Depending on how you feel about recursion, I have a fairly elegant definition of self. "You are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are."

Depending on how you feel about recursion, I have a fairly elegant definition of self. "You are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are." In the most syntactically literal sense of tracing back referent objects it is true. But its true in a deeper sense as well. Human reasoning and consciousness seems to be hacked out of a system for signalling others. There's always a presumed speaker and listener (you/me), even when its the voice in your head talking to yourself. The way we reason by self-dialog is like a strange form of coding where everything has been implemented as a server making requests, but most of the requests are bound for localhost anyway. There is no implementation, its API calls all the way down! So to rephrase less obtusely, "you" are the source of whatever it is you're hearing which isn't attributed to me or anyone else. The easiest way to hear such things is to ask yourself, for in the process of asking yourself you get the thing you were asking for. In a most literal physical sense, "you" are the standing wave of electrical patterns that echo around in your skull, simulating a conversation as if it were echoing around in an acoustic medium.