I’m a brain-injury survivor, so this question is something I’ve had to face.

Now, after my 3rd-wave of braindamage ( this one self-inflicted, as I tried to break will-to-live from my brain, with a cudgel, so that murdering my life could happen. Failed. it’s fine: it was just part of my hellish growing-up process, these past 6-ish decades ) I’ve BAD memory problems.

Here’s the key:

When you come-to in a dream, without your normal-life’s memories, are you still you??

Elegant, isn’t it?

Completely bypasses most of the dead-ends of the question…

“yes I’m still me, even without my memories, because…”

because why?

I’ve learned that it isn’t one’s memories that make one oneself:

… rather, it is one’s instincts which do.

IF anybody puts drugs into my body-life to alter my personality, and they alter my instincts, THEN they have obliterated the someone that had been inhabiting this-life, & induced a drugged-replacement for the someone who inhabited it, before.

IF any experience alters the instincts of the personality who inhabits this-life, THEN that experience has replaced the less-experienced someone with a ( somewhat? ) different more-experienced someone.

Even without memories, so long as my instincts are clean ( unadulterated ), & MINE, then “I” am existing.

So, even in dreams, when I appear/come-to suddenly in some random context, with no memory of any other life, my instincts make me me, see?

The simple fact that I still work to face-into karma, that I still work to challenge abuse, that I still work to make things right, that I’m still careful with meanings & words, relentlessly,

THAT is what makes “me” me.

It took decades of brain-injury to notice the fact that normal dreams oft have me not remember anything from my normal life…

But once noticed, then anybody who has such dreams can understand the principle/truth of it.

_ /\ _

Depression struggled with me for several years, I lost my ability to recall events which happened in my life. I had knowledge of my life’s events, but I wasn’t able to actually recall any of them. My son’s birth, my parents’ faces, etc. I felt dead inside and considered myself already dead, even if my mortal coil still churned on like some kind of pale imitation of life.

Anyway, one day, a traumatic event from my past resurfaced itself, and I was forced to confront it. After that, I slowly began regaining my memories which had been locked away. I made the choice to leave an abusive relationship, I reconnected with my loved ones from my earlier life. I still sometimes hear the whisper in my ear to end it all, but it’s not as persistent, not as loud. I can touch the memory of the trauma without feeling like a pit just opened within me.

I guess what I’m saying is, I was dead when I lost my memories, and when I got them back, I am alive again.

I’m personally of the belief that you are largely the sum of your experiences, so yeah a total loss of memories would mean I am by some definition “dead”. That said, you could easily argue by that same logic that the “me” of a year, month, or even minute ago is also “dead”, since she lacks the experiences that makes me who I am now. I don’t even dispute that that much tbh.

I had west Nile virus and it got into my brain and it was a mess.

Anyhow, during that years long Rollercoaster of a recovery, there was a period of apparently a week where I don’t remember at all.

Like, woke up in a hospital I’d never seen before. Wandered out to have strangers greet me as if they knew me… had to literally ask the question “where am I? How long have I been here?”

Anyways, the experience made it difficult to escape considering questions similar to yours. Who was that guy who was apparently walking around doing stuff and talking to people that week in MY body?

Short answer: always me. People have such little understanding of how at the mercy of chemicals and electrical impulses they are. You’re you when it’s all working, you’re still you when it’s not. Trying to tie something as foundational as identity to something as ephemeral as memory isn’t a good idea, unless you want identity to be something that changes second to second.

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Well, you’d be interested to know that people with amnesia and cannot form new memories still become accustomed to people are are friendly around them despite not knowing who they are or why they feel friendly. It’s in a different part of the brain. Also some forms of muscle memory are literally stored in your muscles.

I have (had) two relatives succumb to dementia (Alzheimers) before they passed.

In one case, that person reverted back to the memories which were at the time of my early childhood. We reconnected in a way that shed off the later traumas for both of us, and while I still could not love that person, I appreciated them for who they were (or thought they were) at that time. And I could grieve their passing.

The other person was pretty much dead to everyone anyways, so yeah, once their memories were gone, they were already dead before their mortal coil passed.

I’m an amnesiac and one of the first things I learned is that memories don’t really matter. The past is over, what matters is what you choose to do and not what you did. Obviously people do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things. I can sympathize with people who can’t let stuff go, but I personally just can’t be bothered by it anymore though. I have and will offer support to even my abusers.

To me, a person is how they act and what they want in the present. Lived experience affects everything a person does, the parts of a person’s past that are relevant reveal themselves in the present through how a person is.

My point of view is that the entire “you” concept needs to be constructed in the first place because it isn’t a self-evident, easily-defined thing. There are centuries of philosophy on this topic, none of it conclusive. Ergo: it’s kind of your call if you are even “you” when you wake up each morning, or just a fresh iteration with your memories that believes it’s “you.” Having hit my 50s I’m quite confident that the person in all my pictures from college is not “me” in any meaningful way. All the memories I have from that time are unreliable reconstructions anyway - stories my brain tells itself.

Theseus, that you?

Imagine if the world was created last thursday but with your and everyone else’s memories already filled just like current so nobody noticed.

Memento Mori?

I’d suggest reading up on John Locke’s “continuity of consciousness” theory of self. It’s essentially what you’re describing here: he holds that the “self” over time is a construct of the continuity of one’s consciousness through memory. This has some interesting implications: for instance, if someone becomes blackout drunk and has no recollection of the experience, can it be said that that experience belongs to the same person after the fact? Also, as another commenter pointed out this has significant implications in the case of memory loss, especially for someone suffering from dementia.