Identity and self I

Most of who we think we are is tied up with what groups we belong to. In this essay I'm going to consider what that means, how it limits us, and how we can let go of some of our self-imposed limits and be more directly in charge of our lives.

Humans are tribal animals. We belong together in groups, like all primates. From our first group, our family, to our last, we belong to groups. Groups include your friends (rarely more than 29, because that's the size of the basic primate tribe), your profession or job, your gang, your hobby group, your country, your religion, your garage band, and so on. We each belong to a number of groups, but at any given moment we are primarily in just one.

What does it mean to be "in" a group? Groups have boundaries which separate the "ins" from the "outs". It is usually required by the group members that prospective members demonstrate their willingness to belong by jumping through a hoop of some kind. These hurdles are called "initiation rituals". Groups may require you to pass an examination, carry out a series of difficult tasks, or tolerate pain or embarrassment to "prove" your right to be a member. The difficulty of the initiation helps establish how important it is for you to be a member and reassures the current members that their group is worth the effort of joining. Leaving a group usually results in considerable resentment from the group members or punishment for the person leaving.

When we're functioning as a member of a group, we have to follow the prescribed rules for behavior, dress, language and other related choices. Even though you may belong to other groups with different rules, you are expected to follow the rules for the group you are currently in. The rules have already been established by the group, and may be ethical rules, behavioral rules, dietary rules, moral choices... the list is lengthy but the penalty for breaking the rules may be punishment or even expulsion from the group. Essentially we incorporate the values (repeated behavioral choices) of the group as our own. As a result some part of how we identify who we are is our group identity. That's frequently what we answer when someone asks us who we are. Many of us identify first with our occupational group: I'm a policeman (or whatever). For others the occupational group is less important, and we identify ourselves with another group, such as family or club.

But we are more than our group identity. We have our names, our historical sense of being the focus and center of all the experiences that were focused in our brains. We have our physical point of view, which is unique to us; nobody else can look out of our eyes or hear with our ears. We identify our self as that person who thinks the thoughts that pass through our brain, who remembers the experiences of the past in the first person.

Of course all these latter issues are largely fictional. Everyone without exception who is conscious and aware shares identically the same experience of uniqueness. Our experience of personal uniqueness is really the one thing we all absolutely have in common. (If that be irony, make the most of it.) Everything described in the preceding paragraph is temporary and removable. We can lose our point of view with losing our eyesight or hearing. We can lose our personal memories in a heartbeat, the instant of a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, or slowly through some deteriorative process like Alzheimer's. Our thoughts change from second to second, like a fountain flowing, without constancy and largely without coherence. Every night we surrender control of our thinking process to sleep. Who are we then? When we're asleep or unconscious who are we?

Not every culture celebrates individual value and personality like the West. Not every individual regards their personality as unique, valuable, important. As I get older I find myself wondering if the self I regard as essentially constant really even has any existence at all. Perhaps the "I" is just a comfortable illusion.

Identity

Current physical models of the universe specify that there is no "center", that there is no uniquely privileged place which we can call a "zero point" from which to measure distances or locations. All positions are purely relative to one another. Yet we each experience the universe from a single and genuinely unique location, in our brain and through our senses. From our standpoint, each of us is at the unique center of the universe; our experience of being individual and unique is one which is shared by every other sentient creature. In fact, it is the ONLY thing we all absolutely have in common: our experience of a unique awareness located in a particular place and time.

Buddhist thought points out that the experience of personal identity or uniqueness is illusory, in that we share our experience of uniqueness with everyone who has ever lived. Yet the illusion is inescapable. Here we are, looking out through our own eyes and thinking our own thoughts, separately from the experience of everyone else who has ever lived. We find ourselves thinking, "why is my experience of myself right here, right now, behind these particular eyes, and not some other place or time or self?" What places "me" here and now? Even recognizing that the self is as illusory as the uniqueness of a candle flame doesn't escape the fact that I experience myself here and now. Even those who are able to transcend the illusion of selfhood are still located in time and space, here and now.

