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I have been doing some self reflection, and questions keep arising. In this post I want to ask "are my memories part of the thing that is me, or are they part of my mind, and thus separate from me?" I don't think the question implies a false dichotomy.

  • If my memories are part of me, then I change significantly from day to day.

  • If my memories aren't part of me, then my mind changes significantly from day to day.

What model of self best answers the question?

I can remember or forget memories. But they are always there, barring brain damage, Alzheimer's, senility, etc., thus implying a stability of sorts. Memories can extend back to infancy, perhaps for some individuals to inside the womb.

Logically, they either are or aren't a part of me. A model of self should answer the question.

By self I mean the part of the brain that becomes self aware when I dream or awaken, but this meaning may well be debatable, depending on what model of self you use. In any comprehensive theory of self, the self senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) experiences emotion, thinks, imagines, and wills or desires. If I've left anything out, please include it in your answer.

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  • There is another option: your memories change to support your world view. The whole thing is fluid. The original memories may have been false anyway – not the facts, but the reasons for those facts.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jun 8 at 21:36
  • Old joke. Can you play the piano? I don't know. I never tried! Sigmund Freud argues that the ego, the effort to govern action in the sensory context, transforms itself as it gains knowledge and skill from being newborn toward greater maturity. I have read one paper wherein the author claims that Freud, like Buddha, did not posit the existence of "self". The ego is a biological function of humans and other animals whereas the self is a subjective experience, "I can't play the piano; I want to play the piano; I can try to play the piano; I can learn to play the piano; I can play the piano."
    – SystemTheory
    Commented Jun 8 at 22:34
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    Related: Who am I? Mind, body, mind and body or something else?
    – HolyBlackCat
    Commented Jun 9 at 5:11
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    Unfortunately, we simply have utterly no clue, at all about the nature of consciousness, of self, of memory, of awareness, of self-awareness, as of writing. Any answers can only be, essays on, one or more of the innumerable notions goign around about what these things are.
    – Fattie
    Commented Jun 9 at 17:18
  • I'd argue that memories are YOU, if you suddenly lost your memories, would you still be you? not really. If you could stop remembering, you would stop growing, memento style, stuck forever as who you are, like a LLM.
    – Rainb
    Commented Jun 9 at 22:20

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Your actual post builds again a dichotomy and splits the concept of a person in two entities, named “me” and “my mind”. And after the splitting your actual post asks how the two relate to each other, notably the person and his/her memory.

I consider this splitting the wrong approach, leading to a series of artifical problems.

Of course the memories of a person, i.e. the content of the person’s memory, belong to the person. And it also obvious that a person’s memory changes from day to day: New experiences are stored, some elder and not very significant content fades away.

In this sense the person changes every day. But the new content links to the old content, which makes up the identity of the person. Memory like other mental processes are a dynamic structure, hence undergo change like addition and loss.

As a consequence, I do not consider the phenomenon of change to be an objection against the self-model theory of Metzinger.

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  • your response seems to me to be coming from an AI program. Do you really believe the self is a set of incorporeal processes. Many of your beliefs seem intelligent, but this one seems artificially unintelligent.
    – lee pappas
    Commented Jun 8 at 21:48
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    @lee pappas Please recall my previous definition of the self as a self-model in the sense of Metzinger's self-model theory.
    – Jo Wehler
    Commented Jun 8 at 22:14
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    You stated: In any case, the self is net of mental processes, hence a dynamic structure. It cannot be localized. I strongly disagree. The self is a unit, a one thing, so it can be localized. It is a dynamic structure on the microscopic scale, but macroscopically it is a body that is localized.
    – lee pappas
    Commented Jun 8 at 22:59
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    Here you come to the nub of the matter @leepappas. Materialists are inconsistent — so hopelessly iinconsistent and fundamentally self-defeating that they cannot recognize it.
    – Rushi
    Commented Jun 9 at 5:06
  • I believe the self is a set of wetware running on the neurons of the body. Since damages to the neurons can damage the self, there is clearly a material basis. However, like software, I believe the self/mind is a set of stored and interacting neuronal states rather than being a separate physical object. Any conflict between the two comes from refusing to recognize that they are a single system.
    – keshlam
    Commented Nov 14 at 22:03
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I can remember or forget memories. But they are always there

You seem to be assuming that memories are somehow static entities that don't change. But this assumption may be wrong. Every time humans (or other mammals) retrieve a memory the contents of that memory may change (memory reconsolidation). We cannot introspectively notice this at the moment of retrieval, but there are other ways to verify this.

