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Re:What is an identity, exactly? Pt 1 of 2
Identity: Part 2 of 2
At the time the "continental rationalists," of whom Descart was perhaps the most famous were trying to figure out this magical phenomenon of human reason, another really brilliant guy in England was doing the modern thing, trying to spend more time in his body and less in his head. David Hume was a British Empiricist working at the problem of reality from the other end. He studied human beingness from the outside in, rather than from the insite out. He tried to figure out what makes two different people different, and what you could point to, to prove once and for all that that squalling purple hunk of mostly water that comes popping into the world on our original birthday, and the gray, wrinkly quintessense of dust on the deathbead breathing her last are somehow the same person. Physicaly, there's nothing to support the idea at all. They don't look anything alike, and we often hear that the human body completely rebuilds itself cell-by-cell, about every thirty days (This isn't exactly true, but it is fun to think about.) Anyway, inking our identity to our physical body is problematic, even though it's awfully convenient. It is a handy physical phenomenon, there is a direct one-to-one association between our bodies and our senses of self, so it works very nicely unless you believe in some essence of us that survives beyond the death of our body.
Anyway, Hume tried to take that on and he tried to find any physical evidence that would scientifically prove that we have some human characteristic that we can call identity. He failed. What it boiled down to was this: Here I sit in my room typing at my typewriter keyboard and I have some subset of 41 years worth of human memories in my head. These are the only connection I have (beyond the physical body I live in) to that squawling purple prune I once was. Unfortunately, there is nothing continuous that links all of those memories together. How do I know that I wasn't just born this morning in this forty-one-year-old body with some random sampling of memories that would be just enough to convince me that that guy who did all of those forty years worth of things was really me? It's kind of a ridiculous question to ask in one sense. It's a lot easier to accept that I have been the same guy for forty-one years. Occam's razor, you know: The simplest explanation is most likely to be correct. It certainly makes a lot more sense. However, there is no real scientific law that correct answers are always the simplest, and there is no scientific way to prove that the star of my memories is really the guy writing you this long blathering barrage of balderdash this morning.
So what Hume finally decided was that there is no such thing as identity. We are nebulous aggregations of sense impressions –of experiences and ideas—and our self images of being individuals with cohesive identites are nothing but illusion.
What do you all think of that?
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
May 30, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: May 30, 2005
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Re:What is an identity, exactly? Pt 1 of 2
Dwyn, I've been really chomping at the bit to talk to this one, because it really fascinates me how much we seem to think we know about this and how little we actually do.
I mean, the goverenment things they know all they need to know about our identities, once they get our names on a birth certificate, citizenship paper, social security card, Drivers license, and so on, but how many people are there out there that have identification showing that they are two (or more) different people? Since the government makes so many mistakes, and people are who we are, and life is what it is, there are probably numbers of people who have no idetnification of any kind. Weren't born in a hospital—no birth certificate. Never worked a formal job, no SSAN. Never got a driver's license, no state ID. As far as the government is concerned, they don't exist.
This seems pretty superficial, and it is, but I start here to make a point. Identity within a social/national context is a construction. societies put these together in order to manage the unmanageable. And any conception we have in our heads of what identity is is just as arbitrary and means just as much.
When Rene Descartes rocked the world with his (in)famous conculsion, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am,") he was making a statement, not only about the nature of human essence, but also on the notion of identity. By defining being as an ability to experience the phenomenon of thought, Descartes was linking our identity to our minds. "I," for Descartes, is the person who experiences thought. That is where our identity lies. That makes a great deal of sense when you think about it, and we kind of want to run up and say, "yeah! That's it!" But there were certain problems with this that Rene never solved, and so far, no has anyone else. If my mind, my soul, or whatever magical force/substance/isness that makes me a self-aware thinking being is the core of my identity, it must be in some way connected with my physical being, with my body. If that is so, there must somewhere be some identifiable connection whereby we can see how it is that the content of my will gets transformed somehow into the dynamic phenomenon of my action. I want to lift my finger and move it over to press down the "t" key and—whohoa! There it goes and all of these t's keep popping up all over my computer screen. It's amazing stuff, and nobody can explain it. We all experience the thought, the will, the idea. We all are intimately familiar with the sensation of our fingers flying about the keyboard (or plodding across it, for those of us who never learned to type properly), by the process that transforms thought into action is pure mystery.
See Identity part 2 of 2
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
May 30, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: May 30, 2005
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Re:And the bells go off!
