Memory Defines The Self

There are two senses in which one could understand the concept of self.  The first is that the self is synonymous with consciousness, meaning that any conscious being has its own self, regardless of how sophisticated that consciousness is on a metaphysical level.  The second is that the self is a unity of experiences within a consciousness.  According to the second sense, people who have lost their memories might be said to have lost themselves.  Both descriptions of the self are correct, depending on the context.  I will focus here on the second sense.

One must have a stable self to even have the ability to form a fallacious argument against a persisting self.  In the absence of a stable self, a person could not even misuse deductive reasoning long enough to concoct an invalid argument against it; they would be adrift in confusion about their personal identity.  In fact, at worst, they would be adrift in confusion about everything except perhaps an immediate grasp of first principles and their present perceptions.  The very process of arguing against the self is inherently self-contradictory.

Without a coherent set of memories, there would be nothing to hold a series of experiences together within one's consciousness.  A mind without a functioning memory would be a cauldron of conflicting identities, none of which would necessarily take precedence over the others, meaning that there would be no identifiable self to appreciate the experiences or comprehend them in a unified manner.  Every new experience would itself form a new identity, since there would be nothing tethering a recalled experience to a present one.

The very fact that I am not confused about almost everything proves to me with immediate and absolute certainty that my memory does provide me with a unified sense of self [1].  Even if my memories of past experiences do not correspond to actual events, it remains true that I have a personal identity because of them.  My knowledge, recollections, and immediate perceptions all mesh together to create my enduring self, and every new experience deepens it further.

The self is omnipresent in my experiences because I cannot escape from my own mind; such a thing would require that my self be separated from my self, an impossible thing.  Without an intellect that grasps the external laws of logic, my experiences would not be understandable whatsoever, but without a memory that ties those experiences into a consistent whole, I would have no core identity that persists from one period of time to the next.  It is the fact that I do possess this core identity that allows me to live as I do.

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