What is the "self"?

[Conradine]

I was thinking...

in Dungeons & Dragons, and only in the fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons ( 3.5 more precisely ) what define the self?

The soul? It's certainly an important part, mabye the most important, but it's not everything.

Memories contribute to define personality. Losing all your memories means that you cease to exist as yourself? In my opinion no, you still have your soul and the changes that events, memories and experiences made you as you are...
but if those memories are removed they cease to further influence your behiavour, so - in my opinion - losing your memory mean losing at least part of your former self.

The body? One may be tempted to dismiss the body as simple clay, a container for soul and memories.
( by the way, memories are quickly lost by disembodied souls after death; does that means a disembodied, "pure" soul is unsuitable to retain memories? )
But part of the body is the brain, and the brain is what makes an elf more intelligent than an orc, and an orc more than an ogre. Also, brain damage can cause loss of memories, therefore we can deduct the soul can't be entirely responsible for memory storage.

My opinion ( but here we are into pure speculation ) is that memories and experiences are stored in the brain, but they leave an imprint on the soul; that imprint is quite fragile, so after a certain amount of time without the body, the disembodied soul loses all the memories and the experience ( Petitioners can't retain class levels, aka experience ).

What we know about the soul? The only thing I can recall with certainity is the "divine spark", a concept which is left quite vague. In Fiendish Codex it's said the petitioners are stripped of this divine spark, and the soul husk is what is left ( and used to form a lemure ). It's also said a petitioner who retains his memories is much more charged with energy than one who lost them and that's why the barbed devils are so careful to not allow petitioners to touch Stygian waters.


So, a little final question. According to Fiendish Codex, upon his arrival in Hell a soul is ( painfully ) stripped of all memory, experience and even the raw divine spark that even a soul without memories possesses. What is left is a soul husk who is further digested and molded into the barely sentient lemure.
Since everything that you were is gone, can we assume that being turned into a lemure means "you" are gone, as gone as if your soul has been consumed to build a magic item, totally obliterated?
Even if that lemure becomes the mightiest Pit Fiend, that "thing" is not you, it's a totally separate being.

[ngilop]

First: I think trying to find a solid answer for D&D base don the rules is an exercise in futility.

They are notorious for not only being as vague as one can get, but also contradictory in a way that is hard to fathom. But, that is what you expect when writer A has book A and writer B and book B and not one of them decided to meet up and say "hey, lets see if our 2 rule books jive OR if they are at odds."

My personal belief is yes, most of what makes you 'YOU" does go away upon death, barring some extreme cases (there are demons/devils you can find in D&D that DO remember their past lives).

[False God]

I think D&D wisely avoids giving any kind of answer to this.

My 2 cents is that "you" is a package deal. Your soul represents the spark of life and some base personality elements. Your mind represents your lived experiences. Your body is both the vessel for these things and the mode through which you express, interpret and understand these things.

In the way that creature stat blocks say "XYZ creature is usually/always *alignment*" this represents the soul. Intrinsic elements of "you".
The mind is simply data, what your eyes have seen, your ears have heard, your body has felt.
Your body puts limitations on the intake and quantification of data. Are you dead? Dumb? Blind? Tall? Short?

"YOU" are all of these things. You might remain mostly you in a new body, but the remaining mental "you" might experience some level of disconnect depending on how different the new body is from your original one. It is probably the least important of the 3(depending on who you ask), but relevant in determining the "you" that you are. Giving all your brain-data to a new soul might lead to entirely different interpretations of information. "New perspectives", while giving all new data to your soul would likely result in similar interpretations of similar data.

And then there's a nature vs nurture debate here, and how much effort and individual puts into overcoming their inherent soul-qualities or physical limitations.

But I think D&D wisely avoids giving any solid answer to what defines an individual.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The way I rule the "self" in my games is much like False God said, that "you" are a package deal, and I'd say that Planescape flavor and setting lore actually gives some pretty solid evidence that that's the case. In Planescape, two of the foundational precepts of reality are the Rule of Three (pretty much everything comes in threes, or multiples/sets of threes, and if something looks like it comes in twos or fives or something you're probably missing part of the big picture) and the Unity of Rings (things tend to be structured as rings, either literally like Sigil or the Outer Planes or figuratively as in recurring cycles or balanced wholes); the third precept is the Center of All, but that isn't really relevant at the moment.

