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The Conundrum of Identity

Apr 22, 2015 //
5

One of the common philosophical tropes is asking what makes us who we are. We all have a sense of Self; we all have a sense of Others, but what actually makes up that essence of Self? There are usually two answers that are given: either the body or the mind.

Let’s start by looking at the body because a lot of people who are trying really hard not to be superficial want to say the mind. The body actually has a great importance when it comes to identity. It’s how we recognize people. I look at you, and I see the way your eyes crinkle when you smile your crooked smile, I hear the sound of your voice, etc. If I see you walking down the street, it is because of the physical make-up of your body that I am able to say, “That is you.” The Christian tradition says that when we are resurrected after God finally gets bored letting us play around, it is our physical body that we inhabit within the heavenly realm. 2000 years of tradition is not easy to dismiss. Lastly, the absolute worst “Would you rather?” question makes us really ponder the essence of a person, be it body or mind, by asking us, “Would you rather have sex with your girlfriend’s body inhabited by the consciousness of your mother, or your mother’s body inhabited by the consciousness of your girlfriend?” If you prefer boyfriends or others, make whatever substitutions you need to until you realize that it’s gross either way. If body was unimportant towards identity, this question would be significantly easier to answer.

So, if body is important to identity, what happens if someone loses a leg and requires a prosthetic? And then an eye and needs a glass one? And then an arm and gets a chainsaw, Evil Dead-style? If the body represents identity, and the body is replaced, (keep in mind that the body has completely new cells every seven years), how can we say that it is still the same person? If I am A, and then later I am B, how is that consistent since A ≠ B? It doesn’t seem logically sound. When we see two clones fighting to the death in a movie, one is typically the normal version, and the other is usually evil. We accept them to be different despite their identical bodies, and it is their minds that separate them.

To those reading this, you know my identity through my mind. My body does not register for this one-sided conversation. If my body was destroyed through a lab experiment gone wrong, and my mind was transferred into a machine that could transmit my thoughts into text, those who know me best would likely be able to ascertain that it is in fact my mind within that machine. They would get my jokes, recognize my allegories, and know enough about my patterns of speech that they might eventually accept that this machine was now me. And of course everyone knows that it’s not what’s on the outside that counts, but what’s on the inside!

But what about someone who suffers brain trauma and whose whole personality changes? Or someone suffering from PTSD and whose mind has been altered because of it? Are we a totally different person when under the influence of narcotics? Or when suffering from Alzheimer’s and Dementia? We might think, “oh, the real them is in there somewhere!” We reject that this new mind cannot be the real them, but we maintain their identity because we accept that the body gives a person the consistency of identity even when we have no other evidence outside the body to suggest this. For example, we continue to love our elderly with Alzheimer’s because we recognize a sense of identity beyond the mind.

So is identity some combination of the two? An amalgamation of body and mind? The astute observer might notice that these problems of identity that I have been going over all take place from the perspective of an observer, not the person themselves. It is the understanding of the identity of the Other that has so many flaws in it, and here is why.

The identity of the Other is not any sort of combination of body and mind, it is based on memory. We remember what someone looks like, sounds like, smells and maybe even tastes like, and that is how we define their body. We also remember how they behave, and how they interact with us, and that is how we define their mind. The only dilemma in identity becomes apparent when the memory of a person does not coincide with how we presently perceive them.

If the identity of the Other transcended memory, everyone would know that Batman is Bruce Wayne. No matter how much he hid his body through costumes, or his mind through his billionaire playboy persona, his identity would transcend these memories people had of Bruce Wayne, and Batman would instantly become recognizable due to the connection of identity that he would necessarily possess with others.

If identity is memory, what does this mean? The most glaring consequence of this revelation is that one can only love the memory of a person, as that is the only way we can ever know them. Before you dismiss this, keep in mind that those who are adopted young enough, who form childhood memories with their adopted siblings, will never love them “in that way” based on those early, developmental memories. In contrast, genetically related siblings, meeting for the first time as adults, frequently have sexual attraction towards one another, as the memories required to counteract this superemely gross encounter are nonexistent. Those with Alzheimer’s are notorious for not recognizing their loved ones in the present, but will recall them fondly within their memories of the past.

Is the love of an abstract idea created from memory as powerful as the traditional sense of love that romantics poetically describe to us? I would argue that it is. Created values will always have the strength that we assign to them.

