Let me start by telling a story.
Imagine in an imaginary world, there was an Army General whose name was Alice. In her office, she had a radio on her desk. She loved it. Everyday she spent a lot of time listening to it. Somehow, what she didn’t know was, that every night after she left, her secretary would come into her office and replace the radio with a new one. We aren’t quite sure why her secretary did that, perhaps for security reason. The new radio looked exactly the same as the old one, and it was placed at the exact same place on the desk by the secretary. The secretary made sure nothing seemed to have changed. That means, if there’s a scratch on the old radio, the secretary made a copy of that scratch on the new one, too. We assume the secretary did everything perfectly. General Alice never found out her radio was replaced everyday. She naively believed that her radio had always been the same one straight from the beginning.
Everything had gone seamlessly well for quite a long time, until one day general Alice’s radio stopped working abruptly. Alice was sad. She called her secretary and asked for help. Her secretary then responded with a fairly reasonable answer, said, “No big deal, general. I’ll just bring you a new one.” However, general Alice was sentimental over her good old radio and wasn’t happy about this answer. She said angrily, “What are you talking about? I’ve been using this radio for years! It is special to me. You gotta repair this radio, not to bring me a new one!”
Well, general Alice didn’t know that her radio was entirely a new one everyday and hence felt so sad thinking that she could no longer use it. From the secretary’s perspective, however, her words were unreasonable, even ridiculous, because the radio was replaced each day anyway. Well, let’s finish the story here. It’s just a metaphor.
What I want to tell you is that we are actually like general Alice, and our lives are like the radio. Feel confused? No worries, I know it’s not an easy concept to understand immediately. I will write more articles in the future to help everybody understand. But for now, for people who desperately wants to know what life is all about philosophically, here it is. This is a problem of identity. You think you are always the same person, or the same mind, or the same soul (whatever you’d like to call it) as who you were before, just like general Alice thinks that her radio is always that same old radio. But in fact, It’s not. You’re not, either. You’re not who you were yesterday. You are not who you were an hour earlier. You are not even who you were a milli-second earlier. It’s just who you think you are, not who you actually are. You are no longer that old person yesterday, but a new person now.
I would say at every different time point, you are a completely different person. Your memory convinces you that you are always the same person as who you were before. That’s just a trick of the mind you get from your memories. It is an incorrect illusion. You’ve never doubted it before, but if you do, you will soon find out that it is incorrect. Remember in the story above, general Alice is oblivious to the fact that her radio has been replaced because the new one has the same scratches as the old one. This is the problem. She never thinks of the possibility that her secretary does that intentionally. People naturally won’t question what they see on the surface. You think you are still who you were previously because you have the memory of your past! Well, maybe I should say his/her past, since you two are not the same person. Although the story may not be a perfect analogy, the idea is the same. What appears on the surface isn’t necessarily how things work deep underneath.
The fact is, we are not the same person we were before. We change constantly and continuously. We change every hour, every second, every milli-second. The change may be tiny, may be unobserved, may be ignored, but it is a change. This is a very important concept. From this concept and moving on, we will come to see more interesting conclusions.