For me it's not perception: in most ways, I'm exactly who I've always been (e.g. decided to be an architect in 1985, followed a straight path to today). I'd have to be extremely committed to the idea of being a divider to see myself any other way.

Even the biggest change(s)--from politically conservative Catholic to very liberal atheist--have significant continuity. What convinced me to reject conservatism was realizing how little they cared for things I was raised to value (equality, conservation--things Republicans paid lip service to but were full of shit on). That said, I find myself struggling to recall/recognize my day to day POV in those years. But we're talking 3 decades ago.

The other clearest shift is less rigidity/judginess in general, and sometimes I forget how much that used to define my personality/worldview. But I wasn't so straight and narrow then, nor so loosey-goosey now, to feel like that was a different person. I mean, I used to be skinnier, too.

If you got skinnier again we could be loosier too!

Anyway, big picture I think the answer is that everyone has a tendency to view oneself through one lens or the other regardless of the objective amount of change, and how rigidly we hold to that has more to do with levels of self-reflection than anything else. IOW, whichever side feels right to you, if you think about things at all you'll recognize the countervailing change/continuity. But some people don't think about things at all, and insist they've left all youthful foolishness behind or else have always been just as they are today, and that's that.

I don't know if the article talks about this, but I'd speculate that most people are continuers. First of all, our brains are very much hardwired to reduce cognitive dissonance, to the extent that people will, in anonymous surveys, claim to have voted for the other side after their preferred candidate loses, and even moreso if they win but are disgraced. So we look back and pick and choose the parts of our past that flatter our present selves. I don't think that's purely temperament; I think it's closer to universally innate.

But of course we all do change, so some people focus on those changes despite that innate tendency, because of innate personality. Not better or worse, just different. But less common than the other, I suspect.

A river cannot be stepped in by the same you twice.

For the multitudes out there who read the article even though heebie described it as kind of boring, and having read the article, remain hungry for more, the 2004 philosophy paper that started a lot of this weighed heavy on my thinking around the time I was writing my dissertation. It was passed on by a friend who considers himself strongly episodic (a "divider" in the article's terminology) and, since I agree with 4 that the continuer pattern is more common, I think episodic folks including Strawson often think of themselves as a neglected minority and find it affirming to make the distinction.

I think I'm more pragmatist/Nietzschean about it all: a continuing narrative of the self seems good if it's useful for life. In the context of gender transition, last year it was really important to find or construct a narrative in which I had been always this way but occluded, because I was badly in need of a fixed point to hold to. By now that baseline is better established, and it's starting to feel okay to allow complexities and discontinuities in.

"We're all Ships of Theseus, aren't we."
One summer I went on a 12 day canoe trip down a river. At some point later I tried to figure out how long I would have at least one molecule of water from that river in me. Based on reported isotopic turnover studies it was disappointingly short.
I have a pretty good memory of places- not photographic to the extent that I can tell you what was on a table if you asked after I left a room, but as an example I can picture the layout of all the airBnBs we've ever traveled to. So that makes it super easy to consider something that happened 20 years ago to be happening to the same person I am today.

I'm extremely interested in the overlap of memory and self. more later, for now will just namedrop Hume and Nagarjuna, who both arrive at deep suspicions about self.

I have a continuity editor to take care of keeping my past selves in alignment. For example, unless there's a scene with a haircut, if you encounter me a week later, my hair will be a bit longer than the first time you saw me.

7. Maybe you know the story "Funes the Memorious"? His memory is so vivd that he cannot effectively live in the present.

Is that the one where he tattoos his memories all over his body?

Funny thing is if I go back to the archives from 15 years ago I have no memory of writing the dumb comments that appear under my name.

I think I'm making the same dumb comments.

One of my favorite experiences in the world is re-reading something I've written years ago, getting to the page break and mentally finishing the sentence how you'd write it today, and then discovering that's how you wrote it back then. Not that it's the best way to write it, but that it was the collection of words that automatically tumbled out of your brain, and still does.

An important aspect of this topic is motivated self-deception-- a 100% viable strategy for lots of circumstances is selective memory, ordered to ignore past manifestations of unpleasant aspects of self. That lie wasn't important, this person didn't deserve compassion. Especially acute with intimate or substantial mistreatment of others, that is of family or partners.
There's an adjacent cluster of problems with nostalgia, whose political manifestations we're all now noticing. Problems for living a good life, not really philosophical ones.

