a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
Luke Dunne at the collector

But then, given all of the various “schools of thought” – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy – that one can subscribe to in assessing human identity philosophically, don’t expect there to be anything approaching a general consensus. I merely focus more on the greater gaps here pertaining to moral and political convictions. Concluding that the most reasonable manner in which construe identity here is from a “fractured and fragmented” perspective.

Souls? Well, that certainly puts one’s identity beyond the reach of…actual evidence? After all, since no one to my knowledge has ever actually located this soul using, say, the scientific method – experiential research, experimental methods that might be replicated – the soul can become pretty much anything you want it to be. Or need it to be. You merely “think up” the parameters of your own soul that best suits you. Make it an adjunct of God or of a Goddess. A deep down inside you manifestation of nature. Or a genetic component of your DNA that, given enough time, will actually be discovered.

And then passed on to clones of ourselves? Or to AI entities? Or perhaps reaching the point where we can create certain traits in the souls of the unborn?

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The Benjamin Button Syndrome on steroids?

An interesting article from the New York Times.

In part, it depicts my own account of dasein. In other words, how many here think of their identity as…rock solid? They know who they are, and they are damn well certain it is exactly who they should be.

Maybe the two men below felt the same…?

Switched at birth? Shades of Toto Le Hero? Only the real thing? Sure, that’s a rarity. But many of our own lives fold over and over again such that the smallest of things happens…snowballing into all manner of consequences. For me it was being born on March 23rd. Or the fluke encounter with Supannika. For you? Well, think about it.

nytimes.com/2023/08/02/worl … birth.html

[b]Richard Beauvais’s identity began unraveling two years ago, after one of his daughters became interested in his ancestry. She wanted to learn more about his Indigenous roots — she was even considering getting an Indigenous tattoo — and urged him to take an at-home DNA test. Mr. Beauvais, then 65, had spent a lifetime describing himself as “half French, half Indian,” or Métis, and he had grown up with his grandparents in a log house in a Métis settlement.

So when the test showed no Indigenous or French background but a mix of Ukrainian, Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish ancestry, he dismissed it as a mistake and went back to his life as a commercial fisherman and businessman in British Columbia.

But around the same time, in the province of Manitoba, an inquisitive young member of Eddy Ambrose’s extended family had shattered the man’s lifelong identity with the same genetic test. Mr. Ambrose had grown up listening to Ukrainian folk songs, attending Mass in Ukrainian and devouring pierogies, but, according to the test, he wasn’t of Ukrainian descent at all.

He was Métis.

And so, after a first contact through the test’s website, and months of emails, anguished phone calls and sleepless nights in both men’s families, Mr. Beauvais and Mr. Ambrose came to the conclusion two years ago that they had been switched at birth.

The mistake occurred 67 years ago inside a rural Canadian hospital where, born hours apart, Mr. Beauvais and Mr. Ambrose say they were sent home with the wrong parents.

For 65 years, each led the other’s life — for Mr. Beauvais, a difficult childhood made more traumatic by Canada’s brutal policies toward Indigenous people; for Mr. Ambrose, a happy, carefree upbringing steeped in the Ukrainian Catholic culture of his family and community, yet one divorced from his true heritage.

The revelations have forced the men to question who they really are, each trying to piece together a past that could have been his and to understand the implications.

“It’s like someone going into a house and stealing something from you,” Mr. Ambrose said. “It makes me feel I’ve been robbed of my identity. My whole past is gone. All I have now is the door I’m opening to my future, which I need to find.”

The first time the two men interacted, in what could have been an uncomfortable phone conversation, Mr. Beauvais broke the ice with a joke. The Beauvais parents, he said, “looked at the two babies, took the cute one and left the ugly one behind.” But as the two men began talking about serious matters, they confided in each other that they wished the truth had not emerged.[/b]

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Being as Onion: A Heideggerian Parable
Mark C. Watney watches Martin Heidegger’s kitchen encounter.

Is this Dasein come down out of the intellectual clouds? In other words, “I” ontically…historically, culturally? Our individual lives unfolding out in a particular world socially, politically, economically. Do we then all end up being basically the manner in which we have either been indoctrinated by others or by ourselves to believe that the existential layers themselves are in fact the Real Me?

And that, in fact, much of how we construe the world around us is derived from the Benjamin Button Syndrome. And that, in the absence of God, our individual lives are essentially meaningless? Prompting many to embrace one or another secular font in order to properly distinguish between rational and irrational, moral and immoral, authentic and inauthentic behaviors.

Here I always cue Michael Novak:

“I recognize that I put structure into my world…There is no ‘real’ world out there, given, intact, full of significance. Consciousness is constituted by random, virtually infinite barrages of experience; these experiences are indistinguishably ‘inner’ and ‘outer’…Structure is put into experience by culture and self, and may also be pulled out again…The experience of nothingness is an experience beyond the limits of reason…it is terrifying. It makes all attempts at speaking of purpose, goals, aims, meaning, importance, conformity, harmony, unity----it makes all such attempts seem doubtful and spurious.” The Experience of Nothingness—Michael Novak

Only he blinked. He took his own existential leap of faith to Catholicism, to Capitalism. You tell me in which order.

