Does a "True Self" Exist?

[robvalue]

For sure, you have to be clear what level of "zoom" you're talking about. People with weak-ass arguments make the mistake of talking about both at once. If we're zooming in, then yeah, we're a bunch of stuff. We're atoms, quarks, quantum thingies, whatever. But to then draw conclusions about the "zoomed out" world, talking in very different base terms, from observations at the micro level is just stupid.

Our DNA has a massive effect on every aspect of us at the zoomed out level, and I see it as the nearest thing to our essence as you can get. How it's going to get shaped exactly is going to depend on every aspect of the environment, but you are still uniquely "you" whatever would have happened.

What we're really talking about when we discuss the zoomed out is emergent properties such as consciousness. This is so poorly understood that it's hard to say much about it at all, except that it seems to somehow end up as something more than the sum of its parts. Scientifically I find this statement hard to believe; I think it's all a matter of perspective, and ours is fixed in such a way as to make it very difficult to examine. But it "seems" real, and that's about as real as anything gets