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In my view as well, the distinction between "self" and "own memories" is invalid.

What exactly is a memory?

Some irrelevant recollection of yesterday's game show? Or the memory of a life-changing event? We know that traumatic experiences can leave essentially physical marks in the nerves of a person, causing/constituting PTSD:

A traumatic event causes an over-reactive adrenaline response, which creates deep neurological patterns in the brain. These patterns can persist long after the event that triggered the fear, making an individual hyper-responsive to future fearful situations.

Of course, PTSD is only the extreme end of the spectrum of alterations our personality undergoes because of events which left traces in us, also known as memories. The warm feeling of being at home when one smells a childhood food; the longing for the safe embrace of a partner reminding one of one's dad.

It is partly our experiences which (in)form our personalities.

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Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened — at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way. [Emphasis added]

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Well that is Nisargadatta; not me!
Can I claim to know it as true?? No.
But hearing it opens a possibility: what I take to be the incontrovertible truth of what is me, in me outside me maybe not a fact, but an attitude, an outlook. Questioning it may have big advantages.

Speaking of out-look its good to remember Carl Jung:

He looks outward dreams; he who looks inward awakens

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I don't understand the difference that you introduce between the concept of "mind" and the concept of "me / self". As far as we can make it out based on the current evidence available / on reasonable assumptions following absence of evidence to the contrary, the self is an emergent phenomenon of the activity of our brain, which itself is an information processing system. In that frame, the memories are an important input of this information processing system. It's safe to say that without this input, the output ("behaviors", "decisions", "feelings") of this system can change drastically. I would argue, to a point where the person is quite litteraly another person without it.

To convince yourself from this, consider the following: Imagine a friend of yours. Now, one day, something happens to them, and they become completely amnesiac. All their conscious preferences / hobbies are gone. They forgot up to their own name. They can't recall their own history, including the one that they shared with you. When you meet them again, in their mind, it's litteraly the first time that they are meeting you. Now, tell me: would you rather say that this person in this state has the same identity as the one that they had before they became amnesiac, or not? That their mind is the same as it was before, or not?

Personally I'd answer by the negative. For all practical purposes, notably from the point of view of other people, this person's mind is clearly and dramatically not the same as it was before. This can lead to interesting considerations. Notably, if, when this happens, the person is serving a sentence inprison for a crime that they committed before, should they keep serving the sentence? Can we still hold them accountable for the crime that they committed before this event? What do you think that they would think if we told them that they must keep serving it? How fair do you imagine that they would feel, when told that they must take responsibility for something that the person that they are right now litteraly did not do?

So yeah, based on that, my answer to your question is indubitably yes. For now, the only way for me to imagine saying otherwise would imply to have drastically different definition / understanding for the concepts of memory and self.

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Strange question. The past forms part of what we call ourselves (I am the person that got into medical school), even if we are not the same. Our memories are how we make sense of ourselves, but I don't think we need them to exist (perhaps in the very short term, phenomenological retention). Dementia patients, even without loved ones, have some form of personal identity with what they have forgotten. If you are asking whether forcing someone into believing events in their life didn't happen is ok, well of course it isn't.

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Memories are narratives which left an impression of very good , good , neutral , bad and very bad. These impressions help build a perception of self.This way memory contribute to the perception of self. But memories can not be called as me , myself or mine. Memories are impermanent. Memories (or part of memories) arise , CHANGE , vanish. Being impermanent, any attachment to memory leads to suffering. And that which causes suffering can not be called Self. Therefore you are not memory, memory is not your self , memory is not yours.

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