The "self" is an evolving part of each of us, responsible for thoughts and actions. Self is created by everything it is exposed to through feelings and thoughts. We are shaped by our surroundings: family, school, friends, music, and anything we experience in our day-to-day lives. .
I was born with a clean slate and my parents built a foundation on top of that. My foundation set up my knowledge of what's right and wrong and to understand the importance of protecting what is truth (that which is positive)". Self adapts and evolves with experience through sensation, imagination, emotion and dreams. What happens in our lives that make a clean, spotless slate (self) dirty? Descartes and his meditations are in search of the answer to this question and he takes on a rational and skeptical mindset to find the answers. .
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In Descartes first mediation, he introduces the idea that a malignant demon" may be intentionally misleading him or that he may be dreaming, but either way he is imagining or sensing. He comes to define "I"" in paragraph 6 of his second Mediation as a thinking thing". He expands that a thinking thing" is a thing that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives. In the hunt for more answers, he considers what he knows about a piece of wax from a honeycomb. He first considers his knowledge of the wax from sensibility but discovers it cannot be reliable because the properties of the wax are changeable with heat. He comes to conclude "that bodies themselves are not properly perceived by the senses neither by the imagination, but by the intellect alone"." .
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John Locke, an English philosopher, describes the self in his essay as "that conscious thinking thing"." Sounds almost identical to Descartes but he puts his thumb-print on the idea as he introduces the idea of "tabula rasa". In other words, a blank slate, but having the ability to perceive and reason.