Just before Christmas of last year I went on a camping trip with some of my friends and an interesting topic of conversation came up that I thought I might share.

What it comes down to is a question of identity - who are we, really? I saw a few days ago someone on another forum suggest that we are:

1. A certain configuration of atoms
2. A brain created by this configuration of atoms

In response to this, as well as points raised on my camping trip, I ask you all the following questions. Firstly though, I would like those reading to understand that the proceeding are to be considered as thought experiments only. For obvious reasons, they do not reflect the way that biology, physics or chemistry would normally operate, so I should ask those scientifically minded among you to refrain from arguing the science in my analogies and retort only the concepts and underpinning questions.

The first question derives from the perception of identity through consideration of shape. An analogy that fits this question is found in Odysseus and the boat that he sailed in for 10 years following the Trojan war. Odysseus leaves Troy in a ship (I don't remember its name). Let's say that over time, some of the panels on the ship need replacing for one reason or another and eventually, so do the sails, etc. By the time he returns to Ithaca, he has replaced every part of the ship. My question is, is it still the same ship?

Secondly, let's pretend for a moment that both hemispheres of the brain are identical in every way. If you were to take half of your brain and placed it inside another person, we can make the assumption that by each having one half of the same brain, they had the same neural connections generated by the same past experiences, so their memories, the way the process information, etc. would all be the same. And so the question is, is that person another 'you'?

My final question comes by considering your answers to the previous two. It is simply this. If you were to take you as you are now and place it next you as you were say, 10 years ago, are you the same person? In a very real sense, you might argue that you are a different person from who you were 10 years ago. This being the case, how are you the person you define yourself to be now? Is it not in part because of 'you' from 10 years ago? So then, if the modern version of yourself were to stand next to yourself from 10 years ago, how is that person not 'you'? At the time, my argument to this was that you differed in life-experience and thus they way you process and interpret information is also different, but that person was still you. However, if that is the case then the second stipulation as stated above of having the brain configured in the exact same way as per the OP is false. Thus, the question still remains: who are you?

Its simple when you realise you just using this slab of meat and your actually a soul. I don't believe is the creator of thoughts you just need your brain to control your body...everything else is you.

There is a very big trick being played on us and if you believe your are just mechanics like a robot, well you become greedy, selfish and will only pursue earth bound needs and everything else that satisfies you body.

Reading over what I just wrote makes me sound like an old lady, but I'm and 20 year old male boxer. I have just took the time to ask better questions plus read countless nde stories.

Originally posted by RANDOMguess
Its simple when you realise you just using this slab of meat and your actually a soul. I don't believe is the creator of thoughts you just need your brain to control your body...everything else is you.

There is a very big trick being played on us and if you believe your are just mechanics like a robot, well you become greedy, selfish and will only pursue earth bound needs and everything else that satisfies you body.

Reading over what I just wrote makes me sound like an old lady, but I'm and 20 year old male boxer. I have just took the time to ask better questions plus read countless nde stories.

edit on 15-2-2011 by RANDOMguess because: (no reason given)

Great reply.

just look at shaolin boxers, how they can deflect pain from there body to accomplice unatural things like hand stands on one finger.
you are what you tell yourself you are...

This is a difficult question to answer. If I was wearing a silver coat, and my eyes could only see a silver coat, then I would define "myself" as being a silver coat. Likewise, when we understand the most infintesimal components of our bodies, we have a new framework with which to define ourselves. Delving further into that, when it comes to memories and the construct of the mind, more accurately, over a period of 10 years, knowing that our minds are a means of storing information about past experiences, the most recent of which being our current state of mind, and thus personality, knowing that these are transient, we can define our personality and mind as being simply a product of our brains, thus, we are our brains. However, the problem arises, when we can observe everthing that we are, why stop at our own bodies, could a table, a chair be "me" - although not connected physically, when I sit at a table and contact the chair, due to the physical link, I can easily define myself as being the table and the chair as well. The real question is, what is the part of ourselves that we cannnot see. If there were such a part, then that part would be ourselves, because as soon as we perceive something, we are able to externalise ourselves from it.

Okay. I can answer this, but I just know that some master cylinder will pop in and try to counsel me due to my ignorance about the All, and the eternal collective consciousness and all that stuff as soon as I hit reply. All I'll say in response to any of that is that I got this notion from combining traditional and modern psychology and psychiatry, philosophy, metaphysics and by translating the allegories of the major theological traditions that have survived for thousands of years, and then by letting each of them beat the snot out of each other with a logic baseball bat until there was one notion left that didn't violate any of them. And this is that notion.

