What Is The Self?

I use either the word "I" or "self" on a daily basis as I converse with other human beings.  These simple, common words refer to my very consciousness, the mind that inhabits my body.  The concept behind them is one that could easily be taken for granted because of the mundane commonality of these two words.

My "self"--what I mean when I use the word "I"--is my consciousness and its experiences bound together through my memory.  At least two things are required to have coherent thoughts from one moment to the next: 1) rationality, without which I could not have any intelligible experiences at all, and 2) memory, without which I would forever be lost in the present moment with no other information inside my mind.  If I did not grasp the laws of logic, then I could not have any intelligible experiences; if I did not have a memory that constantly supplied me with stored information of some type, then I would be constantly unaware of almost everything around me [1], for my memory would not contain anything on which to build with my new experiences.  Not even my internal thoughts would be more known to me than the external world, as my thoughts too would not be stored and recalled.  My rationality and my memory allow my consciousness to have coherent experiences, the unity of which forms my self.

Only because I am self-aware am I capable of recognizing the concept of the self [2].  I perceive, but I also know that there is a self that perceives--that I am perceiving.  The self is omnipresent in my experiences, accumulating new experiences as each moment elapses, all of which (at least the moments remembered) expand the breadth of it.  This continuing process depends upon my memory.  In terms of how I live and understand my self and my existence, it is as if any experience I have undergone that my memory has not subsumed never happened at all.  If my memory failed to store new memories, my unfortunate condition would deprive me of awareness of my self beyond the moment at which my memory malfunctioned, save for any possible moments in which I would unknowingly wait for my recent short term memories to evaporate without being transferred to my long term memory.  My self would be incomplete, yet I would never know of this.

While the words "I" and "self" may seem trivial, they refer to the very essence of the one using them.  The self may remain enigmatic on some levels, but the self of each being is accessible to it as long as its memories persist.  Without these memories that hold awareness of the self together, a conscious being would be doomed to be aware of only its present experiences and perceptions for as long as it exists.  Without them my life would be so vastly different that I can only grasp the difference on the level of an intellectual concept.  I can logically and intellectually comprehend this difference, but I can scarcely understand what it would be like to experience it.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-reliability-of-memory.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/aspects-of-consciousness.html