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At what point during birth do you become an individual? There is no single momemt, but a gradual increase in individuality as a fetus becomes less dependent on its mother. It develops its own mechanisms to maintain homeostasis, which also means developing a neural system so that the body can coordinate and execute its physiological systems. Yet we do not lose our dependence on parents for health and survival after birth. So we could continue to think of individuality as increasing throughout childhood as children increase the ability to care for themselves independently.
You are a series of instances of you, connected by memory and material passed from one instance to the next. It is human nature to tie these instances into a cohesive story, to make one self that endures throughout time. David Velleman argues that “seeming to be an enduring self, even though one is not, is what makes time seem to pass, even though it does not." Connecting this to the Buddhist philosophy that being in the moment relieves suffering, Velleman says "the appearance that time passes, I argue, is the source of the suffering that is alleviated when both illusions are dispelled”
“The realization that I am of the moment – that is, a momentary part of a temporally extended self – can remind me to be in the moment”
- David Velleman
What makes an individual? It is a system that cooperatively maintains itself throughout time. That means that collectives - ecosystems, social groups, and even corporations - can also be individuals. (Of course this doesn't mean that corporations deserve that same moral status as humans)
The more you recall a memory, the less accurate it becomes.
Memory is what connects the many instances of the self. However psychology research reveals that memory is dynamic, updating with every recollection. So we can never really remember what our past self experienced.
Explain how social groups can be people
During life, your body and mind are constantly working to make sure future you will be alive and functioning. In other words, the present self is determining the future self. But after death, this works stops. The self loses its individuality, because its environment gains control over the future self and entropy takes over. But even as you die, new life forms. The same way the death of an old cell in your body keeps you healthy, the death of an animal in an ecosystem keeps the ecosystem healthy by providing the substance for new life.
When you see a jellyfish swimming in the ocean, that is just a small part of the jellyfish lifecycle. The jellyfish is first a polyp that attaches to a rock. The polyp elongates to create a stack of many layers. Each of these layers comes off to form a separate jellyfish. This brings up the question, should we think of a jellyfish as an individual, or are all the jellyfish from a single polyp a single individual? And, should we consider polyps and the floating jellyfish part of the same individual?
Functions that involve your microbiome:
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Eating
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Having babies
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Feeling happy
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Fighting disease
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Sleeping
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Brain development
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…
The human microbiome is made up of about 39 trillion bacteria and an unknown number of fungi and virus that cooperate with human cells for the whole system to function. Bacteria are necessary to digest most food. The composition of your microbiome affects your sleep, reproductive success, immune system, mood, and even who you are attracted to. Without these functions, we would barely be human. So maybe instead of thinking of microbes living inside of our body, we should thinking of bacterial cells as part of our own body.
This world map shows the top export of every country in the world. Countries have become increasingly specialized, as encouraged or forced by a capitalist world order that relies of trade surpluses. This specialization creates global dependence, where countries lose their physiological individuality (their ability to maintain themselves independently) because they are more reliant on other countries for their basic needs. Global cooperation can be positive, but it can also be dangerous. The COVID pandemic has revealed this with supply chain collapse causing shortages of essential goods and workers.
"When a spot on a person's skin changes color, becomes tough or rough and elevated or ulcerated, bleeds, scales, scabs over and fails to heal, it's time to consult a doctor. For these are early signs of skin cancer. …millions of man made patterns on the land surface of Earth resemble nothing so much as the skin conditions of cancer patients…Green forests logged into brown scrub and over grazed grasslands bleached into white wasteland are among the changes in Earth's color. Highways, streets, parking lots and other paved surfaces have toughened Earth's surface, while cities have roughened it. Slag heaps and garbage dumps can be compared to raised skin lesions. Open-pit mines, quarries and bomb craters, including the 30 million left by US forces in Indo-China, resemble skin ulcerations. Saline seeps in inappropriately irrigated farm fields look like scaly, festering sores. Signs of bleeding include the discharge of human sewage, factory effluents and acid mine drainage into adjacent waterways, and the erosion of topsoil from deforested hillsides to turn rivers, lakes and coastal waters yellow, brown and red. The red ring around much of Madagascar that is visible from space strikes some observers as a symptom that the island is bleeding to death." - Kent MacDougall
Like many others, MacDougall describes humans as a cancer living within the body of the Earth. Just like a cancer, the human population has been growing rapidly and uncontrollably, invading and destroying surrounding areas, metastasizing (colonizing distant areas), and dedifferentiating (losing the unique functions of different cells, similar to globalization of homogenization of landscapes into monocultures). Cancer cells are often described as selfish, since they are stealing resources at the expense of the rest of the body. But in the end cancer cells lose because the body they are part of dies and they die along with it.
