A question of Identity...

Your experiment would also support the view that my rainbow is different from your rainbow. It is said that when we observe a rainbow, since a rainbow does not exist without an eye to see it, that even though we may be standing right next to each other, your POV and mine are slightly different. However, not only are we observing the rainbow from a different perspective, we are not seeing the same rainbow!

Earlier I was going to suggests that you don't really grasp Buddhism, but now (in this aspect of it) I see that you do. I don't want to reprint the whole long chapter here, but this is from Paul Carus' The Gospel of Buddha:

There is a peculiarity about my self
which renders it altogether different
from everything else and also from other selves
There may be another man who feels exactly like me,
thinks like me, and acts like me;
suppose even he had the same name
and the same kind of possessions
he would not be myself (53:46)

Oh, and just a point of trivial fact: Springsteen is not from Philadelphia, but nearby New Jersey. I suppose he is just adopting Philadelphia to give his work a wider appeal, or just sympathizing with the good people there as artists will do.

 

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Sperm and an egg made me who I am.

 

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That explains so much!

 

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first impulse: NO
second thought----------i am here

as/re identity:
Long ago, I studied with Buckminster Fuller......as much a zen master as college professor
Poor guy kept looking for a term to describe himself, and kept changing the term du jour (kinda like the child in the play 1000 clowns)
For awhile, he settled on "I am a verb". (and ended up with "trim-tab)
For his classes, we once had an assignment to define ourselves on a piece of poster-board. I did a collage with magazine cutouts which touched on previous experiences, then pop riveted a blank poster-board over the top on which I put my social security " in block letters with shadows. The ta(feeling generous) gave it a c. Then we met to discuss each other's projects, and a fellow student noticed the pop rivets, then the 2 boards and asked if he could take it apart. I consented. After which, the gifted "C" turned into an "A".

Who are any of us?
Can we define ourselves?
Are we defined by the limited perspectives into ourselves by other people? If so, then I am myriad different people, curiously contained within one integumen.
A momentary focus would only be valid for the moment.
and
perspective matters

 

I look at our self identity this way. Our brain is full of our unique memories that were both consciously and subliminally recorded, with subliminal memories the lion's share of the data. The brain is designed to cyclically fire as evident in brain waves. This causes the entire data base to fire as an integrated whole. This memory firing consolidation defines who we are as a static snap shot of memories.

Since our data collection comes from a unique place in space and time, with each of us having variations in the sensitivity and priority levels of our sensory systems, the input data is unique to each person.

To this we need to add the imagination. This enters data as a side stream to the sensory inputs. We can imagine flying to the moon, with nothing in our sensory reality having generated this data. It may use bits and pieces of sensory data but organizes them with us in the drivers seat. This enters as a side stream that adds to the data base.

The next layer, will make use of various subroutines, such as archetypes/personality firmware, habits and skills, etc., which siphon specific data from the memory integration, above, down various pathways. This adds dynamics aspect to us. We may define ourselves by the subroutine of work.

If we get to know a person, we can tell from their experiences; memory, their preferences; subroutines, and their hopes and dreams; imagination, what is in their dynamic data base, from which they see themselves. We can empathize and get a gist of who they are.

As third party, we may also see subliminal things that are not conscious to the person and not seen as part of their identity, that follow them like a shadow self. This is still part of them, but is not conscious to them, but is nevertheless part of who they are.

The shadow is only the tip of the iceberg, with deeper natural subroutines and firmware part of our potential self awareness, but which is unconscious in most people's perception of who they are. For example, in cards, many people have a tell which is body language that tells the value of their hand. They may not see this but it shows up for the other gamblers to see. It is part of them but only seen from the outside unless they become aware.

 

"Duration" [length or amount of continuance], and whatever organized framework it was embedded in or possessed overall itself, is what time would still have left minus the flow. There's a boggling amount of Planck-time units that the smallest interval of human awareness could be further divided into in terms of what it supervenes over. But events at that scale have no cognitive / perceptual / intellectual capacity and interest about anything. Due to "understanding" (including the understanding of one object being distinct from another; knowledge of individuality) being a process or series of steps that has to stretch beyond what the most elemental temporal division is. Even if it was of the experience-less kind of understanding which a robot computer would have (i.e., the latter's procedures of "dark awareness" or outputting of invisible evidence / conclusions about _whatever_; zombie consciousness that is minus the phenomenal showings of images, sounds, skin sensations, etc).

Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters

Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

Robert Geroch: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle." --General Relativity from A to B

Christof Koch: "How does this stream of impressions come to be? Is our perception really as continuous as it seems, or is it divided into discrete time parcels, similar to frames in a movie? These questions are among the most interesting being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists. The answers will satisfy more than our curiosity --they will tell us if our experience of reality is accurate or a fiction and if my fiction is different from yours. [...] [Talis] Bachmann believes that consciousness for any one sensation takes time, comparable to the development of a photograph. Any conscious percept --say, the color red-- does not instantly appear; we become aware of it gradually. A large body of experimental work seems to support this hypothesis. [...] The important point is that we experience events that occur more or less at the same moment as synchronous. And events that reach us sequentially are perceived in that order. Depending on the study, the duration of such snapshots is between 20 and 200 milliseconds. We do not know yet whether this discrepancy reflects the crudeness of our instruments or some fundamental quality of neurons. Still, such discrete perceptual snapshots may explain the common observation that time sometimes seems to pass more slowly or quickly." --The Movie in Your Head; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN; 2005​

Whatever one is supposed to be independent of conscious and intellectual representations -- or how one supposedly exists ontologically as opposed to epistemologically [as if one could ever truly escape the latter]. In the above brand of scientific realism, apparently that would be the whole of one's spacetime "worm" [the body's worldline extended from embryonic development to death], rather than any specious "current" slice from that being experienced while conscious or illusorily seeming to flow from change to change in it. However, all the regions in the worm that were aware would be perpetually "turned-on" in that way (so to speak). Again, this slice of you wouldn't know that yesterday's slice of you was still existant and still consciously "lit-up" because the latter's sensory input and working memory [and the cognition dependent upon it] is not part of "this slice".

 

@QQ- Your question: 'Who are you when you are unconscious (no time passage)?' recalls the zen koan:

What did your face look like before your parents were born?

 

Some really insightful posts! ... still reading...
btw , I was thinking that probably what we most recognize as being our own is our "Voice". Our ability to make "music" using our own voice is unique to us. It is true that we can imitate other voices but we usually know that we are doing it. Although not always so easy.
For example:
I had just completed 30 chapters or so of a sci fi novel I was writing and realized I had accidentally imitated the style of one of my favorite Authors. Of course I had to rewrite all of it because the style plagiarism would be obvious to any publisher and discerning reader. The writers voice appears to be also unique!
Edit: the above was about 10 years ago and I still haven't finished the rewrite...

 

fascinating!

I have a certain grasp and a high admiration for the epistemological and metaphysical principles behind of Buddhism. (not to mention life-style inspirations and values)

A gem of wisdom and beauty! [thank you. I have not read this before]
And if you listen to the words you can hear the affection with which the original author had felt while expressing them.

Yes I stand corrected. According to wiki [just now researched] it was a commissioned project for the Movie Philadelphia staring Tom hanks.
However I get the distinct impression whilst studying this clip that Bruce may have spent a lot of time mixing it on the streets in Philadelphia, possibly like a lot of teens do when they go into the "main city areas" to escape the mundane-ness of suburban life. These are only impressions though and are possibly incorrect.

It is rather coincidental that this should come up though as here in Australia we are currently hosting the 10000 strong 2014 international AIDS/HIV Convention.
also

"To be the sum of all that touches you" ~unknown
comes to mind...

 

Nicely expressed!

If we are a collage of all people then an ability to identify ourselves is strengthened once we accept that we are indeed a "myriad of different people contained within one integumen." don't you feel?
Test Reasoning:
Because it is the "I" in
"I recognize these others"
that is the identity (I) in question...

 

I yam what I yam!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRf4uRRyECg

 

My abilitie to differentiate between me and the surrounding.
And i don't mean the thought/illusion that i am me, (although i suppose it is necessary) i mean my capability to project this illusion on reality.

 

Comparison ?

 

Our Human Identity starts with the , Anunnaki

But doesn't start there

Before the Anunnaki

We as Humans existed, first , they couldn't start from the begining , making a Human

So who are Human beings ?

 

umm, ego ?

 

I AM ME!

Always.

jan.

 

If a single celled lifeform could be defined as having individuality and self, then we being a multi-celled colony with a consensual egocentricity should not really think of ourselves as Me, Myself or I.
Of course it's gets a bit weird when someone ask you who you are with and you are the only one(?) there

 

Going to read Chimera Genetics, seems very interesting

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I don't think that having a unique 4D perspective and unique memories/experiences really solves the problem, it isn't only about "what makes you unique?", we also have to ask "what is relevant?", otherwise we would just number anything that has a uniqueness to it and attribute that to your identity. It doesn't really solve anything, to be unique is only a part of the problem, even if everyone can be shown to be completely unique physically it is still no explanation as to why this is your identity, and why it couldn't have been any other, couldn't you be unique as a different body? Couldn't Peter be John and vice versa?

What is the definition of existence so that it becomes particular to a person? How can a person actually gain existence subjectively? How come existence is personified that way? Could there be more than one subjectively aware in the same body (thinking/doing the same things)?

I mean, why is there even a definition of your identity so that it fits with a certain body's unique perspective? Where is that definition? I don't think that we are anywhere near answering this question. The "hard problem" is still very much a "hard problem".

 

this reminds me of the "Royal" We... not I or Me but We.
Suggesting that the Monarch must consider him/herself to be the sum of all his/her people... thus identified as WE or US instead of I or me.

 

Genetically , I'm Human , with genetic traits of the Anunnaki , of which we All are

Anyway what makes me , me , is the ability to reason , soundly