Defining the Self

My roommate asked me last week what the identity of a person who had undergone a brain transplant would be. Would the patient's identity be of Person A, whose body had received the new brain, or of Person B, whose brain had been placed into a new body? Or is a third, new identity created by the fusion of those 2? (For anyone who's studied Christology, this may debate may sound familiar, but I'm not taking it in that direction, despite my recent studies.)

So, what defines us as individuals? We are clearly bodies, and our experiences and treatment by others is, at least to some extent, determined by our physical being. I would be very different if I had been born male or black, very short or abnormally tall, or with a disability. Others identify us by these characteristics and, when describing us to others, usually list our height, race, hair color, and build first.

Still, if our parent's words to us as children are true, "it's what's inside that counts". What on the inside counts, though? Are we the sum of our experiences, defined by that which we have done? Surely I would be a different person if I had been born into the Danish royal family or been an AIDS orphan in Niger or a woman behind a burqa in Afghanistan. I know that my upbringing, my schooling, and my travels have shaped me, but is that what differentiates me from everyone else? If a different person, you for example, had been in my place and experienced all that I have, would we be alike? Surely not.

This brings in another dimension: choice. If someone else had started life as I did, they would surely have made different choices and, thus, experienced different things. So is it our choices that make us who we are? If so, our person is formed by the factors that caused us to make those choices, which places the spotlight on our natural traits and the people in our lives. Our natural traits make us who we are to some extent, but a person who had the same personality traits as I have in another setting might have been totally different. Likewise, someone with those traits surrounded by totally different people would likely have chosen another path and would still be different.

I guess I could conclude that the self is formed by an enormous combination of inherent and experiential factors. But that leaves me with another question: am I who I am inside, or who people think I am?

Someone called me an intellectual yesterday. I have never seen myself in that role. I always defined intellectuals as very smart, lofty people who contemplated abstract ideas and said profound things. That's not me, but that is how some people perceive me. Another person gave me a list of traits from which I only applied a few to myself. So, who's right? Are we really who we think we are when we're alone inside our heads, or do people who see us from the outside see what's really there? And if those two images are radically different, does that mean we're fake, or just misunderstood? Do we misrepresent ourselves for self-preservation? Or do people see what they want to see?

I wish that I, like Yahweh, could simply say "I AM who I AM" or, perhaps more accurately, "I WILL BE who I WILL BE." The answer is probably in the middle somewhere, somehow combining everything. To give some sort of resolution to this wondering, I could say that I'm a combination of my natural traits, my physical being, my experiences, and the people who have influenced me, a mingling of who I think I am and how everyone else views me. Any more definition than that is probably impossible, but it would be nice to understand it. After all, this is the time of my life when I should be out trying to "find myself", right? But I'm not lost, I'm just undefined. And really, aren't we all?