You have heard the expression “ghost in the machine”, right? It was Gilbert Ryle’s reaction to Rene Descartes’s ethereal “mind”—a mind [soul] floating ghost-like in the so much more solid matter we know as “the brain”. Later, Arthur Koestler wrote a book about this. For him the ghosts are actually embedded in the deepest, most primitive parts of the brain.
My point though is that human identity is equally as elusive—even illusive. It is a prefabricated point of view we acquire adventitiously at birth. And then for years as a child we are indoctinated to view ourselves and the world around us as any particular historical age and culture dictates. And, even when acquiring more autonomy as adults, we merely refabricate it over and again as we are forced to integrate all of our new experiences, relationships, sources of information etc. into all of the old ones. It is ever an existential work in progress until the day we die. Especially in the fractured and fragmented world we live in today.
But, emotionally and psychologically, this elusive and illusive “i” can perturb some folks. They insist instead their own identity is rock solid. They have an essential core Self that transcends the transient nature of the ever evolving existential “self”. Indeed, it functions much like a machine in which there is a place for every part and every part is in its proper place. That way, they insist, they come to view the world precisely as it is—and not merely as a particular dasein might view it situated in a particular circumstantial context reacting to the world from a particular point of view.
And, perforce, language is always ambiguous when we discuss relationships as complex as these. After all, the human mind is not just ordinary matter is it?