What Do We Call "I"?

Do we call a person’s visible whole “a person”, or the one organ that does the most noticeable work? Imagine someone born without a torso, without arms or legs — only a head. Could we call that a person?

Or: when you say “Ayberk”, which part of me are you addressing? Which part is Ayberk? Below the waist, above it, my head, my eye — which? If it’s my head, can we say our names were given only to our heads? I don’t think we can; it would be absurd.

And if by “Ayberk” you mean my visible whole, then without noticing it you are calling my hands and feet Ayberk too, which is also absurd. So both of our propositions, the prominent organ and the visible whole, have just lost their meaning. Whatever we call “I” appears to be well beyond our physical properties.

If people think what they call “I” is nothing more than the physical image in the mirror, rather than wondering whether it might be something past the reality they feel, then they have not started thinking yet.

So who is Ayberk?

You must be calling my thoughts Ayberk, not my eyebrow, my eye, my hand or my foot. What makes us us should be nothing other than our thoughts.

Then is our truth, the thing we call “I”, our thoughts? I don’t know. Even if it isn’t, I think it interacts with them. This may sound strange, but there are sacred texts holding that the human being is the word of God — and that God is a word:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. — John 1

The Word became flesh and lived among us. — John 14

What kind of word do you think these two passages mean? The kind we know, or something else?

While looking into whether thought might be a kind of matter, I found the idea that matter itself is thought remarkably interesting. Where I’ve arrived, with those passages behind me, I can see I’ve set sail toward some fairly bold ideas. And you? What do you make of it?