Information comes into physical existence as a result of something happening. One verb equals one informational fact. That verb can be active, passive or it can be a being verb. It doesn't matter to information. Information appears in direct response to something either occurring or being.

Depending on the verb, the resulting fact can be simple or it can be amazingly complex and sophisticated. Of course, the more sophisticated the verb (example - a football game as an event versus one play in the game as an event) the more dense and complex the fact as a complete and accurate representation of that verb/event. (see, now I'm migrating the term verb into the term event - which is actually more accurate, but you needed to understand that being is also an event (this takes a lot of logical explanation but it's true), which is harder to picture without the term verb to illustrate that fact)

Now, when your human brain does what it does, each event segment is extremely complex, and involves an amazing amount of coordinated activity for it to happen. A football game is nothing compared to the event sophistication of a human intellectual response. In fact, with the emergence of corporeal awareness, not much exists that can compare with the layers of sophistication involved in each "burst" of human corporeal intellect. Of course, when each of those bursts occurs, they are completely and accurately represented by the fact of having happened. Each burst event becomes a fact that is fully textured and logically associated (via contextual identity in ways that I don't have room to detail here) with all the other burst events that happen as a direct result of the same corporeal brain - meaning the brain that is physically identified through DNA coded cells from one instant to the next - even as that brain's componets do, in fact, change and morph relentlessly from instant to instant.

In fact, each burst event reflects (as resulting information) that contextual DNA identity within the composite informational form that includes progressive consistency (supplied by the information collective itself via a data processing triage effort that we call Personality) and a form of informational continuum that I call The Primary Expression, sort of the Intellect's own informational DNA that develops and adjusts over the course of the corporeal brain's life span.

That gathering mass of information bursts (I call it Intellect) is who and what you are. Kind of like the music that is created by a musician and his/her instrument, and how it exists as produced by, but not physically grounded to, either the instrument itself or the person playing that instrument. Still, they are all contextually associated, and long after the corporeal musician and the material instrument have disappeared from the earth, and that music - as information, since the fact will always be that it came into existence - will live on forever to logically represent that musician and that instrument as having once combined to produce the event of musical performance. This is not a bad analogy of what the human being actually is. It is the fully dynamic and aware informational result of the corporeal Homosapien and its incredible brain as an ongoing, yet finite, event, that occurred here on planet earth or wherever else it might've existed in this and/or any other universe, dimension or contextual environment.

Once the corporeal Homosapien body finally dies, the human being is released into the informational realm (call it the spiritual realm if you wish) and its eternal existence as an aware and fully viable personality is begun.

You are what you create of yourself with each thought, each reaction, each initiation, each response, over the entire course of your corporeal life. Your brain literally launches you into physical existence, and after several years, you (the real you) start to reach back into that brain and begin the difficult task of crafting yourself and creating an inimitable identity for yourself.

Freud labeled this informational you that reaches back in to get control over behavior "the Superego", and the DNA me-my-mine instinctive response from the cells of the corporeal husk that you wrestle with for control of the brain's ultimate activity "the Id", with the resulting balance of influences as they collect and offset one another over the course of your life from moment to moment "the Ego". Of course, on this board, "the Ego" refers to something entirely different, but Freud wasn't on this board, and for my purposes here, I prefer his definition of that word.

So, this is a bare-bones sketch of who and what you are. I wrote an entire book that proves all of this, and the link to it is in my signature. It takes tens of thousands of words to adequately defend this very minimal sketch, so don't expect me to indulge anyone with reams of explanation here. I already put those months in, and if you really give a damn, you can spend the 20 bucks on it.

Thanks.

The following is an account of my own experiences so I can only write for myself but I suspect others will find the same if given the opportunity to be shown what they are from i.e. their root.

There are a few things involved.

a. What is being observed or experienced. i.e. the individual species and the environment it interacts with.

b. The interface which we experience this through. This being the Brain which is a Decoder / Encoder.
and
c. The observer that is what is experiencing through the Interface Decoder i.e. the Brain.

So we know what the species looks like, and we know to some extent the Environment.

But on a personal level I have also seen and know what generates this experience and where my true Identity resides.

The Species and environment is my experience and is in the form of a story i.e. my experiences.

The Interface to this experience is via the Brain which we know little about.

But what generates the two, the Individual Species and this little Universe, is very mechanical in its operation, and not what we would call physical, perhaps we could call it the Soul which is really a processor which generates all from program books which I have also seen. The so called Universe and the individual Species is generated from these books in a Processor whose base Processor Map shown below.

This is only the Processor Map which is used in a Geometric based processing system. The programs are from billions of glyphs presented to the real me in a sequential fashion.

The real me I call LIFE or Mind.
In other words I that is the real Identity of me LIFE or the Mind is a “Partition" of a Single Mind or LIFE Entity.

