Who am I?  I’ve been struggling with that question ever since  began dabbling into the subject of genetics and personality.

It’s no secret that a severe brain trauma or an insidious disease such as Alzheimer’s can alter who we “are”.   Maybe that’s where the “soul” comes in, but I dunno…

No one thinks it’s strange that we can take an anti-depressant and our experience of ourselves and our world looks different. The pill has seemed to change the self, or at least our experience of the self. Hasn’t it?  And what else is the self but our experience of it? (It seems the self really means self-awareness).

If a pill can change the self, is it so far a jump to the concept that our self is the shadow cast on the cave wall by our biochemicals?

Or our genes?

It is now acknowledged that we come into the world with different temperaments and intellectual potentials. They call it being “hardwired.”  It has also been theorized that only human beings possess self-consciousness, although 98% of our DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees.

I don’t think I know myself.  (One of the reasons I’ve never experimented with street drugs is because when I experience myself, I want to know I’m experiencing me, and not a  foreign substance masquerading as me.)