I don't know who I am, not really!
Do I have an immortal soul or am I just a concatenation of physical events that will soon pass away?
Is the consciousness from which inner life springs the same in all of us, am I and you really the same "soul" (if there is a soul!), or are we two different souls? If there is only one soul, one light of consciousness, then are we immortal? Am I the "reencarnation" or every living being that came before me, and everything else a "reincarnation" of me?
Are feelings immortal? The feeling transmitted by a Mozart's melody, by a river or a rock... are they real or just in our minds?
What part of me was created by me? What part of me am I responsible for? If I have been raised by rabbits I would probably jump like one and try to feed like one. So does that mean that I am responsible for almost nothing in me?
Does that question even make sense? I mean, what is "me" anyway? If it is Pedro (or Peter, like my family calls me), then certainly Pedro/Peter is responsible for many, many actions and decisions in his life. Many of them dangerous and hard to take or follow, others were simply "I give up" signs. But this Pedro/Peter is not something I made, it is something I participated in making. Like a sculpture one does over time, but immensely limited by the constrictions of the base materials and by the ideas of what can be made with it, what is valuable and beautiful, that were already around.
Yes, I perfected my use of words, I like to read and write, but I could never have invented them. It would have been simply too hard and pointless to invent something with very little or no use at all (if I was the only one using them).
So, who am I, really? The son of my parents, a student of philosophy, a teacher, a consumer, a worker, a voter, a family guy, a pervert, a saint? Freedom perhaps? Love perhaps? Hope perhaps? A big, apparently unending, and void question mark? A doubt?
Certainly we are all of that, and more. And it is great to be part of such a diverse world, occupying just a little tiniest bit of it, seeing just a little bit of it, understanding even less, but knowing, without doubt, that something HUGE is going on, even if I don't understand very well what it is, even if I just see the "fringes" of it passing by, but something is going on, a mystery is going on, and that is, well, mysterious, and magical.
My great sorrow is that I know I'm not able to see the world at large, in part because I'm terribly, immensely, dumb, comparing to what be required, but, worse still, I am an animal, I feel pain, I have difficulty in focusing when intense feelings or sensations occupy my mind, I will get old, my senses will probably get numb, my intelligence will dim, and I can, at all times be affected by disease, accidents and death. So I know that, although the huge mysteries and beauty of the world will persists, long after my pain, dumbness, sickness or death prevent me from seeing it, I will not see it, and I will suffer from my blindness and my being restricted to this ego, this body, this limited set of experiences.
So, in a sense, it is very frustrating to have a "me", because it is a separation, a limitation, and we have all this "candy" around, all these galaxies full of delights that we'd like to explore perhaps through millions of years of adventures, living in a silicon body, or some other more durable body than one based on DNA. It would be great if this "me" was a large collection of experiences, a consciousness immensely expanded, perhaps by cybernetics, that would encompass google and the world. Immense memory, immense wisdom, immense quantity of experiences, immense time to enjoy it all...
Me, a part of me, is anxious for that, a bit like Kurzweil, perhaps. But that's all I can tell you about "me", parts and pieces, different perspectives will give different answers.
To tell you the truth, I think there is no "me". I think what people call Pedro, or Peter, is just a collection of attitudes and memories, in general some kind of predictable behavior, associated with some measure of consciousness (or "light"). I don't think I will ever die, for the simply reason that I have never came to be. I never existed, I don't exist. I am a mere social fiction.
My consciousness exists, the Eye of the Mind, the mind's I. That exists, certainly, it's the cartesian certainty. But, alas!, we do not know what that I, or eye, is, or it came from, what produces it, if it continues or not, if it grows or not, if it is individual or not. We don't know anything about it.
So I am in this paradox, everything I do know about me (where I was born, my beliefs and values, my temperament, my personality, my fears, my virtues, etc) does not exist, it is just a useful social fiction and a requirement for the make up of the persona. What is real in me I do not know, I do not understand it. It is where life and will comes forth, but I don't know what it is or what causes it.
So I'm lost between these two worlds: the fictions I can understand, and the reality which continues to be a mystery. I cannot live without them both. The pure mystery would be craziness, social death, no persona. And to take fictions as reality is even a worst madness, for it passes unnoticed, leaving us death to the mystery, nothing but social / physical machines. So we have to retain both worlds: Peter and the Soul. And Peter looks at the soul with a face full of wonder and mystery, and the soul, as usual, enlightens him but says nothing.
That's who I am.