The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 211 of 254
Episodics and diachronics
Strawson is perhaps best known for his articulation of one such axis of variability in persons, between short- and long-termers, or what he calls episodics and diachronics. ‘Here what I think you find is that people fall along a spectrum,’ he told me. ‘At one end of the spectrum there are the long-termers, who I call the diachronics, and they just naturally think that they’re the same selves throughout their lives, and they really identify with themselves when they were children, say. And then there are these people who whenever they look back more than about five years, feel that it’s not really them. And then moving to the other extreme, there are people who, like me, or how it seems to me, people who just feel that they’re effectively in the moment and they don’t really think that the self that they are in the moment was there even a minute ago.’