Who Am I?

When the Creation Becomes Conscious

For most of my early life, I did not have to ask who I was.

The answer had already been given to me.

I was born into Mormonism, where I was taught that I was a child of God. I had lived with Him before coming to Earth. I had been sent here to receive a body, be tested, and prove whether I would remain faithful and obedient. If I endured well, accepted the proper ordinances, and lived worthily, I could return to God, inherit His highest kingdom, and continue progressing toward becoming like Him.

The idea was sometimes summarized in a familiar Mormon couplet:

As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still describes this larger framework in its teachings about the plan of salvation: a premortal existence, mortal experience, moral agency, and the possibility of becoming like God.

That was not presented to me as one possible interpretation of existence. It was presented as the truth about existence—and therefore the truth about me.

I did not know enough to question it.

Children rarely examine the worldview handed to them. They absorb it. Before they possess the intellectual tools to evaluate an explanation of reality, that explanation becomes part of the equipment with which they evaluate everything else.

Research on identity development likewise describes identity as something formed over time through continuing interaction among the individual, relationships, and social environment. That research does not determine whether a religious identity is true or false. It does help explain how an inherited answer can become part of the self before we consciously evaluate it.

So this identity fastened itself to me.

I was a child of God undergoing a test.

My choices were being watched. My faithfulness mattered eternally. My worthiness affected where I would go after death and what I might eventually become.

For many years, I did not experience this as a theory about who I was.

I experienced it simply as who I was.

When the Given Answer Began to Loosen

The answer remained attached to me through my childhood, my youth, and much of my early adulthood. In my thirties, it began to loosen. In my forties, I gradually gave myself something I had not previously possessed:

the authority to question it.

That was a larger change than changing a belief.

I was changing who had permission to decide what I believed.

The church had once supplied the answer. Scripture supplied the answer. Prophets supplied the answer. My family and community reinforced the answer.

Now I was allowing observation, experience, reason, uncertainty, and my own inner authority into the conversation.

At sixty-eight, the question has not gone away.

If anything, it has become more poignant:

Who am I?

Not who was I told I am.

Not who do I wish I were.

Not which answer makes death less frightening or life more comforting.

What can I reasonably conclude from what I have actually observed—while remaining honest about how little data I possess?

The Person Produced by a Life

From a materialist perspective, the person called Scott appears to be the product of several interacting forces.

First, there is my biology.

I did not select my DNA, nervous system, body, temperament, instinctive drives, or natural sensitivities. I arrived with predispositions I did not consciously choose. Some possibilities came easily to me. Others may never have been realistic possibilities at all.

Second, there is my conditioning.

I did not choose the family, religion, culture, language, decade, or society into which I was born. Long before I could think critically, these influences were teaching me what was normal, valuable, shameful, dangerous, admirable, and true. They helped form the identity that would later imagine itself to be making independent decisions.

Third, there appears to be personal choice.

I experience myself choosing. I consider possibilities, weigh consequences, change direction, resist impulses, and occasionally act differently from the way my past might predict.

But there is an uncomfortable question hiding inside that experience:

What produced the chooser?

This question sits inside the centuries-old debate over free will and determinism. Some philosophers believe freedom requires that we genuinely could have acted differently. Others argue that meaningful choice can exist even within a causally ordered world. No consensus removes the mystery.

If the mind making the decision was itself produced by DNA and conditioning, is choice truly an independent third force? Or is it simply the moment when all previous causes become visible as a decision?

Perhaps every choice could, in principle, be traced backward:

This reaction came from that fear.

That fear came from this experience.

That experience affected this nervous system.

This preference emerged from that inherited disposition.

Follow the chain far enough and perhaps I am not creating my life at all. Perhaps I am experiencing an unimaginably complex computation as it plays itself out from the inside.

In that model, the feeling of authorship may be part of the computation.

I feel that I am steering, while causes I did not choose have already shaped the driver, the road, and the direction that feels desirable.