This does also mean that if you lose a loved one, literally everything that you love about them is still with you, so long as you remember them. I can’t tell if this is consoling or not, but… maybe?

Anyway, I feel that I should probably outline the identity of the Self as viewed by the Self. The identity of the Self should presumably go beyond simple memory. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) concludes that there must at least be a receptacle for thinking, or a receptacle for memory, in order for a being to exist. If memories are lost, the identity of the Self is not lost, as the receptacle has just been emptied, it has not disappeared.

Are we just unique cogitos running around? A thinking beacon? We are not necessarily our consciousness, as the being of consciousness is the consciousness of being (which means that we can only be conscious of something. If we self-reflect, we are conscious of our self; if we reflect on anything else, we are conscious of that thing). However, there must be something projecting that consciousness. There is also a neuroscientist named Raymond Tallis who points out that we know all about the input of sight: light enters into our eyeballs, hits a bunch of eyeball parts, and this information is transferred into our brain, but that doesn’t explain the output: what is looking out. The thing that projects sight in theory would be the same thing that projects consciousness.

Whatever it is projecting these aspects of Self, if you were to ask me, is our identity. I don’t want to use the term Soul because that implies a holiness and an eternal nature which I don’t believe necessarily follows from this theory. I like the term cogito though just because it sounds fancy, or the Subject is another way you could put it. Is it a dualistic ghost in the machine, or a creation of the physical brain? It’s hard to say. The nature of consciousness is another blog for another day.

Finally, for those that think that we are our DNA mixed with cultural and environmental factors, then we would have no identity at all. That would be materialistic determinism, and we would only be cogs, no different from all the other cogs mindlessly plugging through our predetermined roles. You’ve obliterated all meaning, freedom, identity, and value from the world. I hope you’re happy with yourselves. Also, quantum probability and the observer paradox have thrown a few wrenches into those deterministic gears, so you’re probably also wrong, but this blog is already long enough.

Post-Script: we can never access the Other’s Subject/cogito, that is why the connection between beings is based on memory.

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Categories Philosophy

The Anatomy of Sexual Autonomy

Nov 1, 2014 //
2

People frequently puzzle over the age-old question about whether or not all men are secretly rapists. Scientists have done multiple studies, and the results have always come back inconclusive. Men can almost always be caught staring at a woman’s chest, catcalling her or telling her her scale out of 10, or even the mildest form of rape: telling her to smile.

Of course, not everybody considers these social interactions as offensive as others might, and people routinely defend them as harmless, or even complimentary. These people are men, and since we basically make the rules, the qualifications for what constitutes sexual harassment gets to be really, really fluid. If the intention isn’t to beat the shit out of her with your penis, then it’s probably okay, right?

So why are women being raped by pretty much everything that men do, and why are men being entirely oblivious to it?

Allow me, a straight, white male, to give you the answer.

The social conditioning that boys and girls go through are entirely different. I’m pretty sure most people know this. Typically, boys are conditioned to be tools (a tool as in a hammer or a screwdriver, not a tool as in a douchebag). We’re trained to go out and do shit; fight crime, solve mysteries, be astronauts, whatever. Women, on the other hand, are conditioned to be temples. They get to stand around and look pretty while men are out fighting crime and solving mysteries. I’m pretty sure most people refer to this as men being the actor and women being the acted-upon, but I’m using the tool/temple analogy because it makes more sense when I eventually get around to linking this to sex.

Society has gotten a smidgen better with its portrayal of women. Women are beginning to solve their own share of mysteries, and little girls are starting to get role models that are more than just incompetent princesses waiting around for some dude with a sword to fix all their problems with marriage. However, since most movies still fail the Bechdel test, we clearly have a long way to go.

Despite all the progress women have made in becoming tools in regards to their careers and livelihood, when it comes to sex, there is nothing. Nobody talks about it, or if they do, there is zero consensus about how women should be having it. Some think that women should be freely sexual beings, others think that sex implies patriarchal ownership, that it is degrading to women. There is a bit of a divide.

Men, we know how to have sex. We’re tools. We go out, we buy a girl a drink, and then she becomes obligated to have sex with us now that we’ve spent all of five dollars on her. Our sexual autonomy is that we go out and we do. Simple.

