Who Am I?

I can’t imagine that one would be the same person if they couldn’t remember their past. Past experiences shape who a person becomes, how they react to different situations, and the choices they make in their life. These unique occurrences shape individual’s lives and make them different from others around them. Augustine focuses so much on memory and the how it is viewed as “unconscious knowledge.” I feel that Augustine would also agree that if someone could not remember their past, they would not be the same person. He discusses how vast the concept of memory is and how his lack of ability to understand the immense notion directly results in his incapability to understand himself. Augustine feels that memory and knowing oneself go hand in hand and I, for the most part, agree in this case.

While I feel that if someone can no longer remember their past, they are not the same person, I also wonder if perhaps this loss of memory simply makes the person a different version of themself. They are still the same person physically, still have had the same experiences even though they can no longer recall them. They have been shaped by their past along with the mere fact that they can no longer remember that past, they just may not be able to acknowledge this fact.

Throughout Alzheimer’s, the patient goes through a slow decline of memory. I found it very intriguing that Webb referred to this decline as one of unlearning and not simply forgetting. “I call Alzheimer's the great unlearning, because it is clearly an unraveling of mind, language, and former knowledge. But in my experience, there is a center, or centers, of apprehension and experience (such as humor, intuition, and emotion) clearly intact much longer than mind and language” (Webb). Does this mean that the person becomes less and less of themself as the illness progresses? Is this unlearning of oneself or unlearning of the things one has experienced? I feel these questions depend on the circumstance and to what degree the person accepts their experiences of “unlearning.”