The question ‘who am I?’ also asks what am I, which am I, when am I and where am I? Rather than place a division between who and what questions, I will ask a greater variety of questions that all address ‘who am I?’ There are of course two other questions, ‘how and why am I as I am?’ We should see the ‘who am I?’ questions as incorporating all the other questions that we want to ask about persons and what it is to live this life of ours. Before getting into the details, the following sets out the big picture ideas from Chapter 1 where ego, bundle and social theories of persons are concerned. So, what exactly is a person – whether or not it’s at home – and are we all one of these?

In ego theories, we are mostly concerned with what unifies someone’s experience, what gives it its continuous feel, what makes it someone’s singular experience. Ego theories often present the traditional view of the person as an individual sense of self that is a persistent continuous mental thing that is consistent throughout life, the subject of our experiences, our very subjectivity or sense of the personal, our thoughts and feelings as had by one person as the experiencer. The quintessential ego theory is the idea of a soul. It is the soul that orchestrates us, conducts our lives and, according to some versions, is like our bodily form but non-physical. It is sometimes called a ‘vital spirit’. As it is a non-physical body, it can travel the universe. It may enter a human body and animate it at some point of time during pregnancy. The soul leaves the physical body at the point of death. Scientists have tried to weigh the soul by measuring the change in weight after the soul’s departure; at one time it was thought to weigh 21 grams. So the person is the single continuous, unified form taken by the soul throughout life. The soul is likened to a charioteer holding the reins of life and steering our life course. It is unclear how a non-physical form acts on the physical. Where ego theory is concerned, the number of persons is one.