More than 100 employees and investors cheered from the trading floor below, their phones held high to capture the scene. Kristin Holloway, employee number 11, looked up at the balcony and snapped photos, then popped them into a text to her husband, Lee Holloway, the company’s third cofounder. He was home in California. Every so often, a familiar face pushed through the throng to say to her, “Lee should be here.”
In Cloudflare’s early years, Lee Holloway had been the resident genius, the guy who could focus for hours, code pouring from his fingertips while death metal blasted in his headphones. He was the master architect whose vision had guided what began as a literal sketch on a napkin into a tech giant with some 1,200 employees and 83,000 paying customers. He laid the groundwork for a system that now handles more than 10 percent of all internet requests and blocks billions of cyberthreats per day. Much of the architecture he dreamed up is still in place.
Lee’s rudeness perplexed his old friends. He had built his life around Cloudflare, once vowing to not cut his hair until the startup’s web traffic surpassed that of Yahoo. (It took a few short months, or about 4 inches of hair.) He had always been easygoing, happy to mentor his colleagues or hang out over lunch. At a birthday party for Zatlyn, he enchanted some children, regaling them with stories about the joys of coding. The idea of Lee picking fights simply didn’t compute.
He was becoming erratic in other ways too. Some of his colleagues were surprised when Lee separated from his first wife and soon after paired up with a coworker. They figured his enormous success and wealth must have gone to his head. “All of us were just thinking he made a bunch of money, married his new girl,” Prince says. “He kind of reassessed his life and had just become a jerk.”
On the floor of the stock exchange that September morning, Lee’s younger brother Alaric weathered the morning in a state of low-grade panic. He snapped selfies with early employees and fired them off in texts to his brother. Alaric had never worked at Cloudflare, and he knew barely anyone there. But his dark hair flopped over his forehead with the same distinctive swoop as his brother’s, and his long, tapering face had the same dark eyes and olive skin. “It was surreal,” Alaric says. “People kept looking at me like they knew me.”
At home with his parents in San Jose, Lee, 38, was restless. He paced the rooms and hallways of the 1,550-square-foot house, a loop he’d been tracing since he’d moved in with them two years earlier. He didn’t speak. His parents had the TV on, and they called him over whenever Prince or Zatlyn appeared onscreen.
Later, he paused at the family’s Roku to search YouTube for videos of Cloudflare. Then he resumed his circuit: walking the halls, buzzing his lips, snacking on cashews.
What makes you you? The question cuts to the core of who we are, the things that make us special in this universe. The converse of the question raises another kind of philosophical dilemma: If a person isn’t himself, who is he?
Countless philosophers have taken a swing at this elusive piñata. In the 17th century, John Locke pinned selfhood on memory, using recollections as the thread connecting a person’s past with their present. That holds some intuitive appeal: Memory, after all, is how most of us register our continued existence. But memory is unreliable. Writing in the 1970s, renowned philosopher Derek Parfit recast Locke’s idea to argue that personhood emerges from a more complex view of psychological connectedness across time. He suggested that a host of mental phenomena—memories, intentions, beliefs, and so on—forge chains that bind us to our past selves. A person today has many of the same psychological states as that person a day ago. Yesterday’s human enjoys similar overlap with an individual of two days prior. Each memory or belief is a chain that stretches back through time, holding a person together in the face of inevitable flux.
The gist, then, is that someone is “himself” because countless mental artifacts stay firm from one day to the next, anchoring that person’s character over time. It’s a less crisp definition than the old idea of a soul, offering no firm threshold where selfhood breaks down. It doesn’t pinpoint, for example, how many psychological chains you can lose before you stop being yourself. Neuroscience also offers only a partial answer to the question of what makes you you.
Neural networks encode our mental artifacts, which together form the foundation of behavior. A stimulus enters the brain, and electrochemical signals swoosh through your neurons, culminating in an action: Hug a friend. Sit and brood. Tilt your head up at the sun and smile. Losing some brain cells here or there is no big deal; the networks are resilient enough to keep a person’s behaviors and sense of self consistent.
Source: Wired
