SomeoneElse: And yes, regardless of what you do, you will always be you
Me to SomeoneElse: That's tautologous, hence close to meaningless Someone_Else.
It's meaningless to say "you will always be you", SomeoneElse. There is no changless kernel called "you", unless you believe in some sort of soul, but that's next to irrelevant in practical living. The self changes with the internal and external conditions (sometimes drastically-- e.g. brain injury, disease, etc.) -- it is a matter of convenience and simplicty that we pretend we and others are always the same "you".
But simplicity gets us in to trouble: Many times people will even express frustration and disapproval with change in themselves and in others, because of this belief in the fundamentally changeless constant self-identical self.
When we say that two things are identical even Me(at time t1) and Me(at time t2, where t1 != t2), what we are really doing is suppressing the differences for the purposes of communication, we should not believe that the differences really don't exist on the account of necessity of expedience in communication. When differences exist two things can not be identical and it is therefore only a rough approximation, to say that they are.
Another_Someone_Else: we are from moment to moment 'different'. does that make us a different person?
to lose an arm, are you the same person? to suffer severe brain damage, are you the same person?
Me to Another_Someone_Else: Now we are reaching a matter of "definitions". Some will say yes, some will say no, but what we are doing is sticking differences into the same box for a matter of convenience, largely for reasons social and communicative-- we do it all the time and it's fine so long as we don't lose sight of what it is that we are doing. If you want to take all the past manifestations that led to what you "are now", name them "Another_Someone_Else", stick them in a box so that you can feel fuzzy wuzzy and say that you have an "idenitity", then that's cool because that's what we all do, but often we don't see the process that is taking place. It is naming, suppression of difference - that is approximation of reality - for convenience. Society would like us to think that we have one fixed "I", one "self" which is self-identical and always "you" no matter what you become, because it's simpler that way. It's easier to interact with a well deliniated, well classified concept of our own mental creation than it is to interact with the reality of the human being that doesn't fit so nicely into static categories. It's smoother to be able to be able to treat people as though they are self-contained, self-identical with fundamentally invarient "qualities" above all else.
Following after Nagarjuna, this is my final post on the topic for the time being, and I'll leave it to you guys to think it through as to whether or not you "are" the "same" "person" as always, or whether or not you "have" "a self", if you think its fruitful to do so.
Therefore, those of discerning vision would not have recourse to Is-ness and Is-not-ness. ~ Nagarjuna