15 makes me think of a thing I've thought of before, which is riffing on the "Before the wedding, keep your eyes wide open. After the wedding, keep your eyes half-closed." In other words, what's the broader set of circumstances where you should keep your eyes wide open, and which should you keep your eyes half-closed? It's too exhausting to see all the problems in the world and in your life, but it takes a bit of wisdom to know which ones you can safely turn down the volume on and which ones will blow up without tending.

I don't really feel like the person I'm inhabiting is intrinsically me, but some extra years in between isn't an important factor in that.

Where'd you go?

Unlike SP, I remember less about things that happen to me than almost anyone I know.* Also I'm a divider I guess - I'm mentally open to, and half embracing the idea that previous selves were different people. With the isotopic turnover thing, a comparative anatomy professor when I was an undergrad liked to talk about how bones were constantly being remodeled and his laugh line was "on average your whole skeleton is replaced once every seven years... [pause for a beat]...it's your personality that's permanent." Which is true.

*I can't edit out ALL the Moby calls from my posts.

I wonder if having a divider's perspective feels like you're always stuck as Future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy.

La Rochefoucauld: Everyone blames his memory, no one blames his judgment.

What about avoiding looking at your old photos after a nasty breakup? Buried memories to be avoided at all costs are a staple in many families. There must be records of the good times Brad and Jennifer had together, meaningful gifts.

7.last is very recognizable to me as well, and is definitely part of my sense of continuity.

Maybe my biggest gap in empathy is not being able to comprehend the inner lives of people who don't have comprehensive inventories of their lives. Like, I know where everything is in my (perpetually stuffed) fridge*, and also could drive to the vast majority of the hundreds of projects I've worked on over the years, and could pretty closely recreate my classroom schedule through college and most of HS, and can pretty closely place the date of almost any significant event in my life (yesterday someone asked me if I had any recent traffic tickets, and within seconds I knew the approximate date of my last one, in late July of 2018). Like, I know I have a "good memory", but I know that there are people who have virtually none of that framework, and I can't conceive of what that's like.

*setting aside the various jars of leftover sauces that fade from memory but still take up shelf space

I can't even imagine how someone can be a divider. (It's like those people who profess to not think in words. How are they able to think at all?)

I have undergone events in my life that have changed me in important ways. I can envision myself having become a very different person. But it's all still me -- the person I was; the person I might have been.

20: Future Homer is a different guy, but when I get there, Past Homer is still me.

24.1.b https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/Roger_B04151._Nelsen.pdf

When I think about this I remember the paper by Derek Parfitt I read in my Introduction to Philosophy class in my freshman year at college. Am I still the same person? I sort of remember being that person.

27: While I was influenced by Derek Parfitt's argument against personal identity over time, I have mostly been a continuer. I would note that unlike other people that change their musical tastes all the time, I still love pretty much every song I ever loved. The first song I remember loving is "Puff that Magic Dragon" and I still can be moved by it. But then the other day, I listened for the first time in many years to "Had Enough", which was the first Who song that got my attention when I heard it on the radio. I thought it was terrible, and I had a hard time identifying with the person that was drawn to it.

I keep one eye half open, the other half closed.

By constitution I'm a strong continuer, but still before (0-17), during (18-22), and after (23-now) leaving my faith are really significant splits.

Anyway I doubt we'll find many splitters here at this point, any splitter worth their salt stopped hanging out here sometime in the late aughts.

30.2: Yeah, but I bet some of those "splitters" are secretly lurking, and now are wondering how much have they really changed after all.

Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things?
You're still the same old girl you used to be

You should really keep your lying eyes half-closed.

I lean splitter, but may not be worth my salt. There's a stranger in the house but he looks like me.

Evil twin?

I'm also a continuer, and enjoy looking back and seeing the turning points that adjusted my path... but it's still my path most of the way back. I used to think of myself as good at foresight - like figuring that the many people who protested against closing the high school campuses so that students couldn't leave would drop/forget their opposition shortly after.

Of course, part of it may be that I'm so bland that there's not a lot of outrageous self in the past to disclaim.

28: Huh. I never liked that tune and had mercifully forgotten it existed.

But I initially thought you were referring to the similarly titled "I've Had Enough," which was great when I was 16 and remains great today.

1.2 and 30: My atheism is deeply informed by my childhood Catholicism. The Catholics taught me how to think about right and wrong and, at the risk of being glibly paradoxical, I will say that made it pretty inevitable that I would come to realize Catholicism is wrong.