The temples, on the other hand, are still being acted upon. The sexual autonomy of a women is her ability to give out consent. Consent is basically a one-way street. When consent is discussed, it is almost always in the context of the female. She gets to decide whom she allows into her temple. She’s not going out to get laid, she’s going out to decide who she lets have sex with her. Her autonomy embodies the passive role, rather than the active.

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Some people think that the body should be sacred, and sex should follow that logic, and that’s why I choose the temple metaphor. There could be an argument made that men should view their own sexuality in a more revered fashion, rather than just as slavering dogs.

Good or bad, this is the way it is. And so when assholes on the street catcall a girl, they are chipping away at her only form of sexual autonomy: her consent. If the only autonomy a girl has with regards to her sexuality is her ability to either allow or disallow sexual advances, and those advances are being thrust upon her, unasked, as she goes about her daily life, then it is understandable why “complimenting” a girl on her ass might piss her off. It’s basically verbally raping her, and she has no choice but to endure it because you can’t say “no” to a passing comment.

So why are men oblivious? Because we grew up as tools. Since we all know that empathy isn’t real, (or we should) then we know that men will naturally assume that women have the same outlook on sex as they do. I honestly can’t count the times I’ve been told, “well, just imagine a girl coming up to you and saying that” like it’s the same thing. It’s not, because men and women have different sexual autonomies based on our respective conditioning. But most guys don’t understand that, so they remain ignorant to the harm they are causing by something they might view as complimentary, because they imagine the reverse happening to them, without taking into consideration the conditioning towards sexuality that women go through in our society.

As easy as you might think it is to blame individual men for telling random women they’re hot, you have to remember that men aren’t being educated about the sexuality of women, either as temples or as tools, as men are exposed to even fewer female role models than women. And you can’t say, “teach men not to sexually harass women” because most men won’t understand what constitutes actual harassment based off of our own gendered biases.

So are all men rapists? Probably, but at least it’s not on purpose.

Post-script: There are a lot of generalities in here. Forgive me.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality

Subjective Morality: It’s all we’ve got

Aug 16, 2013 //
3

Remember when you were a kid, and you knew there were delicious cookies not-so-locked-away in a kinda-sorta out of reach location? Did you ever take one anyway, even though you knew you “weren’t supposed to”? Why weren’t you supposed to? Because you’d spoil your dinner or “Because I said so!” Now that you’re (presumably) grown up, you might still have cookies semi-locked away somewhere, and you might find yourself in a similar dilemma. You’ve added a few more reasons to the list of why you shouldn’t have a cookie. You don’t want to gain weight. You’re saving them for someone. You already stuffed your fat face so full of pudding pops that to have even one cookie would make you puke all over yourself. All of those options basically boil down to, again, “Because I said so,” but in this instance, it isn’t your parent telling you, it’s your superego telling your id. You’re choosing whether or not it’s okay to have a cookie.

Let’s get a bit more philosophical here. When you were a kid, eating that cookie was wrong 100% of the time. Let’s call it immoral, just for shits and giggles. Now as an adult, eating that cookie is immoral, let’s pull this arbitrary statistic of 50% of the time out of my ass. Half of the time you feel bad about cramming your face hole with cookie goodness, the other half you just savour its deliciousness guilt-free because you found some way to justify it. Maybe you’re going to the gym later or maybe it’s your “cheat” day. Or maybe you just fucking love cookies, who knows.

At some point, eating that cookie became less immoral. Probably it’s when you moved out of your parents’ house. At that point, all of a sudden a whole lot of things became less immoral. Staying out past 10pm, bringing girls home, pooping in the bidet; now you are deciding whether or not these things are okay. The actions themselves aren’t imbued with any moral value, it’s strictly how you as an individual perceive them.

These are, of course, small fry examples. I think most people would agree that these trivial actions shouldn’t even count towards a form of morality. What about if that cookie was a shellfish? Or pork? Religion, the ultimate guide for morality, in some instances dictates dietary restrictions. So let’s look at religious law and see if it’s just as subjective as choosing whether or not to poop in a bidet.

If you’re religious, (I’m going to stick to Christianity in this instance because I’m fairly western centric in my thinking, though it does apply to every religion. Feel free to apply your own belief set to this theory) you would probably say the biblical law against murder is higher than the secular, governmental law against murder. What I mean to say is, you aren’t going around killing people helter skelter because of what God says, not because of what Johnny Law says.

