Imagine a snowball that’s rolling down an infinite slope. As it descends, it picks up more snow, rocks, sticks, maybe some bugs, I don’t know. Maybe there are dry patches, too, and the snowball loses some snow. Maybe the snowball hits a boulder and loses half of its snow, and what remains is less than 10% original snow material. But it still can be said to be this snowball and not that snowball because its composition and history are unique to it—it can be identified by its past travels, its momentum, and the resulting trajectory. If this can be taken to be one’s life (an analogy that I hope was obvious), then the “I” that we refer to in our own lives isn’t even the whole snowball but merely the place where the snowball touches the ground.
Imagine a snowball that’s rolling down an infinite slope. As it descends, it picks up more snow, rocks, sticks, maybe some bugs, I don’t know. Maybe there are dry patches, too, and the snowball loses some snow. Maybe the snowball hits a boulder and loses half of its snow, and what remains is less than 10% original snow material. But it still can be said to be this snowball and not that snowball because its composition and history are unique to it—it can be identified by its past travels, its momentum, and the resulting trajectory. If this can be taken to be one’s life (an analogy that I hope was obvious), then the “I” that we refer to in our own lives isn’t even the whole snowball but merely the place where the snowball touches the ground.