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Scaramouche
Sea Gull
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Joined: Apr 26, 2006
Posts: 247
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 Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 10:58 am Post subject: Identity |
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Identity
What defines who you are? What makes you you? Are you Italian or Indian? A brother or sister? A parent? Short, tall, missing a leg, educated or uneducated, smart or stupid? Forgetful, hateful, shy, sneaky? Buddhist, Taoist, Shinto, Wiccan? Left-handed or right? Which factor or factors define who you are?
Blood
Is your identity built on your ancestors? The blood running through your veins (by which I actually mean your DNA)? If you believe this, do you also belive that an adopted orphan is somehow less whole simply because their life has not included their immediate ancestors? Heck, what if you have a transfusion or an organ transplant? Does that make you partially some other identity?
Nationality
Is your identity built around which side of some invisible, arbitrary border you were born on? What if you're born on the left side of a border, then your government sells the land to the neighbouring nation? Does your identity suddenly change? Are you then a different person?
Religion
Are you your religion? Is your identity based on words in a book, written by a bunch of different guys over millennia, edited and altered many times over? What if we suddenly add a new word, phrase, or chapter? What if we remove some? Does your identity change? What if you have genes, values, beliefs, or nationality in common with others not of your religion? At which point does your identity blur into their identity, and how then does religion factor into it?
Values
Values need not be shared only between those associated by blood, nationality, religion, or any other such categorisation. Yet any of us may have values in common. Yet many values relate specifically to the ways in which we interact with the outside world. We like or dislike wars. We hate or love money. We despise or admire child molesters. Not all values are about external things, but many are. Many are about how we, ourselves, interact with the external world. Are we then defined by the world outside ourselves? If so, do we lose our identity while we sleep, or are unconscious? What if either we ourselves or the outside world by which we determine our identity changes? Are we still us? Does our identity change?
Thoughts
Do our thought alone define us? If there's a baby sitting in a burning house, and you think about saving it or not, does the conclusion your reach, or the process leading to a conclusion, define who you are? What if you decide not to save the baby? Is it then the lack of action, and not simply your thoughts, which determines the result? Or do the results in the external world not factor into it at all?
Actions
Are we the effects we enact upon the outside world? If so, what then is our identity if an effect by which we judge our identity can be achieved by another person, or perhaps even by some machine? I've seen fire-fighting robots. Do they possess identity if they save a baby from a burning house?
Sum of many parts
Maybe our identity is composed of all those things, or some of them. But if there are faults to be found in any such components, does that mean we view our identity as a collection of misconceptions? A collection of mistaken assumptions? If the components are wrong, doesn't that make the overall idea composed of those components also wrong? If so, how are we to define our identity?
More questions
We attach meaning to various things in our lives, or in the lives of those somehow associated with us, and by that we often determine our identity. But it seems to me that forming such mental relationships in order to determine our identity is faulty, a collection of incorrect assumptions. I am not what happened to my grandparents. I am not their choices and actions. I am not the mayor or my town, the premier of this state, or the prime minister of this country. I do not always share the values of those around me. I do not care about borders, religion, et cetera. From where/what do I then derive my identity? From where/what do you derive yours? What labels do you apply to your identity, and why?
The Identity Theory Of Mind.
Personal Identity.
International Society for Self and Identity.
Identity Theory.
What is the Self? |
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boothinator
Tufted Titmouse
Joined: Mar 18, 2006
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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| To me, a person's identity is simply your DNA, which gives everyone subtle little quirks but is also relatively consistent, combined with the entirety of your life experience and what vitamines and food you eat. All the sensations that you have ever had were picked up by your brain, and most were thrown away but a few were kept and stored as memories. But not only that, your brain also adapts to the sensory information it recieves. So if a person is born into a violent environment and they become used to it, ie their brain is trained to deal with such an environment, then you will become pretty well adapted to the stresses of that environment. But those little quirks from your DNA determine a little bit what information gets stored or which info is important, and what you eat determines what capabilities your mind has to process the information. But if this person is put into another environment, he would feel out of place because it doesn't operate in the same way as the violent environment. But he may like it if it bypasses his learning and makes sense on a deeper level, like logic. |
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sc
Phoenix
Joined: Oct 24, 2005
Posts: 1432
Location: Fortuna California
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| Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 3:56 pm Post subject: |
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| The identity is part of the program of reality, it is like pong. |
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Mitch8817
The Equalizer
Joined: Apr 04, 2006
Posts: 2114
Location: Victoria, Australia
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| Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2006 10:27 am Post subject: |
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| I think identity is defined by our actions and memories. Things that we do to shape the world and put our touch on it, and what we can personally take away from it without actually physically doing so. Making this world ours in our own way, through our own lives, experiences and then interpreted in our own unique way gives us our own identity. |
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