Defining I

It seems strange to a lot of people the way that I define "I." I, as far as I'm concerned, is short for Individual or, more shortly, the individual that is me, the person that I am.

I guess that to me "I" is a simple concept, because it is a part of me, it is me. A lot of people find it very difficult to define exactly what it means to call myself "I" or to define the profound meaning of a phrase like "I am."

The simplest way that I define "I" as the individual is based on an idea that was instilled in my as a little boy.

When I was younger than I am (I hesitate to say "young" because words like that are so relative I would like to relate them to something) I told that the individual is a sum, the individual is constructed out of "stuff."

My 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Melton, would kill me if she saw me use that word, but because the essence of "stuff-ness" (a term I used to use in my philosophy class) was so difficult for me to explain I would limit myself by speaking blandly about it.

Now that I know what that "stuff" is, I think it's really important for us to recognize. As human beings, we are defined scientifically as a floating pack of neurons and electrons, buzzing around inside of a skull, but what we really are, beyond the simple physical scientific explanation is "I."

The creation of "I" started at the beginning of the universe, because the earliest events caused the effects which would become the causes which would become the effects which would become the causes (and so on, and so on, and so on) until we reach the present day. This tangled web of cause and effect is what leads us to the Now.

However, it is my understanding that everything from the beginning had an impact on us, because it led up to the events that led our parents together, but it also led our grandparents together and our great grandparents together (and so on, and so on, and so on). These events are what resulted in the creation of this physical definition of the I, to the scientific definition of the "stuff-ness" that makes us up.

I think, however, that to limit who we are (to limit our definition of ourselves, as "I") to a strictly physical and neurological definition is both ridiculous, because it gives us no real insight into the nature of social application and applicable theories in regard to the human condition, and unfulfilling, for the same reason.

When I consider what it is to be "me", what it is to be "I" it makes the most sense to say that I am what I am, as a physical being with neurological bits and pieces buzzing around inside of a skull, but even that definition is the result of a series of events that has led up to my existence.

What it means to define myself as "I" is to recognize that I am the result of thousands of millions of trillions (and so on and so on) of cause and effect relationships that stretch back all throughout history.

My connection to yesterday is that, though I have managed to create the present state (the "I" that exists in the Now), I am still a product of everything that I was a product of yesterday, only now I have built even further on top of that. I have constructed new pieces of the definition of "I," a definition that is constantly evolving, changing and requiring redefinition.

I am everything that has led me to come to the conclusion that I have needed to define myself as "I". I am everything that has ever happened that has led me to the present moment. I am an etymological symbol residing in the Now that can be unwoven and traced back through generations of cause and effect relations to lead to the Absolute Beginning of time.

That, perhaps no quite so simply, is the definition of "I."

The Individual Evolution

The individual evolution is part of my application of cause and effect. In honesty, it is the overarching theme in everything that I intend to write in the blog, because it is something that I have always asked myself about.

I always wondered what makes an individual, what makes me different from you, but, at the same time, what makes us the same. What is the combining thread, and what differentiates the two of us.

The individual evolution is simple a connection to Darwin's metaphor, his understanding of the species that inhabit our planet as ever-changing. Evolution, definitively, is constant change. It is the idea that the universe never stops changing, that species never stop changing. What I simply mean to say, in calling it "the Individual Evolution" is that we are constantly changing.

There is a Buddhist idea that, simply put, states that I am not the same person from one moment to the next, that I am constantly a different person, even though I inhabit the same physical being over the course of a human lifetime.

I know that I am different from one moment to the next, because I know that I grow gradually, I know that, in my own hindsight, I am a different kind of creature, with different intention, different motivations and different ideas, than I was when I was younger. I know that, in time, my intentions will change, and so will my motivations and my ideas. I also know that these things happen from moment to moment, gradually.

I know that because the hairs on my face grow slowly, and I never feel them growing because they are always growing, and I cannot differentiate between when they are and are not growing, because the latter never happens.

It seems strange, but I know that I cannot explain what changing feels like, because I have nothing to compare it to. Just like I have no idea how to explain what it, paradigmatically, feels like to be alive, because I have nothing to compare it to. I can say how being alive in this moment is different from being alive in moments previous, but I do not know what is paradigmatic about them all.

Before I really started thinking about it, I just thought about this Buddhist understanding as an understanding, something that couldn't be explained, but simply was. I later came to the reasoning above as the best means of explanation.

The question, though, is what changes me. What are the causes that effect the changes in who I am. My answer was specific and bland. Everything. Everything that I go through and experience in my life changes me in some way, whether that is because it leads me into the next moment or because it is a memory that I will carry with me forever. Every experience I has changes my life and who I am, whether I remember ir, whether I think about it's specificities, or not.

I will, hopefully, be able to help you understand why every detail in every moment of your life effects you, and how everything that you do affects the world at large. But for now I simply wanted to give you a glimpse into what the individual evolution is, what it means and what it does.

Starting Things Off

At one point I was thinking out what I was going to say, but it seems ridiculous to do that, because, if there is anyone out there reading right now, it doesn't make sense to insult your intelligence by pretending I'm organizing my thoughts in any serious form or fashion.

The purpose of what I'm writing, in all honesty, is to put out an idea I call "The Individual Evolution" and the little ideas that branch off of it. There are lots of them, right now, and I've been jotting them down in notebooks for a long time, but I figure it'd be best if I spread them out over time so that it might be easier to digest, or at least you might have more time to translate what I'm writing into something coherent.

The Individual Evolution comes from a belief I have in cause and effect and what happened, happens and continues to happen, as I explore what it means to say, basically:

Everything that happens is caused by something, and causes something.

I didn't think it was profound until I started to think about what it meant to say that everything comes from somewhere and everything creates something or, at the very least, does something.

What it means, the conclusions that blossom when you think about it as a premise the contexts of things that we also consider basic fundamentals of human life, are really interesting to me and I hope that, starting things of, they are to you.