Identity (Identity)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Saturday, August 15, 2009, 19:57 (5368 days ago) @ dhw

Some immediate responses to points in dhw's post: - "free will". This term tends to be used carelessly. I take the view that by thinking about a subject and coming to conclusions we can as a result influence our subsequent behaviour. Is this "free will"? In other respects our scope for wilful action seems to me to be somewhat limited by our circumstances. - "Matt has pointed out that thoughts often come into our heads seemingly of their own accord, with dreams as an extreme example." In my experience dreams are usually about ideas or events that have come up during the day, and they represent a sorting out process by which the brain tries to file them away and make sense of them. - "David argues that since our conscious and our unconscious minds are part of us, we can hardly attribute them to anything outside ourselves," Agreed. - "and he believes that he is in control of who he is." There I'm not so sure. I don't think I'm the same person I was ten or twenty or forty years ago, or even possibly a minute ago, since new thoughts have occurred to me. What "I" am evolves. - "I'm sure we all believe we have our own identity, so just what is it that makes us "us"?" I would just put it down to continuity. There is a series of connections between the person I am now and who I was forty years ago. - "Materialists would presumably say that the basis of identity is the physical stuff that goes to make up our bodies." I'm afraid that idea is sunsustainable, since the material of which we are composed, i.e. the atoms, is changing all the time. I did read once how long it took for all the atoms in our bodies to recycle, and it wasn't very long, but I forget the details. - "But ... I'd like to underline this ... no-one has yet explained how the materials actually produce the thoughts that make us what we are." I'm not an expert on neurology, but the way I understand it, thoughts occur in our brains in the form of connections between the neurons, or possibly as electric or chemical potentials. What these connections "mean" of course depends on the experiences that formed them, which they serve to remind us of by replaying the experience in some form. - "So are we servants of those materials?" No, not of the materials, but of the experiences and connections that formed us. - "If not, what gives us control over our thoughts when we do control them, and what produces the thoughts we don't control?" There are parts of our brain where we have some control over our thoughts (probably the frontal lobes) and there are other parts that work subconsciously, as in dreams. - "Matt has talked of a tabula rasa. But is there such a thing?" That's an outdated psychological notion, due to Locke I think. The modern view (see Pinker) is that babies are born with innate capacity for their brain to develop rapidly given a helpful and stimulating environment such as is provided by loving parents. Bad experiences can lead to maldevelopment. - "Young children ... do react in their own individual way." Only after a period of development I would think. - "What I do not understand is the mechanism that moulds these different influences into "me"." Mechanism is one of your fetish words! No machine is needed, just individual experiences. Why would you develop into someone else!

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GPJ