Dwyn Red Flags 052505
Hi Dwyn,
Yes, I knew about this—that's actually how I found MLE in the first place. I'm sorry that you didn't know and that this was a concern for you. I wasn't really aware that the material you were writing was stuff you felt was personal—certainly not until our most recent conversation, which, even so, was very vague. Anyway, you can see why I was motivated to have you look at that other message I'd sent to my other friend earlier, in the context of the privacy issue here.
Still, I'm not quite sure I understand your confusion. If MLE is freely accessible to anyone who wants to have a free membership, and every post you write is visible to all members of MLE, how is that different from your posts being accessible to Google users? To me, it seems that the latter only increases the chances that your messages may additionally be seen by people who weren't interested in seeing them, and so won't bother reading them anyway.
Anyway, if you do find you've posted some messages that you do not want to be publicly available, just drop a message to Dan Yuen ("contact us"') and give him the message numbers and ask him to delete them for you. He's always been very helpful to me that way.
By the way, I got your reply and had no trouble getting your drift. At the same time, I do want to remind you of the site policies, to caution you very carefully and point out that the policies are enforced, if inconsistently. I recently lost contact with a valued friend who was ejected from here. His codes were broken and he was discovered and all of the messages he had posted were removed. Just so your choices are fully informed.
Auf Wiedersehen!
# 52511
And the bells go off! dwyn hart
Out of curiosity I went to google.com and typed in my name and almost went into shock. My last comments were there. I didn't know our messeges went out of the community. Now I don't even feel safe anymore. I didn't know anyone else could see these messages. Did anyone else know? Is it still ok to chat? Curiosity killed the cat, or the dwyn in this case. Oh, my gosh. This is scary. I have to try some other searches. bye.
Language pair: English; German
Category: Opinions
Post date: May 24, 2005
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
May 25, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:To whom it may concern.
Hi Dwyn,
We've missed you on the site. I just figured you were having a great time living life in real space.
I thought I'd send a comment in response to your post, not because I feel it's needed, but because, as often happens, I find myself delighted by the way you think. The way you own your place in the world is beautiful and rare, and I want to make sure you know about that, just in case you hadn't noticed it.
Your message touched me in a tender place because I have often had those questions running through my mind. As a graduate student, I find that life can get overwhelming sometimes. When I and the people around me are all feeling like we don't know how we're going to take care of ourselves, we can get kind of defensive and self-absorbed. We may lose our sense of priorities and fail to be there for someone who really needs us. Or we just don’t do a very good job of communicating, and the most important parts of the message may get lost in the scuffle.
Just the other week, a cousin of mine passed a way. It was a big shock to all of us, and it was a really hard time. I got confused about the logistics of the memorial service, and I came home from school one afternoon to an aggravated message from my Aunt wanting to know why I hadn't been there. I got really angry, because I was trying to figure out why nobody had cared enough to make sure I knew when I was supposed to be there and where I was supposed to go. It was pretty messy. It turned out I'd got an e-mail message and I'd misread it, and everybody assumed I knew what was going on, and I was waiting for someone to get back to me with the details. Nobody ever did, because they all thought I had them. It was really awful.
What I think about after all of that, is the old cliché about the glass being half-full or half-empty. The part people never talk about is that the glass is never all full or all empty. It's always somewhere in between, and I guess it's always going to end up being up to me to decide how I want to call it.
Anyway, as one of the people who take you seriously, I wanted to thank you for reaching out and to remind you that there's someone here who cares in Sacramento. Please let me know if you need to talk or anything. Perhaps a comment I made in my message number 48208 may be of some value to you.
I also wanted to let you know that I worry a little, because I have a hunch you may have a tendency to be pretty hard on yourself. My guess is you'll probably be a whole lot better off to risk erring in the other direction. Be good to you. I know you deserve it.
Hugs,
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
May 22, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:One European language?
> Many European accounts point out that the
> cost of translating all the European laws
> into some 20 languages is growing fast,
> since skilled translator are scarce both
> for some Easter Europe languages and for
> regional ones such as catalan.
If there are more than 20 workers per
language, each of them could pick one
foreign language and study it until they
have sufficient reading (and perhaps
listening) capability in it. After that
all participant groups could read all
languages through their in-group
translators, and write in their mother
tongue. Then third-party translators would
be needed very rarely, and the read-only
capability in foreign language could be
gained much faster than full language
skills. It could even be made
a prerequisite for the job.
Puti
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Language pair: French; English
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Juha-Petri T.
May 16, 2005
# Msgs: 2
Latest: May 16, 2005
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Re:Re:Re:One European language?
Wow. Arnaud, you have left me with nothing to say.
And that's really saying something!
:-)
Beautiful analysis. I'm eager to see how things pan out.
Mark S.
Sac, CA USA
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Language pair: French; English
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Mark S.
