Humanity has pondered about this for as long as we have been capable of conscious thought. Even you will probably dwell on understanding the meaning of life and have, what woke Gen-Z calls, an ‘Existential Crisis’ at least a few times here during your stay on Earth.
What makes me, who I am?
Many believe that human life is a creation of the Divine, of some supernatural being who has a plan written out for all of us. This theory is quite popular, as there are more than 6.5 billion people out there who subscribe to some religion.
In the 19th century, as the newfound concepts of Modern Science were catching up, chemist J.J. Berzelius put forth his ‘Vital Force Theory’: essentially, life, and organic compounds cannot be created by humans as they have a God-given Vital Force, which we cannot generate. Just 13 years later, Friedrich Wöhler produced urea, an organic compound, in a lab disproving any semblance of ‘Divinity’ that made humans superior to other manifestations of matter.
So, perhaps our existence is just a happy coincidence, an excessively complicated chemical reaction, and as we sustain our lives, the only thing we are truly achieving is contributing to the overall increase in the entropy of the universe.
Nevertheless, there is a value we place on individual humans, or more specifically, their souls. We weep when we think these souls have departed and celebrate their arrival.
Perhaps I strayed away a bit too much from what I intended to write about. When one dies, at what point does one cease to exist? Is it when their heart stops beating? I don’t think so- the heart’s function is to pump blood. It’s a primitive, yet romanticised way of thinking about what signifies life and death.
Instead, we can consider the functionality of the mind to be indicative of life and death. What exactly is it about the mind that is definitive of a person? It could be their memories. After all, ‘who we are’ is the cumulative sum of what we learnt from everything we experienced in our lives, so with different memories, we would be different persons, and the lack thereof means that we never truly existed. But in the Nature vs Nurture debate, it is established that both one’s experiences as well as one’s hereditary characteristics play crucial roles in determining our nature, who we are.
And what if a person were to slowly lose a significant chunk of both his memory and his hereditary characteristics?
Alzheimer’s is a hell of a disease. It’s unique because it is never the patient who suffers. It is a far greater affliction to those who love him.
Witnessing my grandfather, the dominant patriarch and sole breadwinner of the household, be reduced to depending on others for basic quotidian activities is painful. Dadu will never be the man he once was, but does that mean he isn’t the same man anymore?
I don’t know.
Khaki Jungle 