It was David Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature, who first argued that humans have no single “soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment”; instead, the individual is just “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity”. You may have also thought about this while getting high — what if, like, you aren’t the same person you were a second ago? — but it was Hume who first wrote it out.
And it’s Hume I think of these days every time I see Matt Taibbi. Is this really the same man we knew less than a decade ago? Are his neurons any closer to Taibbi 2016 than mine are? Does this static identity we ascribe to “Matt Taibbi” really just come down to him having the same tooth enamel his entire life? When railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage got into an accident that ended with a 3.5 foot tamping iron being pulled from his brain it so radically changed his personality that his physician tersely wrote: “He was no longer Gage.” This is the kind of philosophical question that’s well above my pay grade, but I can’t help but wonder: is Taibbi no longer Taibbi?
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