That possibility deserves to be taken seriously.

Is There Something Else in the Mixture?

And yet, I am not convinced that biology and conditioning tell the whole story.

I suspect there may be another factor—something present before the particular personality called Scott took shape.

I have called it the soul.

I do not use that word as proof. I use it as a name for something I seem to encounter: the quieter awareness that can observe my thoughts, question my conditioning, recognize my ego in motion, and sometimes choose a response that contains more intelligence, more love, and less fear.

Cognitive science uses the term metacognition for aspects of our ability to monitor and evaluate our own mental processes. That provides one evidence-based way to understand the experience of observing thought. It does not establish that this observing awareness is a soul—and it does not prove that it is nothing more than brain activity. The scientific description and the metaphysical question are not identical.

Perhaps that capacity is entirely produced by the brain.

Perhaps it is an advanced form of self-observation.

Or perhaps the brain and personality are instruments through which a deeper consciousness is expressing itself.

I do not know.

But the possibility changes the model.

If something of me existed before my DNA and social environment began shaping Scott, then I may not be only the product of this life. I may also be bringing something into it—a disposition of consciousness, an unfinished direction, or a potential that cannot be completely explained by the character’s history.

In the ocean metaphor I return to so often, Scott is the wave: a temporary form shaped by genetics, family, religion, culture, relationships, loss, desire, and time.

I explain that metaphor and my working definitions more fully in Ego & Soul: What I Mean by Them.

But the soul may be the water.

The wave has a personal shape. The water has a deeper nature.

If that metaphor points toward anything real, then beneath my biography I am consciousness. I am intelligence capable of growth. I am love—not always in behavior, certainly, but perhaps as a capacity struggling to become more fully expressed.

I may not be here merely to prove my obedience.

I may be here to become increasingly conscious of what I am and of what my choices create.

The Human Shape of the Water

Even if we share a common source, our individuality is not an illusion to be dismissed.

Every wave is made of water, but no two waves take precisely the same shape.

I resemble the people around me. We share bodies, minds, egos, fears, desires, attachments, and the ancient survival needs of the human species. Yet each person experiences a unique intersection of biology, history, circumstance, relationships, attention, and possibility.

The result is kaleidoscopic.

The same basic elements continually arrange themselves into forms that have never existed before and will never exist in exactly the same way again.

So perhaps two statements can be true at once:

At the deepest level, we may be expressions of the same consciousness.

At the human level, each of us is an unrepeatable experience of being.

The ocean does not cancel the wave.

It becomes this particular wave.

From Happening to Me to Participating in Me

When I was young, the creation of Scott was largely happening to me.

My biology expressed itself. My family instructed me. My religion defined me. My culture offered ambitions, fears, identities, and measurements of success. Events occurred, and my developing ego built explanations around them.

Possibilities moved through me before I understood that I might influence which possibilities became habits, character, and life.

As awareness increased, something began to shift.

I could notice an inherited belief rather than simply believe it.

I could feel an emotional reaction without automatically obeying it.

I could recognize that my first interpretation was not necessarily reality.

That distinction—between an event and the meaning my mind places upon it—is explored more directly in The Meaning We Give Things.

I could examine the person I had become and ask whether I wished to keep becoming him in exactly the same way.

That does not make me independent of causation. I did not suddenly step outside biology, history, or circumstance. Even my desire to become more aware has causes.

But awareness appears to introduce feedback into the system.

The life being formed begins to observe its own formation.

The creation begins participating in the creative process.

The more conscious I become of my motives, assumptions, reactions, and consequences, the less completely I am carried by them. A pattern that remains invisible tends to repeat itself. A pattern I can see becomes something I may be able to interrupt, redirect, or refine.

That may be the practical beginning of freedom.

Not freedom from every cause.

Freedom through becoming conscious of more causes—and therefore seeing more possible responses.

The Co-Creation of a Self

I am not the sole creator of Scott.

That claim would give the ego far too much credit.

