Deep and shallow thoughts about education. Random and fleeting visions of reality, truth, knowledge, good, evil, beauty, and madness. Questions and observations about life and the universe. Anything that keeps boredom at bay. By Mike A.G. Muega, University of the Philippines, Diliman.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
I who?
"I" is a weird pronoun, right? When you use it to mean yourself, do you include the person you were 10 years ago? If not, does it mean the person you are right now and not the other one, if you believe you were different, 5 minutes or an hour ago? I think I should suggest instead that we may or may not be the same person we were 1 year or 2 days ago. If you lost a love one a few moments ago, would you rather say that you remain the exact same person you were awhile back? The person you are right now, if you're a father of an adorable kid, must be different from who you were at the time when you were just dreaming to be a father. When you use "I," who exactly is the person that you are referring to? The person you are right now? But then again, here, the temporal referent of “now” is gone. What we actually have appears to be a simple series of nows, but this does not solve the problem. Saying that now covers the past, present, and future, is definitely unacceptable. Well, no one would like to say “now-now-now-now” either; that’s plainly crazy.
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