But we cannot forget that our identity is constituted as well by the countless other dramatis personae in the play that is our lives, who together bring into existence the context in which our own roles make any sense. This fact should call upon us to rethink our supposed independence. And this can be a wonderful realization: we gain a deeper

This pair of analogies is meant to show that we can make sense both of synchronic identity (the chariot) and diachronic identity (the flame) in the absence of anything like the self in which we instinctively presume ourselves to consist.

shared skeptical tradition, with roots both in the classical Greek Pyrrhonian tradition and in Indian Buddhism, traditions that were in contact with one another.1

The Indian classic Bhagavad Gītā (Song of the Lord) characterizes the relation between the self and the embodied person as akin to that between you and your wardrobe.

Now, Nāgasena asks, consider the flame by one’s bed that was lit at dusk last night, and the flame to which one awakes this morning. Are they the same, or are they different? Should

To the extent that we are single characters over our lifetime, we are, like Hamlet, played by a succession of actors: an infant; a toddler; a schoolchild; finally, with any luck, an elder.

a chariot can survive change in its parts, and even disassembly and reassembly. It is therefore neither identical with the collection of its parts, nor with those parts arranged in some particular way.

The self, he therefore infers, is neither identical to nor different from our psychophysical processes. But if it existed as we take a self to exist, it would have to be either identical to them or different from them. So, he concludes, the self does not exist.6

Your dollar, however, is neither identical to nor different from any of these ways that it might be instantiated.