My parents helped create me. Mormonism helped create me. Friends, strangers, lovers, losses, accidents, successes, failures, bodies, institutions, and circumstances all participated. So did forces I will never identify.

Even now, reality continues to resist my preferences and introduce materials I did not request.

But I am no longer merely passive material.

With each increase in awareness, I become a more active collaborator in the person I am becoming.

I cannot choose every event, thought, impulse, or emotion that arises. I can sometimes choose what attention I give it, what meaning I attach to it, what action follows it, and what pattern that action strengthens.

Those choices become causes too.

In The Ripple of Choice, I explore how even a small response can move outward, strengthen a pattern, and affect consequences I may never fully see.

They influence what I notice next, what I practice, whom I trust, how I love, what I fear, and which future choices I will be capable of seeing.

I do not create myself from nothing.

I create with what arrives.

That is why co-creation seems more honest than either total free will or total determinism. I am created by life, and I participate in creating the life that continues creating me.

The process moves in both directions.

Is That What God Is?

This brings me back, strangely, to part of the idea I was given as a child.

Mormonism taught me that human beings could progress toward becoming like God. I once understood that primarily in terms of obedience, worthiness, exaltation, kingdoms, and worlds without end.

I no longer know whether any of that describes the architecture of reality.

But another possibility has emerged.

Perhaps becoming more like God does not mean acquiring divine status or cosmic property.

Perhaps it means becoming increasingly conscious within the act of creation.

If I imagine a being of complete awareness, such a being would not be blindly driven by unexamined fear, inherited conditioning, or unconscious impulse. It would understand the causes moving within it. It would see consequences far beyond the narrow interests of the moment. Intelligence and love would not compete because complete intelligence would include an awareness of the whole, and complete love would act with understanding rather than sentiment alone.

Perhaps God—if God exists in anything like this sense—is not merely a ruler presiding over creation.

Perhaps God is consciousness fully awake within creation.

Perhaps God is the perfect union of creator and creation: reality knowing what it is and participating completely in what it becomes.

I cannot claim that conclusion as truth. It may be another human story placed over a mystery too large for the storyteller.

Still, it gives the old teaching a different meaning.

I may not be here to become a god by passing someone else’s test.

I may be participating, in an extremely limited way, in the movement by which consciousness becomes more aware of itself.

The Question I Am Living

So who am I?

I am partly inherited biology.

I am partly the accumulated influence of a family, religion, culture, and lifetime.

I am partly the consequences of choices made by earlier versions of myself.

I may also be an expression of a deeper consciousness—a soul, a player, the ocean temporarily experiencing itself through this particular human form.

I cannot separate these ingredients with scientific precision. I cannot point to the exact boundary where conditioning ends and genuine choice begins. I cannot prove that the observer within me existed before my brain, or that it will continue after my body is gone.

But I can observe one thing:

The more aware I become, the more influence I seem to have over what I become next.

Not absolute control.

Not independence from the world.

Participation.

Perhaps that is the movement of a human life: from being unconsciously shaped, to noticing the shaping, to consciously joining it.

The question Who am I? may never produce a final noun.

Maybe its deepest answer is a verb.

I am not only someone who is.

I am something still becoming.

And with every moment of genuine awareness, the creation becomes a little more conscious of its role in creating what comes next.

Further Exploration

• Plan of Salvation — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ account of premortal life, mortal agency, eternal progression, and becoming like God.

• Dynamics of Identity Development in Adolescence — A research review examining identity as an evolving interaction among commitments, exploration, relationships, and context.

• Free Will — The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s overview of freedom, causation, agency, and moral responsibility.

• The Neural Basis of Metacognitive Ability — Stephen Fleming and Raymond Dolan’s review of the psychology and neuroscience of monitoring one’s own thinking.

These resources do not settle the question of who—or what—I ultimately am. They show that the questions arising from my personal experience also belong to much older religious, philosophical, and scientific conversations.