When you think about answering the question "who am I?" what factors do you consider? Are we just our experiences or interests, our beliefs, our demography? Who is the golem that drives your body-machine?

  • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    David Graeber indirectly makes an argument in the book Debt: The First 5000 Years (which I'm reading now and it's great! You all should too). He observed that in cultures across the world slaves were often made from victims of war or taken from far off lands. These people had their support networks, lives, cultures, and all the people places meaningful to them stripped away to be made a slave. Graeber implies that it's these relations that make us who we are - our social being as defined by the people we are in community with. Ultimately everything we are is a social phenomenon: Mother, daughter, father, son, sister, brother, teacher, student, so on and so forth. What makes us "us" is our UNIQUE relations to other people. Our role is irreplaceable to those who's lives we are entangled with.

    I think you could extend this metaphysically in a rational way too - but it was an interesting conception that's fresh on my mind.