It's easy to see that the "self" is illusory. It is apparently stable, yet it is obvious that it changes from second to second. Most of us would hardly recognize the self we were 20 years ago, or the one we may become in another 20. Awareness drifts from moment to moment like smoke. Our awareness begins in childhood, suspends every night in sleep, and ends in death, and that's all the universe we can ever experience. In fact, it is our awareness of being located in time and space, here and now, that gives strength to the illusion of a constant identity. We look out through our own eyes, not someone elses; we think our own thoughts and have our own memories, not someone else's. Because of that apparent unique location, we identify the one who looks and is aware as a constant "self", an identity.

The conflict between experience and reality cannot end. We feel unique; we know we are not. We think others are different from us; we know they are not. We pretend our experience is unique; we know it is not. We experience ourselves as at the center of the universe, the zero point; we know we are not and it is not. But the question remains: what is it that is at the center of our awareness and behind our eyes? It looks and feels unique but it isn't. What is it?

Fairness

Fairness is such a peculiar concept. Most of us (maybe all) have strong feelings about the importance of fairness. When we're children "being fair" means that the same rules apply to all players, that there is no "privileged position". Sometimes being fair means that we should all share equally. When children argue about being fair, they always mean that someone else is getting more than they are. They NEVER protest that they are getting too much. Of course, we do much the same today. If the goods were "fairly" (i.e. "equally") distributed among all the world's population, most of the middle and upper socioeconomic classes would have a good deal less than they now do. So when we talk about wanting things to be fair, we don't really want an equitable distribution of the world's goods and services.

The other way in which we use the concept of "fairness" is in regard to the way in which "good behavior" is rewarded. In all cultures this issue has been a struggle. It is obvious that there is no relationship between moral values and rewards or punishments. Good guys have bad things happen; bad guys have good things happen; both are essentially random. We do not wish the world to operate that way. We insist that there is a logic in what happens to us.

To account for the unpredictability and irrationality of events, we invent arbitrary gods who war with one another and with men. Then we invent ceremonies to placate the gods in order to induce them to be more fair, or at least to give us more while punishing our enemies. When we give up hope for fairness, we imagine the god(s) are simply abusers of power or even worse are simply uninterested in the affairs of men, and we resign ourselves to endure unfairness.

In Buddhism (Theravada Buddhism) and some other related religions the arbitrary and unfair nature of the world is accounted for by "karma", which, by assuming that we have a cosmic account from other past lives, imposes a sort of fairness on the present. If something really bad happens to me that doesn't seem fair, then it is because I did something bad in an earlier life for which I am being punished, and the universe is fair after all.

In the Old Testament we observe a god who punishes unbelievers and rewards according to whim. In Christianity we are offered a life in another world after death in which the good are rewarded and the evil punished. Somehow the idea that there is a god who is a perfect accountant and balancer of the scales has endured across the ages and cultures. But the knowledge that this world isn't fair is unavoidable. We won't accept that, so we invent systems which are (at the least) pretty unlikely in order to make things seem more acceptable.

None of us seem to like the idea that the Universe simply grinds on according to its laws and with no regard for important us. Doesn't everything really have a meaning?

A thought experiment

In 1984 the philosopher Derek Parfit suggested a thought experiment dealing with the nature of individual consciousness. According to my admittedly imperfect memory he imagines a teleportation machine that works by "scanning" an object. As it scans the object atom by atom, it destroys the atom by turning it into energy. It sends the energy to a receiver which uses the energy to create an identical atom in a different location.

The item is thus destroyed at the original location to be rebuilt a distance away. So far, so good. The item is re-assembled, atom by atom, to form an identical replica of the original item. Since the replica is in every sense identical, can one say that the replica IS the original item? One assumes that an operating machine would be disassembled and reassembled, still working, at the different location.

Now, thinking of the human as an extremely complex machine, we suppose the device "sends" a particular person through the intervening space to the receiver where the person steps out of the receiver. Whatever thoughts the person was thinking at the time of the transmission would continue to be thought when the person was reassembled. Is it the same or a different person? Parfit then suggests a problem: suppose that due to a malfunction, the original is NOT destroyed. Which of the absolutely identical copies can be said to be the original?