Every animal cell contains thousands of mitochondria, which are essential to converting energy to a form our bodies can use. But mitochondria actually originated as proteobacteria that formed a symbiotic relationship with the ancestors of our cells. These bacteria gradually lost individuality and became more dependent on their host cells, but they still have their own DNA. Later in evolution, photosynthesizing cyanobacteria went through a similar process and became the chloroplasts that allow plants to photosynthesize.
There are 3.3 million unique genes in the human body, and only 30,000 unique human genes. That means there are 150 times more bacterial genes. This reminds us how defining bacteria are for human identity.
About 8% of the human genome comes from ancient viruses
Retroviruses are a type of virus that inserts their DNA into host cells. Throughout human evolution, retroviral DNA was inserted into sperm or egg cells, where it was passed down to future generations. These DNA sections have become essential, for example coding for proteins that cause placental cells to stay together. Our coevolution with viruses shows that our identity, down to our genes, is shaped by our environment.
This table shows the lifespan of different types of human cells. Cells in the body constantly die and are replaced with new cells. These new cells are made from food, water, and air we intake, while old cells are gifted to the biosphere as hair, nails, dead skin, poop, etc. About 100 billion cells are replaced every day, making 36.5 trillion cell replacements a year. A human body has about 37 trillion cells (not including our about 39 trillion bacterial cells [2]). But that doesn't mean the whole body is replaced because some cells have shorter lifespans and are replaced many times, (i.e. the lining of your intestine) while other last years (i.e. fat cells). But only female egg cells, the core cells of your eye lens, and neurons last your whole life. This shows the self is not a constant body, but a continuous process that is iteratively constructed out materials from its environment.
A human is made up of many cells that function somewhat independently. Usually all these cells work together as one, but cancer reveals the cells' individuality. Cancerous mutations cause cells to ignore signals telling them to stop replicating, so they continue to grow and selfishly pass on their own genes even when it hurts the human.
Language reminds us that a human is not a static object, but a connected process
This video shows cellular slime mould, a type of amoeba that are generally single celled organisms. However when food is scarce, they come together as seen in the video to form a single cooperative mass that acts very similar to a multicellular organism. This mass even reproduces collectively, with the group cooeprating to pass on the genes of only a few amoeba, just like all the cells in our body work together to pass on the genes in our egg or sperm cells.
In the movie Memento, the main character has short term memory loss and cannot make new memories. The story shows us what happens when memories are not passed from one instance of the self to the next. The instances cease to be cohesive and the enduring self retains only a low level of individuality from the shared material body and old memories that tie the character together.
There is a nested hierarchy of living systems, moving up from genes to cells to organisms to colonies and ecosystems. This is a simplification of a much messier world, yet we still see the same patterns at each of these levels. For example, the organization of a cell, with a nucleus leading, is similar to the organization of a human with a brain leading, which is similar to the government of a society. This leaves us with the question of how the pieces of the hierarchy evolved to group together this way?
A study of 21 couples found that up to 80 million bacteria are shared in a 10 second French kiss. Many scientists think that these bacteria play a role in the evolution of kissing - tasting and smelling someone's bacteria can tell you a lot about them and requires trust (think of how a dog sniffs you before letting you pet them). Someone's microbiome influences their immune system, their health, their diet, their mental health, etc - important things to know about before you trust someone to have your babies. Kissing shows us how bacteria are an essential part of human life, including human evolution and even our social and sexual lives.
