personal identity - a mirror hypothesis

I was nearly three years old the first time I thought “I am me.” I was standing in my bedroom and I was thinking the words, repeating the phrase again and again. I felt a sense of endless expanse and then a sense of vanishing into thin air, of nothingness. I could oscillate between the two feelings as long as I repeatedly thought the words.

At the time and for quite some time afterward, I described the experience to my parents simply by saying, “I am me!” I had expected that they knew what I was talking about. Such optimism! Then again, I wasn’t aware at the time that it might be such an experience was, while not necessarily unique across all people, certainly uncommon for a three-year-old.

In realizing one’s uniqueness, one senses the start and expansion of one’s own existence. In recognizing one’s finiteness, one senses the collapse of and end to one’s existence. Existence and annihilation are what I refer to as the fundamental paradox, and the source of Dramatic Tension.

Language & Thought - A Second Mirror
I now understand that there was something else happening in that moment as well. The ‘me’ in the sentence represents an immediate self, the me that lives in the moment and experiences in an immediate fashion. Up until that moment I had lived an unreflective life. I expressed myself without first consciously considering what the consequences might be. If I had behaved so as to draw parental reproach, I wasn’t able to reflect on how I’d arrived at such a behavior. I couldn’t reflect on my self and so I couldn’t change my self. The ‘I’ in the sentence “I am me” represented my reflective self. It was with this self that I could reflect upon my behavior and choose how to behave in the future.


Image & Action - A First Mirror
At some point before I had the thought “I am me,” I was standing in front of a glass mirror and realized that it was my own image I saw. One maintains one’s perspective when one looks in a mirror, “I see me.” With the image mirror though, the realization is that this ‘I is not me.’ In order to understand this ‘I who is not Me.’ I had to compare the image in the mirror to my sense-of-self. The distinction of course is that this reflective “me” was just a reflection of who I was. It looked just like me, but it wasn’t me.

The experience severed the umbilical feelings of direct connection, however attenuated, remaining between myself and other people. At the same time, I acquired the ability to sense others in relation to me. I could not however reflect on this sense. It would take language to provide me a mirror with which to engage is that type of reflection.


Reflections on Language
Language had afforded me the capability to detach my thought from my immediate phenomenal experience. When I first thought “I am me,” I was using language as a mirror. I distanced myself from the me that had been my entire identity up until that moment. I had shifted my perspective, stepped into the looking glass, and had become the “I” that I had previously thought was not me. I was the image in the mirror and as such, I could reflect on who I was (my immediate self)! Language had enabled me to take this new intellectual perspective and to reflect on the non-verbal me. I was now able to self-reflect and sympathize. Whereas with the image mirror I had learned to distinguish, the language mirror afforded me the capability to discern similarity.


Reflections on Action
Once through the language mirror, I am me, but it is the non-verbal me that takes action. Note that this is significant, the non-verbal self takes action and the verbal self reflects upon, or hinders such action taking. I observe and provide reflective feedback to myself, or anticipatory suggestion. Because once you go into the mirror, once you learn “I am me” you can’t remember what it was to know only that I am not my reflection, or “I am not me.”


Self-Reflection
To this day, if I sit in a quiet place and repeatedly think “I am me,” I still have these feelings. Thirty-eight years of life experience, however, affords me the perspective and lexicon to consciously address the complexities of experiencing “I am me”. With a view to the future, I strive to fill the vast expanse. Rarely do I turn back and reflect upon the beautiful simplicity possessed of one who tells of a fantastic experience using nothing more than the words from which the experience itself emerged.

And so I conclude writing, to go somewhere quiet and again think the words I was thinking the day I first realized, I am me.