When I look back at my past self, especially in puberty or college, I see a lot of kinship even in the most cringeworthy moments and see that person as myself, but I don't think I would care that much if I didn't -- continuity is not a value for me, let's say.

Life is complex, you change, you're a bundle of chemicals trying to claw and scrape happiness out of an indifferent world; what does it matter if you can or can't fit all the past sections of that four-dimensional worm into some kind of common mental construct?

37: Yes . Present me agrees with you on both songs.

I listened to a fair amount of The Who myself as a lass, and listening to those two songs... did they always sound like showtunes? Like Broadway's version of rock & roll?

Especially 28 but then it primed me for 37.

Trying to figure out what this is about, I just learned that The Who wrote the song using an accordion as a metaphor for a vagina.

28 sounds like the intro to a bad TV sitcom; 38 is Rock Opera!

I mean, 37.

"Rock Opera!" was the B52s.

I'm not sure there's a solid distinction between the two categories, but I think I lean splitter - or at least I associate a emphasis on continuity with an emphasis on not changing or achieving some sort of stasis or mastery and that is definitely not me.

SPLITTERS!

Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?

That's an interesting question. I simultaneously have what I would consider a very good memory--for facts, for fine details of work I am doing even at quite some temporal distance, for holding a lot of things in my mind's eye in order to solve some problem, etc--but I don't think I have very good memory of the fine details of my own life experiences or of how I felt or was at the time. I am not even sure I view my past self as like a fictional character, it's more of a distant blur.

I have a sort of felt sense of continuity, I guess, but it's not something that carries a very strong emotional weight. There are aspects of me--positive and negative--that I think have been very stable over time, some of which I think are quite characteristic of _me_, but there are other things that I'd have felt just as strongly in the past were characteristic of _me_ that no longer hold true.

Interestingly, while I think some of my emotional responses to things and ways of experiencing of the world have changed, I think my core ethical and political values, as far as I can tell, remain largely unchanged. I was always socially liberal, and left-wing economically, and I still am. I think my basic views about how people should be treated at the level of personal interactions and personal politics are also unchanged. I think, most of the time, I live my life consistently with those micro-level personal values so I don't experience a huge amount of cognitive dissonance.

On the other hand, there's music, books, film and all kinds of cultural products that I loved once, and have no interest in now, so those are definitely pretty fluid.

re: 50

50 was me.

My shame self is so lumpy.

I think my core ethical and political values, as far as I can tell, remain largely unchanged.

This is totally embarrassing, but this is my earliest proof that I was fundamentally a lefty at a very young age: I have distinct memories of playing house at the school I went to for k-2, and having to negotiate it with other kids, and strongly preferring to pretend we were extremely poor and had to figure out how to scrap compared to pretending we were wealthy and had every leisure. The wealthy version was incredibly boring, and not noble and pure like the poor version. (I suppose that could have set me up to be a certain kind of Republican. Hooray that it didn't!)

Kid heebie was all like "let's play hovel"

Horatio Alger Playtime.

I don't have any noble reason that I was fundamentally lefty as a child. My parents are lefty* and I grew up in a very low income household in a left voting place in a (relatively) left voting country.

* Although my Dad is more misanthropic and nihilist as he gets older he hasn't drifted to the right, more "we are all fucked, but to the extent that there's any possibility of human thriving, it's in some kind of anarcho-socialist environment, and there's shit all chance of that happening, so ... see previous, we are all fucked".

My cousin has a strong memory, I a weak one, of my coming into the kitchen in probably my very early teens during a big family gathering and offering to pitch in because "it's feeling very 1950's in here", e.g. only women in the kitchen and men chilling elsewhere. (Not how my household did things.) Apparently this fact had not struck them, or at least the one cousin.

That one is tough, or at least I struggle with it. I was at dinner at a newish friend's house -- I like them but I don't know them super well -- and before dinner all the women were in the kitchen cooking and handing around a new baby, and the men were sitting outside with drinks.

And it was noticeable and seemed weird to me and I sort of felt like I should plant myself outside as a matter of principle, but I was also having more fun cooking chappatis and holding the baby than I would have had outside, so I figured equalizing the gender roles wasn't my problem.

That is so lovely of mini-Mini!

As long as the baby isn't being an asshole, that sounds good.

The baby was a bit of an asshole -- some babies are more a lot than others, and this one was a lot. But when you've got enough people to take turns so the bouncing/cooing/nose grabbing/intense eye contact doesn't slow down, it stays fun.