The Real Me is "Non-Dimensional" and experiences things through filters (processing Filters) within the Brain of the Primate or Species I am experiencing at present.

Here is what I have seen which is the Base “Partition Map” of my Soul, I reside in, which I am both aware of its processing systems, and its location. which looks like this, in fact this Drawing is 100% Accurate in its form.



But remember I can only speak for myself, but I suspect the same is for others as well.
It is just a mater of wheather or not one has had the opportunity or not, to otain this knowledge of the Self and the processing system it experiences all things through.

We cannot even begin to know who we are, as a real, true and authentic "who" until at the very least we know who we are not, which is never who we think we are. Only when we know that who we are being, or pretending to be, is simply our own creation, are we authentically who we really are as "not nobody". Other than that, there's no freedom to be authentically true and real, just compelled to keep the story or the drama going regarding who we think we are and are projecting to others as an image of "self".
And so in the end we cannot say for certain, and it's perfectly ok not to know who we REALLY are beyond the roles we play, because knowing that we don't know, if the beginning of self awareness and the awareness of a transcendant ego.

Originally posted by hypervalentiodine
My question is, is it still the same ship?

When the first part was renewed it was no longer "the same ship".

And so the question is, is that person another 'you'?

Only at the immediate moment the other person gets your/my half of the brain. From that moment on, different paths are taken and the information each brain gets, uses and thinks is different.

Thus, the question still remains: who are you?

I am a person, never the same for more than you can divide time to it's smallest degree.

I am different from when I typed THIS....to when I typed THIS.

Fluidity in life. When the flow stops, so do I.

Originally posted by RANDOMguess
Its simple when you realise you just using this slab of meat and your actually a soul. I don't believe is the creator of thoughts you just need your brain to control your body...everything else is you.

There is a very big trick being played on us and if you believe your are just mechanics like a robot, well you become greedy, selfish and will only pursue earth bound needs and everything else that satisfies you body.

Reading over what I just wrote makes me sound like an old lady, but I'm and 20 year old male boxer. I have just took the time to ask better questions plus read countless nde stories.

edit on 15-2-2011 by RANDOMguess because: (no reason given)

I was wondering when the 'soul' argument would come into it. Before I answer, may I ask what you believe your soul is? From your post I infer that you believe it is your substance, your personality, where your emotions and feelings originate. Is that correct? I personally do not believe in a soul, because your 'personality', the way you feel and interpret emotions and feelings, etc. derives from your brain.

Originally posted by NorEaster
Okay. I can answer this, but I just know that some master cylinder will pop in and try to counsel me due to my ignorance about the All, and the eternal collective consciousness and all that stuff as soon as I hit reply. All I'll say in response to any of that is that I got this notion from combining traditional and modern psychology and psychiatry, philosophy, metaphysics and by translating the allegories of the major theological traditions that have survived for thousands of years, and then by letting each of them beat the snot out of each other with a logic baseball bat until there was one notion left that didn't violate any of them. And this is that notion.

Information comes into physical existence as a result of something happening. One verb equals one informational fact. That verb can be active, passive or it can be a being verb. It doesn't matter to information. Information appears in direct response to something either occurring or being.

This is true, although I personally don't like to use the word 'fact'. Information that appears due to the action of one thing or another is interpreted with an inherent bias. The truth is something that we as a species can not obtain, since we cannot achieve our objectivity. We cannot separate our logic from our experiences and thus the way that we process information, be it visual, audio or otherwise, varies from person to person. In a sense, we automatically 'airbrush' what we perceive.

Depending on the verb, the resulting fact can be simple or it can be amazingly complex and sophisticated. Of course, the more sophisticated the verb (example - a football game as an event versus one play in the game as an event) the more dense and complex the fact as a complete and accurate representation of that verb/event. (see, now I'm migrating the term verb into the term event - which is actually more accurate, but you needed to understand that being is also an event (this takes a lot of logical explanation but it's true), which is harder to picture without the term verb to illustrate that fact)

Now, when your human brain does what it does, each event segment is extremely complex, and involves an amazing amount of coordinated activity for it to happen. A football game is nothing compared to the event sophistication of a human intellectual response. In fact, with the emergence of corporeal awareness, not much exists that can compare with the layers of sophistication involved in each "burst" of human corporeal intellect. Of course, when each of those bursts occurs, they are completely and accurately represented by the fact of having happened. Each burst event becomes a fact that is fully textured and logically associated (via contextual identity in ways that I don't have room to detail here) with all the other burst events that happen as a direct result of the same corporeal brain - meaning the brain that is physically identified through DNA coded cells from one instant to the next - even as that brain's componets do, in fact, change and morph relentlessly from instant to instant.

