Man for Himself (Pt I)

"Having realized his own self as the Self, a person becomes selfless. This is the highest mystery."

This week has been filled with interesting meditations on the nature of Self. I'll spare you the self-portrait I had to draw, but if you keep reading you will have to listen to me hash out some of these other thoughts.

Much of what it means to be human comes from the fact that we have such a pervasive sense of self as an independent, autonomous awareness. 'I am me, and you are not. I am different and separate from you, and you cannot know what it is like to be me.'

But what am 'I'? Where does my sense of self come from? And while we may commonly confuse the two, are sense of self and sense of identity really the same thing? (Though the terms are commonly interchanged, I'm going to try to define them as two different things.) Think about the following example... If my physical body is altered or enhanced with a piece of technology, how and to what degree does that piece of technology become part of my sense of self and identity? There is evidence that my brain can easily incorporate it into its map of how 'I' interact with the outside world, but does my sense of identity incorporate the change so easily, or do I persist in identifying it as foreign to 'me' long after my brain has actually learned to function with it?

I suppose I'm trying out the argument that a sense of self (separateness) is a necessary precursor to a sense of identity (relationships and relatedness). I must first know/feel that I am separate from you before I can begin to identify how I relate to you. If this is so, then a sense of self might be seen as a more primitive, basic construct - perhaps the defining feature of conscious experience [1] - while a sense of identity involves higher-order cognitive processing and understanding of relationships. Acquiring a sense of identity is a natural response to perceiving oneself as separate from another, but our sense of identity is a much more fluid construct than our fairly-resilient sense of being separate from others.

Our sense of identity is acquired from our experiences, and continuously modified. It seems reasonable to say that our sense of identity gives us our basis for moral reasoning, as the acquisition of a more complex sense of identity is often paralleled an accompanying increase in capacity for moral reasoning. In a very real way, identity drives morality. A person's social identity - as defined by the groups to which she belongs - will largely determine the values that she is taught, and which she internalizes and chooses to express through actions. There is already evidence that we choose actions that calibrate our sense of moral identity with regard to social norms, which is arguably identity driving morality. Only to a limited extent can a person choose to alter her social identity to bring it in line with her sense of morality.

Many of our definitions of what is morally correct come from our perceptions about the appropriate balance of self-interest against the needs of others. All theories of morality are predicated on the idea that one person is separate from another, yet can have a significant impact upon another. More specific notions of what is right and wrong are subsequently derived from our ideas about how a particular person is related to another (identity).

When it comes to an individual sense of identity, what is acquired via experience is incorporated as changes to a physical structure (the brain). Science is reaching a level where it has become possible to discuss altering various aspects of the brain to create a 'better' personal identity. (Still waiting to get my hands on the full paper.) In reading this abstract though, it occurred to me to ask - If what is 'moral' has previously been defined largely by one's sense of identity, then what are the implications of allowing morality to define identity?

(h/t Trans-Spirit)



[1] Though it is possible for the sense of identity to expand to include other people and objects, as described in mystical experience, one can argue that there must persist something apart from the experience which is able to note the change and reflect upon it.