X-Message-Number: 14215 Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 09:17:11 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: some comments on identity Hi everyone! I note that everyone talking about self and identity on Cryonet seems to believe that it is purely a matter for philosophy --- or put in more blunt terms, that nobody thinking about it need do more than sit in a corner and think. Neuroscience has come up with lots of interesting cases which bear on how our identity works. People who have several personalities each unaware of the other. People who lack one or another trait in their thinking that we'd ordinarily consider essential--- such as a desire to survive. People who believe that they are someone else, and even that the person claiming to be that someone else is a fraud and they are the real one. This is in addition to all the various faults of memory and recognition that we can find --- such as people who cannot recognize faces but go about recognizing people by how they dress and the sound of their voice. Whether I am agreed with or not, I have a doubt that any serious discussion of identity can work if we don't look carefully at how our brains give us our identity. Our sense of "I"-ness, after all, comes from activities of our brain. Brains do not work like computers: they often use vague criteria that cannot be put down into rules or definitions. (In fact, rules and definitions must NECESSARILY depend on recognition events which are independent of them and cannot be effectively encoded without going into an infinite regress). This means that looking for a DEFINITION of identity is almost certain to fail. Definitions have their place, but out of that place they're useless. In terms of evolution, it's useful for us to recognize ourselves as distinct from other things and creatures, and try to preserve ourselves, together with preserving that distinctness. It's not that we're looking at a fact in the world, we're also looking at a DESIRE. What satisfies that desire may change, but its presence continues. As human beings, our abilities to understand the world and work with it exceed that of any other known creature; that is one way in which our identity desire can go much further than (say) that of a rat. Not only can our desire for self change with time, but it may sometimes even change suddenly (we realize that we've been doing something harmful to our Selves, even though we did not see that at the time). As for just how we DEFINE our Selves, that changes along with all the other things. And so I would suggest that we look on identity not as a fact but as one of our major desires. Yes, that does not answer the problem entirely, but I am not claiming it does. We will eventually find out just how our brain produces awareness, and how it produces our sense of self. That will be useful information which we do not now have. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14215