the.com/self
the only character you're stuck playing in every scene you'll ever shoot.
means The whole of what makes you you — your identity, your inner being, the continuous person you experience yourself to be.
from From Old English 'self' (also 'seolf,' 'sylf'), a Germanic word — kin to Old Norse 'sjalfr,' Dutch 'zelf,' and German 'selbst.' For most of its life it was just an intensifier or reflexive ('the king himself,' 'wash yourself'), and only later did English start treating it as a noun — a thing you could have, find, lose, and discover. The bigger ancestry beyond Germanic is murky, so where 'self' ultimately comes from is, fittingly, a question of identity that nobody has fully answered.
- no center
- Neuroscience finds no single brain spot housing you
- cell turnover
- Most of your atoms swap out yearly
- split brain
- Severed hemispheres can hold rival opinions
- narrative trick
- Memory edits your past to fit now
- buddhist take
- Anatta argues the self is empty