I must say the “actually” in this prompt feels a bit accusatory and judgmental — as though, as a matter of practice, the answerer is generally unreliable. It also sounds like a question for someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder — otherwise who is making promises to whom? I am either one being or I contain multitudes, there being two seems at once too crowded and too lonely.
Is a salad lettuce or is it tomato? [It’s both, yet it’s neither. It’s an amalgam that cannot be spun out into component parts any more than one can pluck a solitary fart out of a football stadium — i.e. the fart, the whole fart, and nothing but the fart.]
It sounds like this is meant to be a restatement of the nature versus nurture question, though I’m not sure I understand the question. I would argue that it presents a false dichotomy. Who is one (if not an experience-having machine?) I can’t answer because I think the question assumes a simplification that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’ve just been reading David Brooks’ book, How to Know a Person, in which he offers a relevant quote from Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” I can’t say whether Huxley was entirely correct, but I believe that how one experiences what happens to one is inseparable from who one is. (Also instructive is Brooks’ definition of a person as a point of view.)
The aim of introduction is to conceal a person’s identity.
George Mikes, How To Be an Alien
From the beginning our philosophers have tried to teach us how to die,
Jonathan weiner, Long for this world
and our poets have taught us that to contemplate death
is to learn to live.
Nothing is harder to see into than people’s natures.
Zhuge liang [a.k.a. Kongming], The WAy of the General
To know how to eat is to know how to live.
Auguste Escoffier
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark twain
Sam I. Am. It rhymes. It’s easy to remember. It’s short. It’s not pretentious, like Reginald B. Farnsworth IV. What more could one ask for?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 