Blue is a colour. Football is a game. I like both. Whereas when it comes to blue footballs I am indifferent. What in small part makes me me is liking blue the colour and the game of football, and being indifferent to blue footballs. (Owing mainly to growing up in the 1970s, I support Chelsea. )
I also like fleet foxes and Fleet Foxes. I thoroughly dislike gooseberries and fascism. I love chocolate and coffee. I have a psychological addiction to playing table tennis. I recall scoring goals for Stanley Rd Junior School and having my eyes tested in 2016. I plan to exercise more next week and write a review of ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by T. E. Lawrence. (I took a year to read the book in its entirety. Got bogged down in the desert scenes!)
All the above (invisible) things, often called mental or immaterial, exist somewhere inside a physical body. Mine, as I think of it! Thoughts happening inside my body are mine too. Being thus enclosed is what crucially makes them so. This reasoning, though, is problematic. Does the body make the thoughts mine or the thoughts make the body mine? On certain thoughts being necessarily exclusive to me, there appears to be no way of knowing. Is there an actual (inner) me?
Descartes could not doubt that, inside a human body, there is thinking going on. But is it a me, a self doing the thinking? Might a self – in reality – be a succession of overlapping thoughts, and feelings, and memories, extending through time? Derek Parfit thought as much. And William Hazlitt believed that our future selves are on a par with all other selves. I.e. other people. Thus, the idea, and acts, of self-interest make no sense. What a lovely notion that is. Some two and half thousand years earlier, Siddhartha Gautama had a similar one.
Tangential thinking.
A shelf is a self without its h. (Not the kind cockney’s drop.) Most memories, desires, thoughts eventually peter out. They have a shelf life. Some don’t, outlasting the body in which they occur. Like Buddha’s non-self thoughts.