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Saturday, August 15, 2009

The most boring about me ever

I was watching a TED talk and it occurred to me that this can be a wonderful "orkut about me". I wrote the following "about me" on that weekend. To my surprise, no one commented on this about me. The only comment I got was "Its too lengthy". However, I love the concept of this "about me". Enjoy reading.


This is not just an "about me", its also an "about you".

We always make a distinction between what is our's what is other's. What we never bother to think is, what is "me" and what is "rest of the world"
Think about it.... I am giving you 10 seconds...
(and please don't confuse it with the great philosophical question "WHO AM I ?" )
.
.
.
I knew you won't bother to think. Never mind, you are just another example of I-don't-have-time-for-all-this-shit and I-just-want-to-know-how-you-think type of person.

There was nothing much to think ... on a very vague level, it just that everything that sticks to us when we move, excluding
... clothes
... hmm shoes
... hmm dead skin (dandruff!!! ... that can't be me)
... the air inside our lungs
... shit and similar waste products (yuk, that's not me, even if its inside me)

If we exclude the tumor that develops inside us or the stones that we may generate in various parts of our body, our definition is almost correct.

But what if we try to refine our definition of "What constitutes me" ...
Everything that sticks to me when I move, except the "things" that I don't care about even if I loose them, constitute "me".

Though I don't care if I loose 1 cm of my hair, but I really consider them a part of "me"...

If you are a very logical person, you may have noted that I have made the definition highly subjective by introducing a psychological factor "things that I don't care".

The moment I say that "the things that I don't care to loose", the definition becomes dependent on the person who is defining himself. For example, a person, who is planning a plastic surgery of his face, do not really cares to loose his skin (under anesthesia). He may actually hate his skin for being so ugly that he decided to undergo a plastic surgery, and do not consider it to be a part of himself.

OMG! another complexity, what about organ transplant ? Does the original organ constitutes me, or the new transplanted organ ?

Even if my whole body gets transplanted (including those that impossible to transplant yet), lungs, heart, liver, stomach, pancreas etcetera etcetera and I still have the memory of myself, and if I still can remember who was I, then all the organs that form a part of my body at that time will be "me".

While defining "me", a statement that I want to mention is "He just loves my body, not me." This statement creates an impression that the speaker thinks himself to be different from his body. This is also preached by religion, the concept of a spirit.

I don't really think that I am different from my body, in fact there is a part of my body that, if transplanted, will make me die even if my body continue to live; and that is my memory. If some forgets everything and starts everything from scratch, that is equivalent of being reborn.

So "What is me" ?

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