Pattern
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I made this drawing years ago while thinking about a question that has followed me around for most of my life:
What, exactly, is the thing I call me?
A body seems like the obvious answer, except that it isn’t the same body I started with. Cells die. Cells divide. Hair grows and falls out. Skin flakes away. Bones grow and regrow. Molecules arrive, stay for a while, and leave.
The vessel is under constant renovation. Slow motion revision.
Am I memory?
I have no recollection of my own birth. None.Evidence support that I was apparently there, and people I trust assure me it happened, but from the inside there is simply darkness. No opening scene. No title sequence. I arrive somewhere later in the story already underway.
In my case... first memory is unclear. A purple bathroom. Piles of clothes. A musical mobile? Fuzzy.
So if I cannot remember an event, in what sense was I there?
Here is an argument for shared memory if I ever heard one.
It sounds ridiculous at first. Obviously I was there. Witnesses. Documents. A tiny physical organism existed, carrying my name and eventually becoming the man/wolf presently drinking coffee and asking irritating questions about metaphysics.
But nearly everything about that organism has changed.
This is the old Ship of Theseus problem wearing a person.
If a ship has each plank replaced, one at a time, until none of the original wood remains, is it still the same ship?
We generally say yes.
Not because the wood remained.
Because the pattern did... not governance or administration. No serial number here.
Something persists through all that replacement: organization, relationship, continuity. The particular atoms seem almost beside the point.
Maybe consciousness works that way too.
Maybe I am not primarily the material from which I am assembled. Maybe I am the arrangement. The peculiar ongoing pattern of memory, temperament, affection, fear, habit, curiosity, scars, desires, mistakes, and stories that keeps reproducing itself while the physical substrate quietly changes underneath.
Which is WILD! Replacing every component in a power plant while maintaining the continuity, heat, frequency, of the spark.
Comforting and unsettling.
Because patterns can change, interrupt—be forgotten even.
But they can also survive astonishing amounts of damage.
Perhaps this is why an old photograph can feel simultaneously like me and like a stranger. The vessel is different. The memories are incomplete. Yet some recognizable geometry remains.
He stands exactly like his father.
Her mother holds her arms in the exact same way.
Not genetics, behavior.
Patterns.
I increasingly suspect that this is what we spend our lives becoming conscious of.
Not the body.
Not even the autobiography.
But the strange continuity running underneath both.
Whatever that thing is, it has been replacing itself for decades. One tiny piece at a time. But what remains are the synapses that make me, me. The spark of the self. And every moment and every ONE that I've ever met are a part of that.
So no matter how I change, I will always be me.
The pattern of I.
Indelible me.
Constant as the northern star, dumb as a rock.
