Who am I.... really?

Maybe what we think are our 'personalities' are really just cells optimizing for survival. And so biomechanics completely changes who we are.

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It’s been awhile since I wrote a good philosophical article and it seemed like I was due today.

I was reflecting on some thoughts that EGR has shared with me over the past weeks and I thought it would be interesting to share.

Basically his view is that all we really are is a bunch of cells that were programmed to survive. And so what we think are conscious choices might be far less under control than we believe.

Sure we have “personalities”… but maybe that is just like the screensaver on your computer. All of the coding underneath is pretty much just cells doing as they were programmed to survive.

Let’s first start with some context.

Lady suffering from pica has eaten talcum powder for 15 years

The case of ‘pica’

EGR (who is a doctor) was telling me that he was seeing a patient recently that had ‘pica’ and that it served as an interesting logic point.

Pica is a psychological disorder characterized by compulsively eating non-food substances, such as talcum powder (as this lady above), sand, sandpaper, dirt, paper, ice, chalk and paint chips.

And it is essentially due to an iron deficiency. When iron levels are low, the brain misinterprets nutritional needs, leading to these unusual cravings.

But the important point here is that the brain is telling you what it needs in a way that is influencing how you behave and even almost reflects on your personality.

And the brain is doing that because it was programmed to do so in order to help you survive.

Is the brain therefore a lot more independently in control of us than we think?

By this I mean perhaps the brain’s survival instinct is controlling us in many other ways besides just what we choose to eat.

Maybe the type of people we hang out with, the partner we choose in life, the career we choose, the hobbies we take up… maybe it’s all just the cells of our brain operating out of their own survival instinct.

We have various compensations (ie. damage) that the brain is aware of and therefore it is adjusting our ‘personality’ to optimize for survival.

We ‘think’ we are in control of these choices… but the reality is that we have no more control than the lady above who first started eating talcum powder without knowing why. But the brain was telling her to do it because it needed more iron.

Let’s use me as a case study

I’d like to use myself as a case in point as this is what I was reflecting on.

What blew me away the past ten years was just how much my ‘personality’ changed when I got better or worse.

It was like I was two completely different people.

When I was doing badly i was a person that had a lot of self doubt, shied away from others, came up with a lot of excuses as to why I shouldn’t do things, didn’t want to talk in front of groups, was very conscious of what people thought of me, etc.

But when I was doing better like I am now… I am almost the exact opposite of all of this.

I don’t really give a shit what people think of me. I’m naturally confident.

My wife often tells me that I am talking too loud in cafes and am drawing attention to myself when I don’t even notice it.

I often have a towel in my mouth as I drive my motorbike down the main (Sukhumvit) road of Bangkok… and when people look strangely at me because of it I just smile at them with the towel in my mouth. LOL

I take on challenges with little preparation and the attitude of “fuck it.. let’s roll the dice and find out!”

I am relatively personable with people and feel relatively confident that i can connect with most types of people again.

It really blows my mind when I reflect on it. And it’s the fact that I switched between variations of these two different ‘people’ multiple times in the past decade that really locked it in for me.

That this is likely not just some phenomenon with me. This is how it probably works on all human beings!

Driving around Malaysia in 1998 with a couple friends

How much am I the same Ken I was in my early twenties?

This is another thing that I find interesting to reflect on. What elements of my personality have remained the same since I was young?

With the logic being that if almost nothing held constant from my early 20’s when I was already an adult… then maybe our personalities really are just a bunch of cells responding to signals to survive?

And therefore the biggest influence to our personality is simply the biomechanics that are acting upon our skull and skeleton.

And so with this thought in mind I tried to remember who I was as young Ken.

So much has honestly changed. I don’t think most of my friends from my early 20’s would recognize the person that I am today.

But the parts that I’d say are relatively consistent are:

• I was always ambitious and had high expectations for myself

• I was always a pretty good listener

• I was always curious

• I was always fairly strategic and generally had above average IQ

And that’s about it. At least that is all I could easily think of.

Most of the rest seems to have changed to be honest.

Closing thoughts

My point with using myself as a case study is that I think my friend, EGR, is mostly right.

What we consider our ‘personalities’ really just are our cells/brains reacting to stimuli in order to survive.

And the biggest constant stimulus on them is these biomechanics.

Because when it is getting worse… it is basically putting the brain on full alert to prepare for the worst. And so that then becomes your personality and who you are.

But if you change the biomechanics… you literally change your personality.

And in my view…. that just blows my mind.

**Notice to folks that plan to purchase r2**

We’ve just run out of stock of R2 (RevivTwo) and the inventory that was supposed to arrive tomorrow has been pushed back by around a week by our supplier. So we expect to be back in stock when that arrives.

We will still be taking orders but will be noticing that they will not ship for about a week.