EvidenceVsFaith Wrote:"Why am I me?" you are you because you're not someone else.
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You are not someone else because then you wouldn't be you!!!
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I'm not making an argument because no argument is required. The question is like asking "Why is a rock a rock and not something else?" We define ourselves as necessarily not someone else and someone else as necessarily not ourselves. This is a matter of definition not argument. We are ourselves for the same reason a rock is a rock, because it by definition is what it is.
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We are us because if we weren't us it wouldn't be *us* asking the question it would be other people. It's the anthropic principle and it's fucking simple.
Exactly. It's a really simple point: I am me because the claim "I am not me" is a contradiction. In a sense, it is a tautology, as Saerules says. But this doesn't make the claim weak. In fact, the tautology is perhaps the most valid of arguments (a bachelor is an unmarried man, for example). And the facts that its negative is necessarily false, and that the law of the excluded middle is a self-evident axiom, we are left with the undeniable conclusion that I am me because... I am me.
