The Me, I, and You

What makes you you? What characteristics are distinct to your personality? I've never gotten this sort of sense of self-definition, moral or values, etc. That's not like selfishness or looking out for one's own best interest, I get that very easily. Like Christians for instance, their values and ideals tend not to change for long periods of time, their very views and opinions don't seem to change. Maybe it's a personality thing, the type that draws them to this logic. My main point about this is, there is no you.  You are a product of genetics, your environment, your parental guidance and ultimately, just a victim of events of consequence and chance. It's hard to reconcile this with your ego, say there is no you, only a canvas that, because of the colors aligned in a certain way, makes that distinct picture (artist analogy, but frankly if you didn't get that, you probably won't understand any of this post, so why am I bothering to write this?).

It's like logic that says Christians are only Christians because they were brought up in a culture in which the spooky religious, spiritual, communal tradition is that of Christianity... predominantly. If they lived in a predominantly Muslim culture, or Buddhist culture, or Hindi culture, and so on.

What forms consciousness? This questions ultimately are only good for "food for thought" as they say, as either way they go, it has no impact on any lives. So if we're just blank cattle, so what? And if we truly are individuals within our communities.... so what? I've often pondered the question that if you could take the same exact same set of genes and "raise" them in every culture, to see what the results would be. Would there be characteristics that are unique enough to be called distinct across all incarnations of these genes, or would they all be different? There is absolutely no way to do this experiment, as raising a child is not just a culture, it's also the parents, people, economic situation, etc. It's fun to think about. Think of the core of you. What experience, if any, made you who you are? I come from a very unique situation... my memory, conscious memory anyway (just when I don't focus on remembering), is absolutely atrocious, so I tend to forget my positions on certain issues, maybe that makes me more susceptible to other viewpoints because I'm essentially a fairly blank state to begin with. But for "normal" people with normal functioning memories, why do you people stay the same for so long? I change every 6 months or so, on at least 30-40% of whatever I'm thinking, priorities, what's important, etc. I couldn't imagine holding the same views on something before and after hearing a lot of evidence on it. We don't learn everything at once, we take lots of information from different sources, just boggles me that anyone who keeps up with the times would remain stagnant in views and opinions.

Anyway, the events around us make us different and unique, we have no intrinsic uniqueness... unless you believe in an intelligent creator.