What about slavery? The Bible, even the New Testament, advocates slavery. Ephesians 6:5-8 tells slaves to obey their masters as they would obey Christ. I sincerely hope that you would place secular, governmental law higher than biblical law in this instance.

So why do this? You might justify about how the Bible was written in a different time period, under different circumstances, and that it needs to be interpreted in a modern cultural context, and that’s fine. Go ahead and do that. I’ll allow it, but in return, I need you to understand that the only reason you’re saying that is because you were raised in that same modern cultural context, and because of this, you are choosing which parts of the Bible to follow. The morality dictated by the Bible isn’t inherently moral because of where it’s coming from, it is only moral if the person interpreting it declares it as such.

Even if you followed every letter in the Bible, it would still only be because you are choosing to do so, because that is your belief. Your choice. It’s only “Because I said so” if you let it.

I feel as though I need to take a step back and explain what I mean when I say morality. I’m going to do this super quick because this is a huge tangent and I apologize, but I want to make sure I’m being clear. An action is moral only if it is inherently viewed as moral. Because I said so, and because I’m going to punish you if you don’t, are not valid reasons for morality.  So governmental law, for example, isn’t a basis for morality because it’s a mix between because I said so, and the fear of being locked in prison. The only reason that religious law is exempt from this stipulation is because God is viewed as the source of Goodness. So God’s laws are already imbued with morality, simply because of their source. My argument is that that is not the case, as you as an individual already have preconceived notions as to what’s good or not, based on your upbringing, and use those notions to pick and choose which parts you like or dislike. Some folks attempt to use reason to dictate morality, but that always leads to trouble, and I’m not getting into that right now.

And we’re back. Okay. I have lost my train of thought. And this is why tangents are a bad idea.

Oh right. I remember. I’m going to give a few more examples of subjective morality that don’t involve cookies because that will just make me hungry.

Since everyone loves pop culture, and you’re a damn dirty liar if you say you don’t, let’s look at some situations where traditionally “wrong” actions are looked upon in a favourable light. Aladdin, for example, steals things. Disney, the production company for kids, says that stealing is okay. Sure he shares the bread, but he still steals. What is the message here? There are some options. Stealing is always okay. Stealing is only okay if it’s food. Stealing is only okay if it’s for the benefit of those who need it badly. Which reminds me that Robin Hood is another good pop culture example. Stealing is never okay and Aladdin should have his hands cut off, as was the tradition at the time. Of those options, which one did you relate to most? It’s going to be different for each of you, but that’s my point. Based on who you are as an individual, you are going to relate more to one version of morality over another. Especially in the grayer areas. Note: I hope you’ve caught on that my point is that they’re all gray areas. Some are just grayer than others.

Oh wait hold on let’s look at  straight up killing folks. This one is easy for those of us who are lucky to be born into such privilege where we can smugly assert that killing is wrong in every instance and that it is never justified (For the record, killing is always wrong and is never justified). What about those who live in the context of kill or be killed? Maybe you might change your mind if every day is a fight for your life. Pop culture reference here is City of God.(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317248/?ref_=sr_1) I wanted to give an example of a localized culture where killing has become the norm, but every action movie ever has us relating to someone who is killing dudes left and right. Maybe it’s for some cause or another, but it’s still death dealing that movie goers cheer for. The book and upcoming movie Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card has us relate to someone who commits genocide. Spoilers, by the way. Maybe you feel as though that every instance of death dealing is wrong, and that movies that perpetuate that culture are a hindrance to social progress. Kudos, but that’s still only because that’s what you’re choosing to believe based on your personal, unique life experiences.

There are countless pop culture examples of robots being programmed with “humanity’s best interests” and then being unable to properly understand this directive due to an acute case of Lack of Feelings, so they go on a murderous rampage or whatever, and then humanity has to assert its humanity in order to bring the world back to its chaotic interpretation of morality. Sometimes it’s wrong doing right, and sometimes it’s right doing wrong. Robots don’t understand this, but humans do, and that is because we choose our own morality, and it isn’t based on anything having intrinsic value, it’s based on how we happen to feel about it at the time.

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Categories Philosophy
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