You're Not What You Think You Are...

But What You Think, You Are?

“You’re not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

This saying is a quintessential gnomic statement. It’s short, it’s pithy, it’s terse, it’s profound, and it’s got some punch to it. It also plays better when spoken than when read so go ahead and read it aloud to yourself:

“You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

It makes for a pretty good little mantra—I know because I’ve been practicing it ad nauseum in preparation for episode 2 of my podcast, Proverb Peddling, for a long while now.

Watch or listen to this episode here on my Proverb Peddling YouTube channel (go like, comment, and subscribe to help me out even if you’d rather continue reading the transcript here):

You can also listen or watch the podcast version on spotify:

Now, I’m not exactly sure where this saying comes from. I’ve seen it attributed to Norman Vincent Peale, William James, Brian Tracy, and others. But wherever it came from, it’s here now and it’s worth reflecting on because this saying provides a profound and often needed check on one’s self-conception. While it makes for a good aphorism, I can’t keep typing it out, so as we get going here, let me just refer to the whole saying as “The Saying” from now on:

The Saying = You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.

The First half of The Saying is pretty straight forward: you are not what you think you are.

Another way to say it goes like this: “you’re not your own conception of yourself; your self-image is mistaken, inaccurate, or incomplete.” The second half of The Saying is meant to draw out a profound way of revealing what you actually are instead. You are the thoughts that you have, not merely your self-conception.

 So, for example, you may think of yourself as a kind person, but in reality, perhaps the majority of your thoughts about other people are hypercritical, judgmental, and downright wicked. In such a case, according to The Saying, you are not a kind person but kind of a prick.

Now you may be thinking “That doesn’t add up. Who cares what I’m thinking, so long as my actions are kind, I count as a kind person, regardless of my inner thought life.” Rachel Dawes says something akin to this to Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins: “Bruce deep down, you may still be that great kid you used to be, but it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.” But this sort of knee-jerk, pragmatic notion misses the importance of the thoughts, or intentions or reasons—or whatever mental terminology you like—which accompany and determine our actions. It’s these kinds of thoughts that are the things which make our actions interpretable. It’s not as though “actions” are some objective things we can perform devoid of intentions. In fact, it seems to me like an “action” without an intention isn’t really an action at all but more of an involuntary spasm of some kind.

An “action” without an intention isn’t morally praiseworthy nor blameworthy. If I kick my dog while sleep walking, then that’s unfortunate but I’m not morally blameworthy for it. But if upon waking I decide to kick my dog for some reason or another, then I am blameworthy for it. Our intentions matter, they shape our actions. Consider an action which was intended for evil but which brought about a good by accident. This ought not count as a morally praiseworthy action in the perpetrator’s book. Would we praise an assassin who missed his shot on a senator and accidentally killed another assassin wielding a knife just behind the senator instead? No, of course not.

So all this to say, I think a kneejerk pragmatist response to The Saying is no good. What you think really does matter, because what you think shapes and determines your actions. So, your thoughts matter, but how much do your thoughts matter? What do your thoughts tell us about ‘you’? Is it true that “what you think, you are”?

Well, it depends. There are at least two different ways that we could interpret the second clause of The Saying, one of which I think it true, and good, and beneficial, and the other of which I think is totally incorrect. So, let me break it down and show you what I mean.

I’ll go over two interpretations of the The Saying, starting with the wrong way first.

The Wrong Interpretation of the Saying

Interpretation 1: Your thoughts constitute your personal identity.

            On the first way to interpret The Saying, your thoughts are what you are. That is, your thoughts constitute ‘you’. So, you’re not your self-conception, instead you’re literally the thoughts that you have. In grammar and logic there’s this thing called a “copula” which is just some form of “be” or “being” that servers as a connecting word, so think: am, is, are, was, were. Now on this first interpretation of The Saying, the copula ‘are’ in “what you think, you are” is functioning as a copula of identity (this usually goes by the name the ‘is of identity’ but here we have ‘are’ functioning in the same way instead).

But still more needs to be said to flesh out the idea that you are your thoughts because there are 3 potential ways to take this notion:

Interpretation 1a: You are all of your thoughts; you are the sum total of everything you’ve ever thought.