Planes, and the matter composing them, come in three general varieties: physical, spiritual, and conceptual. You have the Inner Planes (purely physical, being planes of Air and Earth and Fire and various solid/liquid/gaseous/energetic instantiations thereof), Outer Planes (purely spiritual, being planes of Good and Law and Neutrality and various interpretations thereof), and Transitive Planes (purely conceptual, being planes of Thought and Potential and Proof and various extrapolations thereof), with the Prime Material either being considered a "physical" plane along with the Inner Planes or a mixture of all three as part of a higher-order set of three, depending on a given scholar's interpretation.

Creatures, also, are made of three kinds of "stuff" in that they have a body, a mind, and a soul. These are definitely independent parts, as you can change one part without changing the others (e.g. enlarge person to change the body, modify memory to change the mind, or atonement to change the soul), combine multiple parts of the same type in one being (with e.g. grafts for the body, personality parasite for the mind, and possession for the soul), or even swap one part out entirely (with e.g. polymorph for the body, mind switch for the mind, and magic jar for the soul).

However, if you split a creature into all three parts (that is, kill it, causing the body to stay where it was killed, the soul to go to the Outer Planes, and the mind to linger in the Astral Plane) all three very quickly become unrecognizable, and if you make a creature with only two of the three parts (such as an awakened skeleton, with a body and mind but no soul; a golem, with a body and an elemental "soul" but no mind; or a ghost, with a mind and soul but no physical body), or a creature out of balance with one part diminished or separated (such as a lich, with a body and mind but its soul stored elsewhere; a voidmind creature, with a body and soul but its mind removed; or a vestige, with a soul and mind but no physical existence), it ends up as a sort of mockery of a real being, static and unchanging and a slave to its nature and/or its controller.

So your self is composed of your body and mind and soul together (Rule of Three) all present in equal and unadulterated proportion (Unity of Rings), and anything less than that is not "you" anymore.


Since everything that you were is gone, can we assume that being turned into a lemure means "you" are gone, as gone as if your soul has been consumed to build a magic item, totally obliterated?
Even if that lemure becomes the mightiest Pit Fiend, that "thing" is not you, it's a totally separate being.

Correct. Again going by Planescape lore, if a being wants to actually become a devil after death, as opposed to having the soul-formerly-known-as-the-creature thrown into a diabolical blender and used to build an entirely unrelated devil out of the resulting soulstuff, they have two options: they can either avoid their mind and soul being separated upon death in the first place, or have something fetch the two and reunite them after the fact. The former is how people who make pacts with devils "skip the line" and get reborn as something other than a lemure, the latter is something any deity can do for its petitioners if they're willing to spend the energy.

[Psyren]

Keep in mind that the rules define normal or expected cases (like dead petitioners in Hell becoming lemures through torture and effectively losing themselves.) While most people go through these processes, exceptions exist, and adventurers are by definition not most people. You could have a character that dies and becomes a fiend with their personality/memories intact. You could also be a petitioner that never even makes it to the afterlife because a daemon got into the River of Souls and managed to devour you (or part of you) before they could be chased off by a psychopomp. You can spontaneously become an intelligent undead like a ghost or revenant or even a bodiless haunt, that may or may not retain all your memories and personality (or may warp them significantly) and not even the gods need to be clear on the reason why. Or a specific deity or other being might take an interest in you, or there could be some celestial event going on that just throws everything off whack, that some other group of adventurers is off solving but not before it affects you.

So while I do think there is is some value in establishing a baseline expectation for what constitutes "you" - at the end of the day such definitions can always end up having variances for one reason or another. Some of your fates may have your memories, some your personality, some both, some neither, and some a mixture of "you" and something else entirely that eventually becomes a new "you."