I don’t believe that there is necessarily a “real” us in the sense that there is a certain way that we truly are deep inside. We are very complicated creatures. I like to use computers as an analog here. We have our physical bodies (hardware) and our genes and early childhood teachings that came before the age of reason (firmware). Then we have our memories (hard drive), what we are capable of holding in our conscious mind at any given moment (RAM), a myriad of perceptions and thoughts (reprogrammable software), the subconscious (processes running in the background), and the consciousness (the interplay between the computer’s output and the operator). If any piece of this puzzle changes, it does not happen in a vacuum, it effects all the other parts.

This gestalt whole is the real you! This changes with every cycle of the processor(s). The person I was is no longer. That person exists only for a fleeting moment but I retain the memory of him and therefore the feeling of continuity and wholeness. The person who will type the end of this sentence doesn’t exist at the beginning of this sentence and the person who started it is already gone. Children are a continuation of their parents and ancestors in much this same way, but they are mixed up amongst them and whatever new mutations and experiences they may have. Just as we change throughout our lives as we grow so our offspring change from us and we from our parents all stemming from an original source. It is all the same life, a shared life, a continuity of a system, of information that is changed and added to over time.

When we hate or harm another, we are literally hating or harming a part of ourselves. The distinction from one person to another is psychological, a human-made idea, just as all ideas are merely poor copies of the reality that they seek to describe. This is like the currents, tides, and weather stirring the ocean and then parts of the ocean say “I am not the ocean, I am a drop, distinct from the others. I will seek to cause them to flow as I do, to carry the same sediment that I do, to harbor the same creatures that I do, and punish or destroy those that do not.”

A person is an idea. An individual is an idea. Society is an idea. All created by those who are those things, if they are those things at all! Does a neuron think this way? “I am not a brain!” But a person may say “I am not my brain or my body!” A society may say “I am not Matthew Cooley” but it is composed, in part, of him! Is it not him? Is he not it?