The answer may seem obvious; of course there’s a real you. But journalist and philosopher Julian Baggini, who studies the complexities of personal identity, offers a counterintuitive answer to the question. Baggini is the editor-in-chief of the Philosophers’ Magazine.
There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it’s because of the way that they relate that we get this sense of self. I call it the ego trick. It’s not that we don’t exist, it’s just that the trick is to make us feel that inside of us is something more unified than is really there.
If you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such, but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that’s quite liberating. Because we actually have the capacity to channel the direction of our development for ourselves to a certain degree. Now we’ve got to be careful here, right? If you watch the X-Factor too much, you might buy into this idea that we can all be whatever we want to be. That’s not true. There are limits to what we can achieve. There are limits to what we can make of ourselves. But nevertheless, we do have this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves. The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover, you don’t sort of look into your soul and find your true self, What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self.
To the extent you have a true self, it’s something that you in part discover, but in part create. And that, I think, is a liberating and exciting prospect.