Discovering Ourselves...the fictional self
"There is no life that can be recaptured wholly, as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction. What does that tell us about the nature of life, and does one really want to know?" Bernard Malamud, Dublin's Lives
Well we do know about the fiction of our lives and we should want to know. Resconstruction of events starts with perception and goes all the way to human reasoning. Funny, the mind is the last to know things. After the brain computes an event, the illusionary "we" (that is, the mind) becomes aware of it. It reconstructs the brain events and in doing so makes telling errors of perception, memory, and judgement. The clue to how we are built is buried not just in our marvelously robust capacity for these functions but also in the errors that are frequently made during reconstruction. Biography is fiction. Autobiography is hopelessly inventive.
Now with all that said, draw your own conclusions about yourself. After all, it's just my version of the truth and I could be wrong...Doc
