WHO WANTS TO KNOW?
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
Identity (the Self) is an intersection of “what” and “who.” The fact we inhabit a unique, distinct, incrementally changing body, mostly answers the “what” part of the question. We can appreciate this when looking at photos of ourselves at successive stages of life.
The “who” part—our memories, dispositions, aspirations, and all the revisable, private and public, autobiographical stories we construct about ourselves—is more difficult to pin down. It seems that we construe who we are. Our waking experience is anticipatory. We distill fragments of past memories and imagine what's next?
The first of these stunning photographs of four sisters was taken in 1975. Art photographer, Nicholas Nixon continued to take their portraits, always in black and white, annually for the next forty years! The second portrait shown here was taken in 2014. The series is archived in full in Forty Portraits in Forty Years, a 2014 New York Times Magazine article by Susan Minot.
Nicholas Nixon is represented by the Nicholas Nixon/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.
“We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life… we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others.”
INTERLUDE: THE SHIP OF THESEUS
The Ship of Theseus is a famous philosophical thought experiment. The ancient historian, Plutarch asked whether a ship that had been restored over a period of time, by replacing every single plank and mast, remained the same ship? The idea has some bearing on how we think about embodiment and the permanence of identity.
We know that life changes to stay the same. Most cells in the body are younger than the individual. We get a new stomach lining every few days, a new liver every couple of years and a whole new skeleton about every ten years. The Ship of Theseus analogy breaks down somewhat when we consider recent evidence that, with notable exceptions like the hippocampus, most neurons of the cerebral cortex are not replaced. (It seems that heart muscle cells are also unusual in mostly not being replaced.)
However, the Ship of Theseus problem returns when we note that the hippocampus is critical for long-term and spatial memory. Also, zooming in further to the sub-cellular level—all cells are constantly recycling worn out macromolecules and organelles.
Reference: Retrospective Birth Dating of Cells in Humans. Spalding et al. Cell: 122, 133-143, 15 July 2005.
Salvador Dalí (1931) The Persistence of Memory. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.