Locke’s argument of identity and diversity made my head spin, simply because he examines it way more thoroughly than most people do. When I think of identity, I mostly define it as something that makes it who or what they are. However, Locke goes farther than that by describing in terms of existence; there is only one version of you, and every place and second that the state changes, that version of you is no more. It exists by itself. Even though you still continue to be “you,” those versions of you are only the diversity of your existence.
You could say that this was a concept that really puzzled me. Even if you change, wouldn’t you still be yourself? Or does that mean that every breath that I take, every move that I make (hah), I will be someone different. Locke’s writing style was complicated because of the long rambling sentences, but in the end, his argument boils down to this.
When I read this argument, I thought of parallel worlds. The theory of parallel universes is that every decision that I make, there is another me in another universe that make the other decision. And since it doesn’t even have to be a decision, it can just be me walking with the other food in that one instant, the theory comes down to the fact that there could be over trillions of parallel universes. These different version of me are diverse, but they are not, according to Locke, identical.
(This reminded me of something that I always thought about. Sometimes, I wondered that after I died, whether I could be reincarnated into someone completely different, as a different place of a different time, place, race, and family. When you are this new version of yourself, you wouldn’t know of your past self, so this could have happened to you hundreds of times from the dawn of civilization. Would this other version of you still be classified as you? But this is just a weird thought I have to myself).
One response to “Me, Myself, and I”