As babies to be left alone with, N might not be my first choice. My own were stolid and slept a lot, and I was grateful.

56/57 reminds me that probably the strongest throughline of my entire life is preference for the company of girls & women. I have always had both romantic* and platonic female friends, while close male friends have been fewer and farther between. I never quite know what to make of the societal fact that middle aged men lack male friends, because that's always been my condition. Basically at most I'll have a good friend who then pulls me into his larger friend group--but I never hang out one-on-one with anyone else in the group.

Anyway, I'm always in the kitchen at home or at friends' houses, so whoever is also there won't make for a '50s scene.

*obvious caveats for prepubescent crushes, but they were very real to me

I suppose that could have set me up to be a certain kind of Republican.

Do you wear a respectable cloth coat?

I really like my Filson Mackinaw even though it would look funny on Pat Nixon.

Especially now.

re: 61

That's something I miss. Not that I don't spend any time at all with female friends, but it's much rarer than it was when I was in my 20s. My friendship circle is much more male, much more circled around school and other dads from the school, and we tend to go out either just "the dads" or just "the mums", or all of us with kids in tow. It'd be very rare for it to be a mixed gender group of adults with no kids present.

All right thinking people are in the kitchen at parties, though.

It's too small to wear another layer underneath, but I got it used and cheap.

61.1: Agree, boy going from a social life centered around theater in high school to a career in mathematics has been rough on that front.

A weird thing in 56 is that I feel like that because RWM and I won't follow this convention (if asked to cook in a family setting we would make a point of doing it together or my doing it) the upshot is that we don't get asked to do any cooking.

My brother and I were both expected to help cook and clean up on holidays. It wasn't bad. I can make a turkey and some of my grandma's pasta dishes.

Never do I feel more gender non-conforming than when I'm trying to figure out how to be helpful in a group of very competent, very social women in a kitchen. I also feel like I have no business being in the smoking room with the men, but that's usually where I would go because it was more free-form and I could sit and read. Whatever gender I actually am, it seems to have been some kind of very useless, maladaptive one-off.*

* at least in the domestic sphere

Risotto requires a bunch of time, but you're basically just stirring. Low thought, lots of looking busy. It's the equivalent of formatting a spreadsheet at work.

I usually identify the alpha cook and request an assignment. I'm one of nature's subordinates.

That's how you get stuck peeling stuff.

69 is me too. And at my in-laws house, requesting an assignment will get you clucked at to go relax and enjoy yourself. The women are supposed to intuit what to do pro-actively and cut their own meal short in order to start the clean up, while I'm still milling about, wondering if I might have room for seconds.

However, they're not having a blast in the kitchen. They're cleaning up at lightspeed. It's the sheer pace that makes me feel like a bumbling idiot. I always suspect they're trying to gently get me out of there so they can do it effectively when I do bumble my way in.

With my own extended family, everyone bumbles around more haphazardly while cleaning up, and stops to chat along the way, and I understand better how to do that.

71: Our longest-standing couple friends are both cooks, but she's by far the better, and she's introverted enough that she's basically a sous chef when they come over, which is wonderful, because she's really good and smart, so I can just chuck assignments at her with no oversight and barely any guidance. Last week they were over for a Puerto Rican meal, and she ended up doing most of the work on making mofongo while I grilled and talked baseball by the fire with her husband. I'd have felt bad, but from 22 years experience, I know she has no problem with that.

It is a little funny, given 61, that I gravitate towards the men in most of our couple friendships. Although I guess that's because, in most of them, their dynamic is similar to ours, so the husband is a rare guy with whom I'm simpatico. But I am bummed that effectively all of my friend girls from college moved out of town; it's hard enough making friends in middle age, let alone developing brand new cross-gender ones.

Most of 50 is true of me, especially the first paragraph, which made it particularly charming for it to not be signed.

I do, however, have occasional vivid feelings about an alternate me who can't exist any longer but it really seems like a possibility, it would just have changed a great deal about me. What if I'd gotten really into the SCA? Or joined the Coast Guard as my mother inexplicably thought I should do? Or given in to the headhunting from very, very early Amazon? All of these seem like they shape a person as much as the overwhelming occupations I *did* take up do, and differently.

If I feel that I could have been a self who is not actually accessible now, then there can't be a true self who is both my actual past and this alternate self's past, eh? I am a poset?