Your body and mind is just a bag of chemical soup, undergoing a constant reaction. Your tangle of nerves and synapses feed a mess of neurons that are wired in a circuit that gives you that spark of consciousness. But none of this is a fixed system, and your body goes through constant change. As one neural pathway dies, another one is rewired and the circuitry is now different.

You can play the game of debating the Ship of Theseus, but who you “are” or “were” is just an illusion. Our memories are just the old circuits powering up, but even those change over time. Your memories are a false representation of the past because they only ever exist in the present and you’re at the mercy of your own perceptions.

You “are” until you are not. So do what feels good —Kiss your loved ones, hug a tree, and be kind to yourself and others while your bag of soup ain’t leaking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Your past selves aren't dead. You just evolved into what you are now. That's what we do.

Dead is not the same as gone. We are a stream of consciousness moving through time. The past isn't "dead" it is just behind us, just as the future is not "birth".

If you imagine yourself as a river of water, there is still a river behind you and In-front of you, but all you are aware of is now.

Whether or not we can go back or forward in that stream of consciousness - who knows. We don't know what we perceive when we do actually die.

If you can't get past this focus on the concept then at least stop thinking of it as "death". That's anthropomorphising what is happening (trying to attribute a human experience to it) but it's adding the baggage of all those negative or anxious feelings we feel about death. Our consciousness moving forward through time is its own thing, it is not death.

Listen if past me couldn't keep up that's on them.

We're all probably better for it.

I'm way cooler than that guy.

I had a dream one time (a literal asleep and dreaming dream) where I went back to my younger selves and it was the first time I felt continuity, like the me I am is built from all those previous instances of me. They aren't gone, exactly, while I am alive. Yes as you experience time as going in one direction you are not all of them at once, but neither are you a series of points, you are more like a line.

Yes, often.

We as thinking beings consider ourselves to be constant. The trail of memories leading from our childhoods to today make it feel as though we are still that person who lived through all of those times, but we aren't. We can't be.

I have memories belonging to an 8 year old boy in my mind, he had the same name I did and lived with parents who also had the same name as mine, but I am a much older person - older than his parents, even - and I share almost no common ground with this boy. How can we be the same person, when we are so obviously different?

I am physically a different person to this person of my memories, and I can't be sure he exists or existed. He may simply be a figment of my imagination, a story I tell myself of where I have come from but made up from whole cloth.

I can't remember so much of what used to be me, it astounds me sometimes. But also it doesn't really bother me. The me I am now was shaped by what was regardless of my knowledge of it. Those past parts of me have passed through me, and new parts are yet to come.

I guess I'm just not a very sentimental guy.

Personally, I'm glad that fuck-up is dead.

You've probably hit upon a good metaphor for what's happening.
I believe each time we sleep parts of our personalities are torn down and rebuilt slightly differently.
Whatever the mechanism, you aren't really the same person you were years ago, you're a different person with many of the same memories. The "self" is a useful simplification of reality. At the fundamental level, its not possible to define "you" and "not you" at a moment in time, much less across spans of time.

Alternatively, your past selves are immortal. They can't be harmed. Nothing that didn't happen to them can ever happen to them.

Well, if it makes you feel any better, nothing really matters, on a universal scale. We'll be extinct as a species in a million years, probably much less. Our solar system will be nebula after our sun explodes in less than 5 billion. There will be no trace we ever existed.

Just try to hurt as few people as little as possible, and be kind to as many as possible. Leave the place better than you found it. That's all you can do. Or don't, it's up to you.

I really like this topic and think the idea of ones past self is a very interesting concept to think about. Personally I've thought about it in a different way, specifically about whether I own my past and it's also a question about how we own our body.

For example, let's say ten years ago someone took a picture of me and I demanded that this picture must not be shared or posted online. Now if ten years later I ask the photographer to send me the picture and I post it online, then the photographer and I broke the rules. I certainly did not get consent from my past self. So now the question of whether or not I am my past self comes up. Most people would probably say yes, but it's still an interesting question.

To continue this chain of thought even further one can be creative and add themes like time travel and meeting ones past self. That expands the idea to a crazy big scope of possible questions though and is perhaps a bit too unrealistic for most people to bother thinking about.