In other words, if you were around when the fascists were coming to power in Germany, you might have chosen to be the onion in the Nazi soup. You might have found your true identity as “one of them”. And, ironically enough, this “true identity” no doubt will be derived existentially from your own unique experiences. As with Hitler, you come to acquire [ontically] a set of moral and political prejudices. But these subjective biases are easily subsumed in one or another of these “soups”:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p … ideologies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy

Indeed, check out the ingredients in this soup: knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

In other words, for some, the courage to subsume their own individual complexities into this or that “soup”? Think of all the objectivists chefs here with their own one size fits all recipes. It’s not what they believe in, it’s that there had better be something to believe in that allows them to anchor their Self to the Enlightened Path in order to transcend an essentially meaningless and purposeless No God world.

The courage to be…a Nazi?

How about a moral nihilist?

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duplicate

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Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
By Luke Dunne, The Collector

Now all we need is a particular context in which to explore all of these many, many, many components of human interaction.

Actually, what we need is the capacity to grasp a definitive understanding of the existence of existence itself. Go ahead, take a wild ass guess regarding how and why the human species fits into that. Time to invent another God?

Again, however, for many, there is no “problem of personal identity”. Why? Because they simply take their own given identity for granted. In other words, they don’t pull back and ponder, “what if I was born in a different time and place? what if I was raised by different parents in a different situation to believe different things? what if I was able to fathom the existential consequences of the Benjamin Button Syndrome as others do?”

And of course: click.

Okay, but at its inception there was still going to be that crucial distinction between the biological self, the demographic self, the flesh and blood empirical self, etc., in the either/or world and the far, far, far more contentious self in regard to right and wrong or good and bad or rational and irrational behaviors.

Yes, that’s certainly one direction in which to go…souls. Which for most are attributed to God and to religion. You take a leap of faith and all the stuff philosophers grapple with in regard to identity is simply subsumed in that. Only in this day and age that often becomes increasingly more problematic because there are just so many, many paths out there to take.

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Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
By Luke Dunne, The Collector

Personal Identity: A Variety of Questions, a Variety of Answers

Some of the usual answers to the question of personal identity – ‘I am a human being’ or ‘I am a person’ or even ‘I am a self’ – are sufficiently vague as to be worthy of further philosophical analysis.

Vague, perhaps, but to the extent you are, in fact, sufficiently capable of demonstrating what you claim to be…? You are a human being. You are a person. You are embodying a self from day to day to day.

Accepting of course that until proven otherwise you are not just a character in a sim world or in a dream world or in a Matrix contraption. You are not inhabiting [along with all the rest of us] your own solipsistic reality.

Actually, given our day to day interactions in what is presumed to be an autonomous universe, it is relatively easy to define ourselves biologically, demographically, circumstantially, empirically. Some things are either true about you or they are not. On the other hand, with human beings, what we “really are” can easily be hidden behind the personas we wish others to think that we are. And not just virtually.

And, given such things as psychological defense mechanisms, some even become adept at hiding things from themselves. And then all of the variables in our lives that we are neither fully cognizant of nor fully able to control.

As for what it takes to know “what the conditions are for the persistence of a human or a person or a self over time”, well, each one of us inhabits our own uniquely existential trajectory from the cradle to the grave. And beyond subsistence, the things we all must have in order to survive at all, our likes and dislikes, our wants, our desires are still entangled existentially in dasein.

Choose 2:

1] Marx and Engels and their ilk
2] Freud and Jung and their ilk

Or maybe one of these guys:

If for no other reason then any number of them will assure you that who they fundamentally are is who you fundamentally are as well. Or else? The rest? That’s what, among other things, “final solutions” are for.

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If a tree became conscious so that it could prune itself, could it prune itself out of being a tree? Perhaps if it was still in the seed?

Too late for us, I suppose.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

To the best of my current knowledge, I have no soul. I do have a body, however, and “I”, to the best of my current knowledge, “somehow” emanates from my brain. Unless, perhaps, that’s just an illusiory “I” created by the Matrix.

Pod reality?

What’s the first thing that should tell us about the question itself? That if, after thousands of years, some of the world’s greatest minds have failed to answer it, how much stock can we put in one of us here having accomplished it?

As for it residing in memories, which particular memories of what particular experiences? Why your memories of it and not others? And pertaining to morality and meaning, human memories are, in my view, the embodiment of dasein out in particular worlds understood in particular ways…in a world that has itself been awash for centuries in conflicting goods.

If you Google “internal memory” you are deluged with links regarding computer memory. And – so far? – that is little more than human memory. Thus, I would expect that in regard to meaning and morality, that sort of memory is no less conflicting in regard to good and evil, right and wrong.

Then the part where all of this may or may not be but inherent components of the only possible reality.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Identity Principles

Before delving into Locke’s position on personal identity, it will be helpful to consider his principles regarding the identity or sameness of things in general. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke offers us two main principles in determining the identity or unity of things. One is the time and location principle: at any given time, one thing can exist at one place only.

This is the point I keep making in regard to “here and now”. Depending on when you were born historically and on the culture able to fill your head with all manner of moral and political prejudices as a child, your identity is shaped and molded by things and by people that were often completely beyond your control.

