Free Will, Decision making and religion

[Mudhammam]

Is the self necessarily unchanging? The Buddhists make a lot of arguments that there is no unchanging thing in consciousness which would serve as the self. But I wonder why the self has to be considered unchanging; why can't it change along with everything else about us?

I analogize the conscious self to a river, in that both change, and yet remain selfsame.

I find the idea of an unchanging self to be frighteningly static, myself.

I don't think the idea of an unchanging self is compatible with the knowledge we have about the brain or its contents, especially the personal experience of growing conscious of your surroundings and the mechanics that comprise any semblance of understanding them. I look at the brain as hardware that is pliable to whatever software gets uploaded, though the hardware itself is hardly static. The self is in some sense the thought or awareness of memories that are retained in the hardware; storage is probably unconsciously filtered so that some memories are permanently forgotten, others are filed away for convenience, and still yet others are perpetually recalled due to the structure of language, one such memory being this "person" experiencing "event X" at time "Y" that the dynamic system categorizes and defines as "I."