Coming back to a more realistic idea, would posting a picture of my baby self online and insulting the person in the picture be considered morally wrong? It would certainly be considered rude by people who don't know the context. But how many rights do I actually have here? How about using it as a profile picture on social media? There's many different possible interesting questions here.

I understand that this is opening a whole other can of worms and a different idea than the original post, but I feel it's a similar direction and also brings up the question about the relationship between a person and their past self.

edit: Also I just now noticed that I tend to write "past self" as singular while you write it as "past selves" in plural. I guess that's because you talk about the topic as a more continuous thing that happens constantly. That reminds me of a theory according to which the universe splits up into many different paths every time a random quantum thingy happens. I think it's this thing: Many-worlds interpretation (wikipedia).

Because of the nature of time, the universe is in a constant state of becoming something else. Everything is changing all the time. But, because of the Laws of Conservation of Energy and Mass, there is always part of what was before persisting in what is now. For example, a fire burns logs, releasing the kinetic energy as heat, water vapor, carbon dioxide, etc. The heat dissipates because the atmosphere is very large, but it doesn't dissappear, it just gets diluted. The water vapor is released into the atmosphere, and those molecules become moisture in a cloud and turn into rain, continuing in the water cycle. In a metaphorical sense, your past selves have "burned" and "released" what you are now. You may consider your past selves dead, but the molecules that made them continue to exist as your current self, even if those molecules are rearranged or are slightly different (we eat food and excrete waste, so our molecules are regularly being exchanged with other molecules in the environment). Those same molecules were once inside the sun. Before that, those molecules existed at the beginning of the universe. So, in a way, yes we are constantly dying and being transformed, but the stuff that we are made of can never die. We are just constantly changing, along with the universe, because we are part of the universe.

Good, I hate those past me's

Not a fan of the current guy either

I never really solved this, though I grown to accept it as a sort of reassuring fact.

I am constantly dying and being substituted by my new present self, but I'm only aware of that because my reasoning brought me there, I'm unable to feel that I'm experiencing it first hand. The self who started this comment is already lost in the past and didn't even realise that it happened, there is a perfect continuity between them and me.

It's a bit sad that "I" won't be specifically the one to experience the future, but some of the other selves with which I compose my identity will, which is good enough.

Moreover, it means that I have no need to fear ceasing existing (like with neurodegenerative diseases, death and similar situations), because it has always happened and it's painless.

I went through a period of this when I was younger. I did not find a satisfactory way of dealing with those thoughts, but they did eventually recede.

There's quite a bit of philosophy out there abut this. It might help to read about it. Some physics topics are related, like the Planck scale. If you want to read about what others have thought on the topic, here's a starting point.

So: yes, you're not alone.

Buddhism has some interesting takes on this. In particular, I really enjoyed The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche.

I have their memories, so how can they be dead? Personalities change over time, so it's only natural to see your past self differently.

I think of a tree. It's a tiny little sprout that grows into a sapling that grows into a young tree that grows into a regular tree that grows into a giant.

Yet when I think back to the sprout or the sapling, I don't think of someone that's gone. I get like a cartoon image of the big tree, with the little tree still fully formed inside it, like the big tree has made a cave that shelters the smaller tree. The smaller tree is still there in all it's form, it's just safe and sheltered and a bit harder to see.

I've always thought of that as renewal of the self instead of the self dying.

Your personality is based largely upon your human experience.

As you get older and experience more, you have more things from the world around you to use to orient your thoughts and feelings on the world, and because thoughts and feelings are what the human experience is at its basest level, it will change your personality continuously.

I experienced much the same through and up into my mid twenties. I have found that upon reaching my 30's that it does not happen as much, or at least it takes much more thought and feeling to change my personality.

You too will reach a point where you obtain a certain confidence in who you are and what you actually believe in, and after that, you will not experience the feeling of being a different person every couple of years as much.

My advice to you since you recognize this in yourself is to pay attention to it. If you can realize that it is possible you could be a different person in a couple years, who would you want to be? What would make you happy?

Focus on that, use it.

Well yeah that’s what we call personal growth. Middle school you is dead because present day you is too adult to act like that and have a child’s priorities again.

And in a couple years from now you’ll probably have given up some aspects of your current day life because they aren’t fulfilling you any more for any reason.

Some folks apparently consider this depressing, but I found it helpful to accept that I'm just a pile of atoms drifting through the universe.

I'm 'alive' in the medical sense, so there's lightnings going between the piles of atoms within my brain and another pile of atoms continues to wobble in the appropriate way to pump a soup of atoms.

But I'm not alive in a sense that inflates meaning into it, which we do a lot:

• the completely religious ideas, like heaven/hell or being reborn (in a sense that isn't just parts of your pile of atoms being reused in other living piles of atoms)
• the widely accepted but undefined 'souls'
• some elevated meaning of 'consciousness' (which does not just mean your pile of atoms has some concept for recognizing piles of atoms as individual objects)

Similarly, the past and the future don't exist. They're concepts we've made up. The whole time traveling brouhaha in science fiction might make one think that they exist more concretely, but that nonsense foots on a missinterpretation of Einstein's theories.

So, there's not a meaning to your past self being alive or not. It really is as simple as it just not existing.

And ultimately, without inflating the meaning of being alive, there's nothing to be sad about either. Because, while it's fancy when piles of atoms do the lightnings and the wobbles, it doesn't matter which concrete atoms are part of that fancy pile.

You can even stop thinking about your pile of atoms and rather consider yourself part of the big pile of atoms which is the Earth or the whole universe. That big pile of atoms is quite immortal.

To be honest, not that much

The other way to think about it is not to concentrate on your past self dying but a new self being born.

It's sad when you think that you and I have to die. But the flip side to that is that it is a complete miracle that we will never understand that we even came to being, were born, live, are aware and exist for a brief moment in this amazing universe on this planet.

Yes. I think you might like this article and other musings of this guy https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/p/im-a-different-person-now

Nothing is dead. The past, present and future exist in harmony together. Yesterday is still there, and so is yesteryear. We can't reach it anymore, but it's still there.

The questions you pose are exactly the type of thing one can explore through various forms of meditation.

The thing we usually associate with self can not, in fact, be it, as it is just an appearance in our consciousness. It is a sort of thought, really. Our consciousness, however, is just the sum total experience of the present moment. Everything before is no more, everything after may only be.

I hope my ramblings made sense.

Probably isn't going to help you at all but we get an entirely new skeleton every five years thanks to our osteoclasts and osteoblasts.

Related: Ship of Theseus

You also replace the atoms inside of your body and nether your state of mind nor your physical body are the same in a few moments. Everything changes and time moves forward, relentlessly.

How do you know you can't become those past selves again? If you did have that ability imagine what that would be like...

Let's say you want to bring back your middle school self. You would forget everything that came after middle school, you would become that middle schooler again. Not only that, but to truly be your past self, you would have to be in the same situation, place, point in time. Otherwise the change in environment would be reflected in a change in your mind and that change would mean you are a new person, not your past self. To truly become your past self, you would just be back in middle school and the future would still be ahead. If you pressed a button that did that, after you pressed the button you would not and could not know anything happened at all.

Going beyond that, maybe you have the ability to become your future selves as well. Maybe you have both of these abilities and you just don't know, can't know. If you did, you couldn't tell.

For all you know, in between every moment you jump around and become every version of yourself. Maybe every possible version of yourself. Maybe in between every moment you become every person that has ever lived or will ever live. Every saint and murderer, every animal and bug, every rock and star and black hole. Everything and everyone. And in all that jumping around you would eventually land back to this current moment and version of you, except one timestep in the future. And you wouldn't know any of that jumping around happened, because to be you in this moment you can't be anything else.

You are not separate from the universe, you are the universe. Past, present, and future.

I highly recommend the book Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz. It’s helped me a lot, and boils down to the idea that we have “parts,” and that our thoughts and feelings can sometimes be diametrically opposite.

It, along with being able to speak with zero inhibitions to my therapist that makes me feel heard and my thoughts not seem batshit insane, has really brought up a lot of old memories and scared parts of myself. What I thought was anxiety, I’m learning to notice as a fear I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and that fear helped me survive a lot of my early years of trauma.

https://ifs-institute.com

I can guarantee that this book will give you a sense of the answer you’re asking for.