What’s So Simple About Personal Identity?
Joshua Farris asks what you find when you find yourself.
Okay, take this body out into the world and, with it, interact with others. When they ask why you choose the things that you think, feel, say and do you tell them, “I am my body, that’s why.”
Here that makes sense [to me] only to the extent the body as a whole is in sync with the laws of matter in a determined universe. Then identity itself is merely an inherent manifestation of that.
The part where given some degree of human autonomy ascribed to the self-conscious “I”, a distinction is made between the autonomic body functions entirely embedded in the biological evolution of life on earth and that mysterious “ghost in the machine” that somehow more or less self-consciously maneuvers this body in and out of particular contexts only more or less able to be understood or controlled. The part where the genetic self stops and the memetic self begins; and then gets embedded in any number of historical and cultural narratives that each individual “I” ceaselessly constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs existentially from the cradle to the grave. The part “I” assign to my own understanding of dasein.
Again, here are the two “reductionist” explanations:
1] the body is at one with nature and all of this unfolds only as it ever could have. “I” is merely the illusion of opting for alternative twists and turns.
2] Religion. “I” is manifestation of God’s will.
Where this becomes all the more problematic is when we consider the way in which “I” can be profoundly upended by biological conditions – Alzheimer’s, dementia, schizophrenia, other major mental disorders – that seem to confirm the extent to which the body prevails.
Or the use of powerful drugs that can shape and mold the manner in which we experience “I” as a a sort of…chemistry lab?