Today is my second day of unemployment, and I am trying out this website to see what I can record for myself. Speaking of recording something, one has to talk about why to record at all, and for myself I have really never thought this question through properly. The meaning of recording, for the time being, probably lies mainly in writing my own thoughts down; the secondary purpose is of course to look for resonance.
For this I looked up, with ChatGPT, some philosophical claims about memory and the self. John Locke’s claim about memory and the self can roughly be illustrated with an example: if I remember that I once studied physics, then the present me and the past me who once studied physics have personal identity. ChatGPT gave a classic example: should “the waking Socrates” be responsible for the actions of “the sleeping Socrates”? Today I will only take responsibility for throwing this question out to myself, or perhaps also to whoever is lucky enough to see this article some day in the future.