The Questions · the self · the vehicles
What’s left of you when the memory goes?
Take the memories and it feels as though you take the person. The question is whether the memories were ever the person — or something the person was reading.
The mind holds them; the self reads them.
What this settles
Which puts the memories on the vehicle rather than in the driver. A reader that loses its book has lost the book, and the loss is real — but the reader is not the book.
What it leaves open
What is the self ultimately made of?
Raised in this footing and not answered anywhere in the work.
Not this question
Which part of you is actually in charge?
Also in this footing, and a different question. That one answers what the parts are. This one asks which of them the memories belong to.
Also asked as
- What makes you the same person today that you were years ago? What is this sameness made of?
- What's left of you when the memory goes?
- So where do the memories actually sit, and what reads them?
- At the far end — deep decline, the mind really going, the machine failing for good — does the self still remain? Or does it finally go down with the ship?
Where this is worked out
You Are Not Your Memories
What's Left of You When the Memory Goes?
Does the Self Ever Actually Break?
Items without a link are sessions, shorts, strand reads or frameworks that live as video or audio rather than as pages. Everything Philosophy Zero puts out is listed on the Shelf.
Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.
The self as governor
The body, the mind, and the third thing that overrules both — what it does, what is still there when a vehicle fails, and what it is finally made of. 3 of the 5 here have been worked through; the rest are on the map and not yet walked.
- Were you damaged, or did you just lose the wheel?walked
- Which part of you is actually in charge?walked
- Who governs the fleet?answered, not written up
- What is the self ultimately made of?not explored yet