This confusion isn’t exactly new. It’s been lingering for a long time, reminding me of the doubts I once wrote about in Certainty. Back then, I questioned the certainty of our perception of the world. This time, I’m questioning the certainty of who is actually doing the perceiving.
There was a time when I felt like the “weird” one among “normal” people (honestly, I still feel weird now). As a communications student back then, the “normal” thing to do was to practice persuasion techniques or try to look confident in front of an audience. But in reality, I actively avoided it. Instead of joining discussions about practical methods, I spent most of my time sitting alone in front of the psychology faculty, imagining that if I were a psychology student, I’d confidently mock Sigmund Freud’s penis envy theory.
I also skipped classes a lot just to hang out in the library, wearing earphones playing my favorite classical compositions at the time. I’d spend hours staring at lines of text from thick books on classical psychology—from Freud to Karen Horney. It was a gaze perhaps too “romantic” to be called just reading. It was in that library that I began to wonder: if the label “communications student” felt so uncomfortable on my skin, then who was “I,” really?
The search for an answer eventually led me away from social narratives toward a more biological understanding. The turning point didn’t come from a philosophy or social science discussion, but from an MIT lecture video I clicked on out of pure curiosity, titled “Introduction to the Human Brain”.
While the instructor was dissecting the wonders behind the human skull, a student asked a question—if I remember correctly, it was about identity. I don’t recall the exact details of the question or how Prof. Kanwisher answered, but a premise stuck in my mind ever since: the only place identity truly exists is in our brain.
From there, I began to form my own hypothesis: that identity is deeply tied to biological and cognitive processes that are constantly in motion. It is born from a complex interaction between neural networks, synapses, and social experiences accumulated over a lifetime. The brain acts as the integration center, while the social environment provides the stimuli that shape its direction.
The brain and the world are mutually implicated. Social information is absorbed, filtered, and processed into a self-narrative—often subconsciously—directing our tendencies toward things that align with our assumed identity.
For example, if someone is constantly exposed to the idea that jazz standards is cool, they might internalize it and subconsciously feel like part of the jazz community. They might impulsively buy an instrument, learn basic music theory, and try to play jazz standards, all to fit that new internal model.
But because our brains are actually incredibly flexible, identity isn’t static. It’s an evolving system, much like science itself: new models replace parts of old structures without erasing the foundation. Like a scientific theory that grows through trial, error, and updates, human identity stores its “old versions” as part of an existential continuity.
If that’s the case, being yourself doesn’t mean freezing the meaning of “I,” but rather constantly negotiating it as information, experience, and environment change. Identity is a living organism within the brain—always changing due to neuroplasticity, yet maintaining a thread that connects every bit of information to build a self-narrative that feels consistent, even if there’s no actual requirement for it to be.
But what about the view that identity is just a label attached to us by outsiders? In my opinion, that label can become part of our identity if it’s internalized. Or, it simply reinforces the identity we’ve already assumed for ourselves.
Those labels come from other people’s perceptions of the “persona” we display. They build an imagination of who we are and then name that imagination “identity.” The question then shifts: are people actually seeing us, or are they just seeing the mental models they’ve built for themselves?
I feel like this will get way too long if I keep going. Perhaps I’ll write about it in the next post: about other people’s perceptions, and whether anyone can truly understand who we are.