Thus, many of the “principles” involved here are themselves no less rooted existentially in dasein.

On the other hand…

Still, chairs of all shapes and sizes existed, exist and will no doubt continue to exist on into the future in all manner of locations down through the ages and in most cultures. But chairs aren’t people. Chairs don’t congregate in philosophy forums to explore their own existence. Their own nature. Their obligations and responsibilities around other chairs.

What’s tricky about the human Self/“self” is the part that revolves around dasein in a free will world.

[quote]However, if you happened to see only one chair in the front yard in the morning, and two hours later you saw an identical chair in the backyard, you could easily assume that it’s the same chair you’d seen in the front yard in the morning. Someone possibly moved it. Locke concludes:

“It being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place; or one and the same thing in different places. That therefore, that had one beginning, is the same thing; and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that, is not the same, but diverse.”[/quote]

And it all seems reasonable until you get to us…the human species. With the Benjamin Button Syndrome alone we can note just how awash human beings are in sets of circumstances that, embedded in conflicting goods, really are understood basically from subjective/intersubjective perspectives that have everything to do identity at the historical and cultural intersection of conflicting value judgments and political economy.

With people there are always going to be things that seem applicable to all of us. And that’s because for all practical purposes they are. Here and now or there and then. Instead, it is in regard to value judgements that “here and now” self can become very much at odds with other “there and then” selves.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Here the mystery truly deepens. Everything in the universe seems to be composed of much the same matter. And yet note all the ways in which these constituents – elements – can come together to create countless [and very, very different] “entities”.

Especially on planets like Earth where the human species takes matter and reconfigures it into, say, smart phones?

And, of course, all of this assumes the human species “somehow” acquired autonomy from the “heavy elements” that came to exist as a result of massive stars exploding. And, really, how close are we to actually explaining that?

Unless it actually does turn out that every single particle throughout the entire universe is exactly in the only place it ever could have been in.

Whatever that means, of course.

A little help, please. What on Earth for all practical purposes do you suppose this means? Especially given how, the older we get, the less organized all the parts become. Unless she means something entirely different.

Yep, that’s how biological life works alright.

[quote]As living beings, humans are no exception to this rule. As Locke says:

“He that shall place the identity of man in anything else than like that of other animals, in one fitly organized body, taken in any one instant, and from thence continued, under one organization of life, in several successively fleeting particles of matter united to it, will find it hard to make an embryo, one of years, mad and sober, the same man, by any supposition that will not make it possible for Seth, Ismael, Socrates, etc to be the same man.”[/quote]

Basically, this seems to describe the scaffolding of biological life. But what unfolds inside that framework is ever and always evolving from the cradle to the grave. In particular, regarding our own species. But human identity also includes components that no other lifeform on Earth possesses. And the gap here in some respects is just mindboggling.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Identity of Man vs. Personal Identity

Personal identity is not the same as human identity, because for Locke, the man and the person are different things, despite our frequent interchanging of the terms. They are different because their constituents are different.

This is basically what I come around to here: a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

We are all the embodiment of the human species. As such there are going to be things that are applicable to all of us. Biological imperatives, social constructs or otherwise. And yet no two of us will live exactly the same life. Even among identical twins there are going to be the things that eventually make each of them unique.

And Locke’s own consciousness was able to substantiate the existence of a human soul…how? And he pinpointed the neurological and chemical interactions that demonstrate the unification of the body and the soul…how? Instead, as with most of us here, he did the best he could as a mere mortal in connecting the dots between words and worlds.

Still, it’s not like the philosophical and scientific communities today have come together to celebrate Locke for having come closest to understanding the interactions between “I” and “we” and “them” given particular social, political and economic contexts.

[quote]Specifically, a person is a thinking being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places. This he can do only through consciousness. Therefore, says Locke, personal identity or the continuing ‘sameness’ of a rational being consists in this alone.[/quote[

Click of course.

And given free will, yes, each of us sustains a sense of identity that goes wherever we go from the cradle to the grave. Unless, of course, we are afflicted with any number of conditions that seem able to take this consciousness of ours and twist it into any number of conditions that are “beyond our control”.

Again, given the extent to which you believe that you understand this, how is it applicable to your own life? You have a body and a conscious mind “somehow” intertwined in a Soul that encompasses…I?

And cut off limbs are one thing, brain tumors and mental illnesses that reconfigure “I” into any number of virtually unrecognizable “selves” another thing altogether.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

But the soul is not the place where personal identity resides, either.

No, really, you tell me: where does “I” manifest itself most convincingly for you?

For many, it’s all in the eyes. Though not of course for those like Maia. Others say it’s the mouth…the place where “I” comes out given the words choosen in which to convey itself.

Other than that? Well, the assumption sometimes is that somewhere in the brain resides the mind resides the self.

As for the soul, sure, an invention that pulls everything together. And then on top of that, it assures us that “I” will continue on, well, forever.

More to the point, beyond the “anything goes” thought experiments, how exactly would someone go about actually demonstrating this past self? Or, perhaps, even more surreal, what if they actually could?