That’s a bit odd, right? Who’s keeping track? On this view it seems only God would know who you are and we can kiss self-knowledge goodbye because we’re not God. So, I thought I’d just broach this one since it’s a possible interpretation even though it’s not a very plausible one.

The second way to flesh out the idea that you ‘are’ your thoughts goes like this:

Interpretation 1b: You are all of the thoughts that you can recall, all those thoughts that enjoy a type of access consciousness, those available to introspection and active recall.

This seems arbitrary, what if I’m groggy today and can’t recall as many thoughts as I could yesterday? Or what happens to me when I have a dreamless sleep? Is there a core number of thoughts that I need to be able to recall in order to retain my personal identity? This interpretation seems more plausible than (1a) but it still doesn’t seem great.   

Interpretation 1c: You are your pattern of thoughts.

What about personal identity over time? The pattern of my thought changes, sometimes dramatically, and yet I’m still me, right? How much continuity with past selves do I need to maintain in order for the pattern of thoughts to still count as me? And what about pattern duplication? If the pattern of my thoughts is duplicated in another mind, say by a systematic brain scan and a futuristic-y 3d printer, then which pattern of thoughts am I? This seems like a problem for personal identity, though it’s the most plausible interpretation of the three.

The Problem with Identifying Yourself with Your Thoughts

These interpretations of The Saying are all identity claims and they run into odd problems because you just are not the same thing as your thoughts. Say your thoughts are temporarily destroyed, maybe you get amnesia or an alien zaps you with their thought-changing ray gun, but then your pattern of thought returns to you at a later time. Did you cease to be you for a time and them continue being you again? I don’t think so, but maybe you have different intuitions than me. Seems to me like you can survive the destruction of your thoughts but that your thoughts cannot survive the destruction of your thoughts and thus you and your thoughts are two different things with different properties. If that’s the case, then this interpretation of The Saying (and its various possible interpretations) confuse the product of the mind, our thoughts, with our minds themselves, the producer of thoughts. Our minds are not our thoughts. We may or may not be rightly identified with our minds—are you your mind? Is your mind just an aspect of your being?—but that’s a topic for another time. For now, it suffices to establish that the mind and the products of the mind—like thoughts (amongst others like perceptions, conceptions, memories, etc.)—are not one and the same thing. You have thoughts, you are not thoughts.

The Right Interpretation of The Saying

So is The Saying just bunk? Is there no salvaging it? Hang on, I didn’t say all that. I think it’s still a wise and beneficial saying if we interpret it along a copula of predication instead of a copula of identity. Predication is just the assignment of something to a class or an affirmation of something about something else. Here’s a quick example of the difference between identity claims and copulas meant for predication:  “Parker is dumb” is predicating dumbness of Parker and using the ‘is’ of predication; “Clark Kent is Superman” is an identity claim identifying Clark Kent with Superman.

            So, I don’t think The Saying is all that great if interpreted along identity lines, but if it’s interpreted as predicating something of the thinker, then maybe it’s still a wise sentiment.

Interpretation 2: Your thoughts expose, or reveal, or betray the kind of person that you are.

According to this interpretation, The Saying would mean something like this: “you’re not the kind of person you think you are, instead, you’re the kind of person that your thoughts reveal you to be.” So again, you may think that you’re a pretty good person but if the majority of your thoughts are “bad” thoughts, then you’re actually a bad person.

Now this interpretation will probably suffer from some vagueness problems as well, like “how many thoughts need to be bad in order to predicate badness of the thinker?” etc. But at least this interpretation can be examined by the thinker through first person analysis. You can sit down and think about the thoughts you’ve had the past week, for instance, and consider and reconsider the quality of your character based on what you remember of them. Sure, your memory could be skewed, and that’s part of the point of The Saying. Give thought to your thoughts and reexamine yourself in light of them rather than merely deferring to your naïve self-conception.  

So, I’ve probably analyzed this pithy little gnomic saying into oblivion by now, and I’m sorry about that. I don’t want very many of my Proverb Peddling episodes/posts to be like this, but this saying has been chewing a hold in my mind for a while now and I had to do this to get it out. I think it’s a beneficial saying if we interpret it as a tool for self-knowledge but I think it’s incorrect if we interpret is as a statement of personal identity. Lord willing, I can be rid of it now. May it not bore a hole in your mind.

Fin.