When I was a teenager, I used to recall my earlier childhood memories being rose tinted and almost dreamlike, now that I’m in my early 20s, my memories of my early to middle teenage years are also becoming dreamy and rose tinted in a way. Does anyone experience this? Is it possible that I will I remember my early adult years in the same way?
I sometimes think about how over the years every single cell in your body is eventually replaced and how that means the past you that those memories are about is literally a different person.
There’s an idea that any time you sleep you wake up a different person. The only thing that makes you you are your memories and how can you be sure that the you that woke up isn’t just some kind of clone with your memories?
On the surface it seems a little silly, but thinking about it for a while gives me anxiety
You’re a different person in each and every moment. There isn’t really a “you” in the first place when it comes to the first person experience, you’re just a constant stream of changes. So yeah, you are definitely a different person than the one in the memories.
I am going on a “bit” of a tangent here but I have long pondered about what is me in the context of teleportation and uploading yourself to become a digital being and other scifi stuff. I think that I am still me as long as at any given point in (space)time there is either continuity of consciousness or continuity of matter if at any point both of those have breaks in them I would consider myself dead, and even if i would come back as a “same person” from that state, i would consider that being still be not me.
By continuity of consciousness I mean an unbroken line of forming memories and me being aware of being conscious and capable of forming memories. Of course memories fade but i still remember that i had the memories of the time so for me it counts as continuity.
Of course there are breaks in that continuity, for example sleeping is kind of a grey area and being so drunk you dont remember anything for me counts as a break.
But at those times there is continuity of matter. While the exact atoms we are made out of change all the time, the change is gradual and thus continous, usually the scenarios where the contiunity of matter breaks are the scifi stuff so i wont spend more time giving examples.
With that in mind the person in my memories is still the same me because we share the same continuous line of history. For me I am not a single point in time, as then i would be a completely new person every moment, but i am the entire history I have gone trough.
interesting link I found.
neurogenesis is the cause of memories fading.