prologue (6)

However, the belief that ∩(30) and ∩(15) are the same can be sort of an illusion. Looked from outside, they can be very different, at least on a superficial level. When you go to the class reunion of your junior high school for the first time, at the age 30, you might have some difficulty telling who is who that you know of fifteen years ago. You yourself might appear, at least initially, a total stranger to your old fellow classmates. Even some of them say things such as“I remember you told so and so in such and such a situation”in order to reminisce some experiences that you shared in old good days, while you migh still say to yourself “what is he talking about? I don’t remember at all…”This is a tangible example of the fact that you (∩(30)) and you (∩(15)) might look so much different from each other.

As the term “overwrite”connotes, I have an image of making some documents on the computer as an analogy of the vicissitude of self-consciousness. In making a document on the computer, you might overwrite the document by correting, modifying and adding new material to the original one, without losing a sense that you are still makind the same document. However, in that process your document might end up being quite different from the original one after several time’s updating.
Now let us examine the right column that represents a life with a trauma. As a person sustains a serious trauma in his childhood, there appears a new self-consciousness which is so different from his original one that it cannot return to its baseline but aquire a separate indentity. This can be called identity “ A’ ” if we call the original one ” A”.
In this diagram(#2), as the time (T) passes, the self awareness returns the original line. "T" represents a time span when an individual lived with the identity A’. After returning to A, one might become amnesiac about the traumatic event and this is called dissociative amnesia.