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A good question to ask someone is, "Who are you?" You'd be surprised how often people get tripped up on this little doozy. Seems like such a simple thing, right? Here is an interesting experiment: try asking one of your friends to write down five things that describe who they are. Almost invariably you will get answers that fall into six main categories: physical characteristics, personality traits, interpersonal relationships, personal accomplishments, ethnic and national heritage, and personal beliefs. These things are all very informative about a person's physical and psychological chemistry, but putting it into context, it seems like a rather simplified explanation of what makes a person an individual. This simplicity lends itself to inherent flaws in describing individuality. If everyone sat down and did an entire inventory of their selves, given the statistics involved, at least one other person in the world would have a profile identical to your own. Going strictly by these profiles, it would appear that there are two of you running around out there. But obviously that is not the case; there is only one of you. This other person is obviously not you, because only you are you, and you know that you are you. So my question is: in what way does a person know themselves that allows them to believe that they are a unique, autonomous being among billions of others like them? It is the intangibility of this question that makes the question "Who am I?" so difficult to answer. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, right? That seems intuitive when it comes to personal identity. There is something more than just the conglomeration of traits and perceptions that contributes to forming the all-encompassing "I." It is something that is understood in a visceral sense that doesn't lend itself well to verbalization; spoken language is among the most constrained methods of communication. All we can do is understand it in our small, ignorant ways and keep plugging along, building "I" without letting "Me" suffer too much from the lack of comprehension between the two, and hope that this blissful intangibility maintains its integrity as the keystone in our fragile personal infrastructure. Who am I? I am tall. I am preachy (obviously...). I am a son and a brother. I am a college grad. I am from a Scandinavian background. I am agnostic. But who am I really?...I am I.Also this:how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen