Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 12:23 pm
Dimebag wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 12:11 pm
Tell me, what do you feel your identity is?
I identify as a homo sapiens. I regard all subcategories of this as divisive and potentially dangerous the health of humanity, and suspect all who promote other forms of group identity, which is most often damaging, as failing to see the solution to identity problem.
Your thoughts? Your emotions? Do you feel like a little you riding around inside your head, the one which sights and sounds are presented to? Or, do you feel like your body? Do you identify as your body?
Homo Sapience is about all these things.
Or do you feel like you are awareness, or consciousness?
What's the difference?
Does consciousness happen TO you, or are you consciousness?
The first seems like a disabling dualism. Attributing properties is what others do to you. I am complete with my consciousness, not separate from it.
That whole thing where we say, “we’ll figure out who this consciousness thing happens to later”, well that’s what this is about.
Never said it. Don't think i ever would.
Who are you, or more to the point, what are you?
Homo Sapiens
Sculptor and Henry quirk, answer these questions?
DOne
Some people identify for instance with their profession, with their familial role, or racial category (more so now). Which is why when someone loses that particular role, for instance, their job, or their children leave home, they feel lost and in a sense don’t know who they are. I don’t know of anyone who’s identity is tied to their species, but I suppose one could. That sounds more like an intellectual categorisation which you chose yourself rather than an identity, which you don’t choose but which normally is due to some attachment to that particular role. Being a human is very general and non specific and has no real designating characteristics. I’m not saying it’s not true or you are wrong, but it doesn’t seem like a typical identity.
My point is though, as identities can morph and change over time, they aren’t stable. When someone loses this particular identity, they are essentially floating free, but they tend to feel extremely vulnerable, and this results in a kind of “searching behaviour” for a new thing to attach their identity to. You see the human being doesn’t like being isolated or exposed as an individual, and rightly so it is safer as part of a collective group.
This is the idea of identity, it binds you to your group.
These days, we are less oriented towards large Dunbar number groups due to obvious reasons, and more oriented to our identity with our profession, our interests, or our familial roles.
But there is a default identity state our minds resort to when none of these social identity groups aren’t relevant. That state is the body. It is most relevant to moving around in the world, when we are doing things which don’t require much attention, our awareness views itself or merges with, the sensations of the body and thus, your identity is of the body.
But when one probes their identity deeper, there seems to be a feeling of being something in the body, specifically in the head, which is the controller of the body, the thinker of thoughts, the setter of goals, the haver of feelings.
This particular aspect of identity relates to the feeling of being in control, and thus also relates to the mind and body. Without this aspect of identity, you would merely be a passenger, watching your body move, watching feelings come and go, listening to thoughts entering your internal sound space, and then leaving. Instead of being this one that watches everything come and go, most people feel those things that come and go are created BY them. This is the illusion that identity creates, by “merging” awareness or identifying with that stream of mind.
By observing things coming and going, like bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, etc, eventually you can break this identification with them. An analogy is, everything that comes and goes are clouds, but you are that in which the clouds pass, being the sky. What is left is an observer, and the observed. There is still some aspect of identity here, as DAM has iterated, more conceptually. This is not my area of expertise, as I am yet to fully realise this. I speak only from my experience.