Of course the issue of identity and how it can be defined is the concern here. But I want to suggest an interesting variant: suppose the "original" is destroyed as is posited in the original concept. From the standpoint of the person who steps out of the receiver, his thought processes seem consistent and continuous from his birth to the present instant. He would certainly experience in his awareness that he was the actual person who stepped into the transmitter. But now imagine the experience of the original. He steps into the transmitter, and there he ceases to exist. His awareness stops, no matter that an identical awareness starts elsewhere. So while the person stepping from the receiver would experience a continuous and harmless process, the original consciousness would have ceased to exist because its atoms were destroyed.

What are we to make of this in defining individual consciousness and identity? The process is not symmetrical. From the standpoint of the person at the receiver, there has been no interruption. But from the standpoint of the sender, the process was discontinuous and terminal. We can of course never know this experience directly, since while the receiver person reports "No problem" or the equivalent, the person at the sending end has nothing to report and nothing to report with. In fact, this outcome cannot apparently be resolved by experiment since there can be no report of the sender's experience! What we have just considered here is the only evidence we are ever going to have.

Outside The Box

Sometimes when the universe presents us with new data it's "inside the box", by which I mean that it is not widely disparate from other data. We can see where it might fit in. We can expand current theories to include the occurrence of the new data.

Sometimes the data is "outside the box", but not so far from other data points that we can't see how to develop a new theory to expand the box and all the possibilities therein. The data may be strange, but it relates to other data, perhaps in unexpected ways. A recent example of that is "dark matter" and "dark energy". While the theories that include "dark matter/energy" are somewhat cloudy, the expansion of the theories about the universe now includes a number of other data points not previously easily included. Clearly such new theories are less certain and will require additional proof and even new theoretical constructs. However, we can imagine in general terms how such constructs might appear and how they will fit in with current theories.

But sometimes the data is very far outside the box. It's so far that it cannot fit in with other theories. They are contradictory to other data points or massive groups of data points. There is no easy theoretical construct that can include them without rebuilding the entire box. When someone "sees a ghost", that data point is so far away from all the others that to include it we need an entirely different view of the universe. The very meaning of the phrase "supernatural" is equivalent to "completely outside the box". Most of the current fads in "new world" thinking fit in this category.

This is not to say that we shouldn't consider rebuilding the entire box. All advancement in science has come from this direction. "Germs" were outside-the-box thinking, and to include them we had to completely reconsider our theories about how bodies worked. Other "outlier" data points could be seen to fit into the new construction, which could then be further expanded.

For data points so far outside the box that we have to rebuild our view of the universe, we should require a higher level of proof. The data points can be mistaken; the "ghost" was a trick of the light or a flare in the lens. Occam's Razor recommends that we find the construct that requires the least change in our view of the universe, that we rebuild the box minimally, if at all. We should see if the data points are truly "out there" or only appear to be out there. We shouldn't accept a change in world view on the basis of a single event. We have to see how the rebuilding of our world view fits with other known data points and theories.

Whatever reconstruction of the universe we may come up with, it must include all the old data points as well, and explain them as well or better than the earlier theories. Many people seem to be comfortable with holding two or more mutually inconsistent approaches. On the one hand, they demand intellectual rigor and theoretical integrity and consistency. On the other they hold absurd and contradictory world-views, based on feeling or “faith”. “Faith” seems to be a poorly-defined word which is used to justify the acceptance as fact of unverifiable and absurd items, as if accepting something unproved and unprovable is some sort of virtue. When people can’t even be consistent with themselves, how can we expect them to be consistent with one another?

I have an acquaintance with a Ph.D., who adheres to scientific rigor in her area of expertise, but at the same time is able to believe in homeopathy, “meridian lines” on the body and extrasensory perception. She is even astonished that I'm unwilling to accept her personal experience as sufficient proof, because personal experience trumps science. Amazing, isn’t it?