May 16, 2005
# Msgs: 2
Latest: May 16, 2005
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Re:Mùsica y pirateria.
jejeje!
Anoche, mi novia y yo fuimos a ver el musical, Los Piratas de Penzance, y despué de eso, lo ví a tu mensaje, y creíe que quisiste discutir las obras de Gilbert y Sullivan :-)
jejejejeje...
Mark
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Language pair: Spanish; English
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Mark S.
May 7, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Democratic Legitimacy part 4 of 4
Now does this mean that the same process, that mapped out for the ratification of the EU constitution, will have democratic validity? Europeans will know far better than I would. There are obviously a great many differences between Europe and the U.S. Not the least of which is, it may not be safe to assume that Europe intends to form a Federal Republic such as our own. From what I can tell so far, this is, at the very least, a highly controversial issue over there, just as our own relationship to NATO is often a topic of heated debate.
But ultimately, the question of democratic legitimacy is an issue of perception of the people of EU member nations. My gut reaction is that I don't expect that the differences between us are such that the question of constitutional legitimacy will be very different. I look forward to hearing about why I might be wrong there, or certainly why I might be right, if that be the case.
Well, thanks for listening. tomorrow I think I'll probably take a look at an argument that the current constitution fails to abide by the guidelines of the Laeken Declaration—that'll take a little further research, since I've never heard of the Laeken Declaration before this document, so if that isn't ready yet, I'll work instead on a 14-point critical summer, which will be very interesting, because it actually includes some of the most compelling concerns I've seen so far. Stay tuned!
And help me out here, folks—I won't learn anything at all if nobody tears my thinking apart!
Looking forward,
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Well, the representatives of our Constitutional Congress played a dirty trick on us. They made a command decision to overturn their commission and choose a job that they felt would more effectively accomplish the goals they were sent to achieve.
Does this mean that our constitution does not have "democratic legitimacy?" That's a very interesting question. I guess first we have to know what "democratic legitimacy" is. There are probably a million definitions of it, and certainly people on all sides of this issue will offer varying ones. I would like to submit a practical definition to work with for this discussion: A government derives it's power from the faith and trust of its citizens, and I would argue that this would be the key measure of democratic legitimacy. When Hitler marched into many European countries, perhaps the biggest reason for our International outrage, was that the offended nations' sovereignty was trampled. For those nations who were, at that time, democratic states, the issue was one of democratic legitimacy. The people of such countries were not willing to accept Nazi rule. This was not, for them, a democratically legitimate government.
The United States faced a related, if quite dissimilar national crisis in 2000, when the Bush / Gore election was so close that one candidate one the popular vote, and the other won the electoral vote, and the margin of error in awarding the electoral votes was much larger than the differences between the candidates in the closest races. Nobody ever really knew who won the election, which finally had to be decided in the Supreme Court. What this means is that the Supreme Court, not the voters, chose our president in 2000. For many voters (admittedly, most of whom were Gore supporters) this cast a significant doubt on Bush's legitimacy as President of the United States. Thankfully we weathered that storm, and we're still here, rather beaten and bruised by the Supreme Court's decision, but we're still here, and we're still a free, legitimate democracy, with all of our problems.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4
So I guess what my conclusion is here, my opinion, is that there may be a couple of ways to read Dr. S's claim that the EU Constitution would lack Democratic Legitimacy. One might be that in his opinion, it would not be democratically legitimate, that he expects to see more involvement of the citizens of EU member nations in order to agree that the Constitution would be a valid reflection of the democratic values of the EU. The other way to read him might be that he expects that the people of the EU will not agree that this process of development is democratically legitimate. I guess what I see as important to notice here is that Democratic Legitmacy is not an objective characteristic like red hair or number of words, or whether or not the constitution addresses matters of security. Legitimacy is a social value, and is strictly a matter of perception on the part of a huge body of people. The constitution will be legitimate of the people of the member states find it legitimate, and it won't be if they don't.
So if Dr. S feels that the constitution is not democratically legitimate, he's got a very difficult argument to make. The U. S. Constitution was written by public representatives acting outside of their commission on behalf of the people of the states. We find our constitution to be legitimate because, even though our representatives chose not to follow our instructions in doing their work, each individual state did subsequently ratify the constitution, through votes by duly elected representatives of the people. It is true that the people of the states never voted on the constitution, but the individuals who all agreed to accept the constitution were all elected representatives of the people. This was a valid democratic process under the values of our republic. So while we've had a few constitutional crises, we have weathered them all (so far), and this is, I think, a great testament to the democratic validity of our constitution.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 4 of 4)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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