Is it possible to literally find yourself being a collection of things?

People often suppose that they literally are their brain. They say to themselves, "I am this brain." Exclusivity seems implied. I am this particular thing and no more and no less. But this is puzzling, isn't it? I am reminded of something I read about Gilbert Ryle asking his students what is wrong with saying that there are three things in a field: two cows and a pair of cows.

When we think of a brain as a single thing while imagining that we are the brain, we overlook a problem: the brain is not a single thing; rather, it is a collection of many neurons, or if you want to go further still, many, many particles. To bring the problem into better focus, let's eliminate most of those and imagine that someone claims to literally be identical with a particular pair of particles, a collection of exactly two things in a universe containing a vast multitude of such things.

How can we make sense of this? It seems more intuitive to that you might find yourself being a single thing, one of the many smallest possible things in the world, or maybe the totality of everything, with everything ultimately being one, the separateness of its components being something of an illusion. But to draw some boundary around a particular pair of particles seems rather arbitrary and strange. If two, why not more and why not less? And it introduces something extra into the world of particles: the boundary.

It is like when people suppose that rocks might be conscious in some rudimentary way, with a particular rock finding itself existing as one rock separate from all the others. But that particular rock being defined as a thing is something we impose on the world. Our minds carve the world up like that. But is there any line drawn in the world itself around that rock that designates it as a thing? Why not half the rock? Why not just one quartz crystal in the rock? Why not a pile of rocks? Why not the whole mountain?

And if I am two particles, why these two? And do they have to be in close proximity? If so, why? If I can be a particular pair of particles, why does it make any difference if they are less than a few nanometers apart as opposed to a million light years?

To say that I literally am my brain is to say that I literally am this specific, bounded collection of particles. It seems intuitive to suppose that if I am these particles now, I have always been these particles, whether conscious or not. And the particles that currently compose my brain were not always together inside a skull. Some were in a carrot. Some were in a fish. Some were in the air. What are the odds that all the particles that I happen to be identical with would come together inside one skull and compose a brain at some point?

This idea that I can be something like a particular brain seems to me to result from an unconscious retention of some aspects of the old soul idea. We used to imagine that we are a soul assigned to a particular body. The problem I am trying to reveal here would seem to not be present if you are a soul assigned to a body. The soul would be a mereological simple. How structure can appear within its consciousness would be mysterious, but it seems natural to think that I am one thing.

But if we retain the idea of ourselves each being "assigned" to a particular brain while at the same time trying to eliminate the identity gap, undoing the Cartesian split, we end up thinking ourselves each identical to a particular brain, actually being that very brain, but no more and no less. This is rather a predicament, isn't it? The exclusivity in particular seems problematic. And what is this 'I' that still seems somehow affixed to a particular brain?

I am not trying to reassert some Cartesian dualism here. Rather, I am pointing out something puzzling about the way some seem to think about identity.

How can your identity span a multiplicity of things? And yet, our conscious experience is a bound whole that seems to include the activity of a vast array of circuits in a brain. And it doesn't seem to all come together at some particular single point, some master neuron or something. So what are we to make of all this?