“Men die; their world changes; but through this unending death and change, man lives and his world continues. It continues incessantly through ending incessantly. In the individual's eyes, it is a case of an "existence for death", but from the standpoint of society it is an "existence for life". Thus human existence is both individual and social.” - Watsuji Tetsurō
Tetsurō is a 20th century Japanese philosopher that developed an ethical theory focused on the dual nature of humans as both individuals and pieces of social groups. A human is a group of cells that reproduce themselves to continue the group's existence until it dies or reproduces. Likewise, the human species is a group of humans that reproduce to continue the group's existence until the species splits into other species or goes extinct. In both cases, the individual cells or humans may die, but the group continues itself. The different between a human or any organism versus a species, is that there is significant cooperation and communication within an organism that doesn't exist within a species.
We are all a string of connected instances of the self, but frame our reality as if all these instances were the exact same person. We tie together these instances with stories, selectively shaping our memories to construct a meaningful narrative.
“we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes dis-unified, and we always put the best "faces" on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography.”
- Dan Dennett
“We are not only by nature social beings, but we inevitably come into the world already in relationship: with our language and culture, traditions and expectations, parents, caregivers, and teachers. It is a myth of abstraction that we come into the world as isolated egos” - Robert Carter & Erin McCarthy
This quote reminds us the sociality is an essential part of human identity, not a choice. Every human is biologically part of social groups - from birth, we are part of a family. We need another person to reproduce. And no human survives on their own - we feed, clothe and heal ourselves collectively.
This world map from Geert Hofstede shows a metric of how individualistic or collectivist different countries' cultures are. While these are big generalizations, people in individualistic cultures tend to define their identity in terms of their personal characteristics but in collectivist culture people tend to define their identity in terms of their relationships. In more collectivistic cultures, the societal level has more individuality because people give up more of their functions and freedoms to have society-level systems, such as healthcare, education, food distribution, managing waste, physical protection, etc. This map shows that individuality is, to some extent, a choice of how much we decide to maintain individuality at the human level versus build individuality at the societal level.
“We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the Ocean is really in our blood” - Teresa Teaiwa
The ocean is in everyone. Water travels through rivers, streams, clouds, and our bodies, flowing in and out, but aways coming back to the ocean again and again. The ocean both carries the history of Earth through the traces of the many bodies it has touched, and the future of the Earth as a pool of generic life ready to infuse any organism.
What is the wind? It is not a material body. It is a series of movements of other materials. But we name it as an individual, the wind, because these movements are all connected, with one movement causing the next. A human is an individual in the same way. Our bodies are constantly in flux, with new materials coming in and old cells going out. What makes us a single person through all of this is that the movements of energy and matter are connected and organized by memory and genes that are passed from current you to future you.
About 100 billion of cells die and are replaced every day. Each time, DNA is replicated and there are 100 - 200 mutations. That's 10 to 20 trillion mutations a day.
Often we think of DNA as a defining identity that stays constant throughout your life. But these numbers show that our genome changes as new cells are replicated and old ones die. Just like our physical body and our memory, our DNA is always in flux. So you cannot be defined by your actually DNA sequence, only as the continuous process of change that includes DNA replication and mutation.
Explain how social groups can be people
The volume of a human is about 66 litres and each day we consume about 3.2 litres. That’s 4.8% of the average body volume, the same as the volume of both of your hands, plus your lungs, brain, heart and bladder!
Like all organisms, your body is part of the water cycle, a temporary reservoir where water is stored and used before being released as pee, poop, sweat, period blood, etc. When we realize humans are part of the water cycle, we see that not having access to clean water is equivalent to not having access to your own body. We see that polluting water is poisoning ourselves.
The water that’s now part of your body was once ocean, once rain, maybe a mushroom, a woolly mammoth, your great great grandmother, or an iceberg. Likewise, the water in the clouds and the ocean is a pool of latent body, with the potential to become part of you or any other organism.
This time lapse of an ant colony rebuilding after a storm shows ants insanely coordinated behavior. Ant colonies are so well coordinated that they are called eusocial, meaning they function as a single superorganism. Each ant has a different task, just like different organs in our bodies or organelles in cells. The colony reproduces as one, with the queens creating new colonies just like our eggs/sperm create a new human (a new colony of human cells).