Is this me?

Dear Reader.

Today I'm going to get a bit philosophical and to start at the very begginning, its a very good place to start, when read you begin with A, B, C when you philosophy you begin with;

Who are you? What are you supposed to be doing? And where does the world come from?

Yes I am paraphrasing "The Sound of Music" thank you dad for the weird upbringing. these arguably are the three questions all philosophy is built on. Today I'm going to be talking about "Who are you?" but its always useful to think of philosophy in these terms especially if you want to start studying it.

So "who are you?" if you answer with your name "I am Joseph" (for example) well you need to start thinking about whether you're name makes you what you are. If I was born and given a different name would that make me a different person, do "Franks" have a certain frank quality that comes with the name? I have several  But I digress really the question "who are you?" or "who am I?" (perhaps an easier question because you know more about you than anyone else. Don't you? ...) brings me to the picture bellow.

This is me aged around aged five taken by a man named Donald who goes to my church (and quite interestingly was childhood friends with Ted Hughes the past poet lariat),

and this is me today taken on my dad's phone to test out a new app on his phone.

and just to show ballance in-between here is a picture of me looking fat in front of a boat.

are the people in these pictures the same person? because I believe I have developed a bit both physically and mentally, I have changed and developed and have been moulded by time. They have different bodies, different brains, different tastes in hats and clothes and different beliefs and ways of seeing, the boy in the first picture wanted to be an inventor, had never read a book in his life and thought girls were stupid (ironic because I know now that he was fucking idiot).

The people in these pictures are even different people by most physical standards because every cell in your body, even down to your bones and your braincells dies and is replaced in at least a year. And yet I can say to you in every picture this is a picture of me. Who am I? What makes me, me?

I suppose what this does show is that what I might be is an accumulation of things but it is one of the reasons why I like looking at these pictures because its such a complicated experience. They're me but then they're not me yet.

its a bit like that when you watch really old films of heroes doing death defying stunts you find yourself thinking "oh gosh they're going to die" and then of course you realise its just a film and they won't really die and then you realise that if its a really, really old film, then they might well be dead already.

Both dead alive and about to die at the same time.