and the people around you interact. Perhaps knowledge of how your society works helps you understand who you are.

- Psychology, the brain, the unconscious and conscious and the way your mind takes you places. Perhaps knowledge of how your psychology works helps you understand who you are.

- Economics, medicine, politics, geography... anything.

Maybe you don't think at all about who you are, or you don't do it in terms like that. That's interesting too, and I want to hear from you about that :)

Answer as long or short as you want.

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Comments ( 4 )
  • [Old Memory]
    8 years ago

    I would say the mind defines who someone is. Ideas, memories and personality.

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  • kingofcarrotflowers
    8 years ago

    I honestly would just leave my answer as being born human, that's what human means, I deleted a long comment of things I perceived to be human when I realised that I see it from more of a technical level, initially I put things like belonging to and understanding social constructs gained through observation and positive reinforcement, education, economics, hierarchies, abstract thought etc

    But then I thought of a situation, a man, born in isolation, kept that way throughout his life with no understanding of communication, the world around him etc is still human, someone in a hospital bed lost in a sate of detatched reality is still human, s. me being human is just that, being a human

    As for who I am, I told another op I didn't know but I'd think about it, I've been thinking about it since and I still can't answer, I feel I'm not my morals, my lack of faith, my taste in music, I feel they're aspects if me but I still can't tell you who I am, hell half the time I can't tell you my own morals and beliefs

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  • howaminotmyself
    8 years ago

    Meditation, reading, gardening, riding my bike, being a mother, talking to people, living my life.

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  • ArmusWasTheFirstTroll
    8 years ago

    Biologically, I understand that I am driven by autonomic responses that would have been useful in the wild. Example: We don't love because it's special or because we want our lives to be meaningful. We love because it creates the desire to procreate and we only see meaning in that so that the species can not kill itself by acknowledging that most of them have done nothing with their lives.

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