Conceive

I was walking home from work the other day taking full advantage of the wonderful warm weather and I was struck by an extraordinary commonplace fact. Each person that I passed was completely different from the next. And I am not speaking of personality here, just sole physicality. And for once, I considered this strange occurrence.

Strange in its unique status among other animals on this planet. But the more I thought about it the more I began to wonder whether this was actually the case. Can’t people tell their dogs apart from others of the same breed? Is there really such a divergence between the differences between humans and those between other animals. Perhaps, to flip an old joke, to animals, we all look the same.

But then I began to wonder about how this is then a question of perspective. A number of years ago when I was working in a bar, whenever I would request something from a manager friend of mine, she would always respond by “You really do think that the world revolves around you, don’t you?” And the answer is “Of course.” One of the fascinating things about our existence, to me at least, is the singular perspective that we have. No matter what any of us our doing we always look at things through our eyes, feel things through our skin, and experience things through our bodies. No matter how much we may try to empathize with others, even that empathy is filtered through the lens of our perceptions. We are never able to experience a single thing where the world does not revolve around ourselves.

And it is through this constancy of body that we build our ideas of personality. Since I have always existed inside of this same body and experienced things through this same entity and set of organs, the person within must be the same. But perhaps this is a great fallacy, a lie that we have constructed based on this uniform perspective that is impossible to escape. While I would recognize my physical self from ten years ago should it appear suddenly in front of me (I have seen the photographic evidence of my youth!), but would I recognize that person at all. Can I really say that who I am today and that person are truly one and the same.

I often hear talk about people changing (or not changing) and the constant evolution that is sweetly phrased “growing up” – but what does this all mean? If there are things that I do now that I never would have even considered before, I am the same person then? Of course, it comes done to a question of classification in the end. Do you maintain your personality and merely see it change over the course of a lifetime or is life an experience as a multitude of different persons that inhabit the same body linked together by the illusory wrapping of memory and body?

One thing is for certain though, at any age I have been able to have my mind wander from noticing that people all look different to considering the basis of consciousness. Maybe my parents were smoking a little something when I was conceived.

And that word itself is perhaps a link to the puzzle for I have often found our choice of words to describe our collective understanding. To conceive or have a concept is normally used to describe the act of forming something in the mind. But in the context of birth it is meant as a physical rather than a mental one. However, maybe conception is more of a mental idea than I previously thought. For if to be conceived is for the thought of who I am to be created, to emerge from nothing, then this is what conception is. For it may be from that moment on, an idea of myself begins. From my parents contemplating who I will become to my own belief about who I am, these are all merely conceptions surrounding a physical being.