In fact, each burst event reflects (as resulting information) that contextual DNA identity within the composite informational form that includes progressive consistency (supplied by the information collective itself via a data processing triage effort that we call Personality) and a form of informational continuum that I call The Primary Expression, sort of the Intellect's own informational DNA that develops and adjusts over the course of the corporeal brain's life span.

That gathering mass of information bursts (I call it Intellect) is who and what you are. Kind of like the music that is created by a musician and his/her instrument, and how it exists as produced by, but not physically grounded to, either the instrument itself or the person playing that instrument. Still, they are all contextually associated, and long after the corporeal musician and the material instrument have disappeared from the earth, and that music - as information, since the fact will always be that it came into existence - will live on forever to logically represent that musician and that instrument as having once combined to produce the event of musical performance. This is not a bad analogy of what the human being actually is. It is the fully dynamic and aware informational result of the corporeal Homosapien and its incredible brain as an ongoing, yet finite, event, that occurred here on planet earth or wherever else it might've existed in this and/or any other universe, dimension or contextual environment.

This is a quite eloquent and rather agreeable representation of identity. However, do you not think that shape comprises an aspect of how we identify ourselves?

Once the corporeal Homosapien body finally dies, the human being is released into the informational realm (call it the spiritual realm if you wish) and its eternal existence as an aware and fully viable personality is begun.

Is you suggesting the existing of a soul?

You are what you create of yourself with each thought, each reaction, each initiation, each response, over the entire course of your corporeal life. Your brain literally launches you into physical existence, and after several years, you (the real you) start to reach back into that brain and begin the difficult task of crafting yourself and creating an inimitable identity for yourself.

Freud labeled this informational you that reaches back in to get control over behavior "the Superego", and the DNA me-my-mine instinctive response from the cells of the corporeal husk that you wrestle with for control of the brain's ultimate activity "the Id", with the resulting balance of influences as they collect and offset one another over the course of your life from moment to moment "the Ego". Of course, on this board, "the Ego" refers to something entirely different, but Freud wasn't on this board, and for my purposes here, I prefer his definition of that word.

So, this is a bare-bones sketch of who and what you are. I wrote an entire book that proves all of this, and the link to it is in my signature. It takes tens of thousands of words to adequately defend this very minimal sketch, so don't expect me to indulge anyone with reams of explanation here. I already put those months in, and if you really give a damn, you can spend the 20 bucks on it.

Thanks.

This is a very well thought out response. Thank you for contributing

Originally posted by The Matrix Traveller
The following is an account of my own experiences so I can only write for myself but I suspect others will find the same if given the opportunity to be shown what they are from i.e. their root.

There are a few things involved.

a. What is being observed or experienced. i.e. the individual species and the environment it interacts with.

b. The interface which we experience this through. This being the Brain which is a Decoder / Encoder.
and
c. The observer that is what is experiencing through the Interface Decoder i.e. the Brain.

So we know what the species looks like, and we know to some extent the Environment.

But on a personal level I have also seen and know what generates this experience and where my true Identity resides.

The Species and environment is my experience and is in the form of a story i.e. my experiences.

The Interface to this experience is via the Brain which we know little about.

But what generates the two, the Individual Species and this little Universe, is very mechanical in its operation, and not what we would call physical, perhaps we could call it the Soul which is really a processor which generates all from program books which I have also seen. The so called Universe and the individual Species is generated from these books in a Processor whose base Processor Map shown below.

This is only the Processor Map which is used in a Geometric based processing system. The programs are from billions of glyphs presented to the real me in a sequential fashion.

The real me I call LIFE or Mind.
In other words I that is the real Identity of me LIFE or the Mind is a “Partition" of a Single Mind or LIFE Entity.

The Real Me is "Non-Dimensional" and experiences things through filters (processing Filters) within the Brain of the Primate or Species I am experiencing at present.

Here is what I have seen which is the Base “Partition Map” of my Soul, I reside in, which I am both aware of its processing systems, and its location. which looks like this, in fact this Drawing is 100% Accurate in its form.

But remember I can only speak for myself, but I suspect the same is for others as well.
It is just a mater of wheather or not one has had the opportunity or not, to otain this knowledge of the Self and the processing system it experiences all things through.

edit on 15-2-2011 by The Matrix Traveller because: spelling

An interesting interpretation. I'm not too sure I can respond to it though in any great depth though. As I said in a previous post, I myself do not believe in a soul. I believe that the experiences that are attributed to a 'soul' are in fact processes of the brain. I myself have a very scientific mind and I am happy with knowing that on a physical level, I am merely a series of chemical reactions and physical interactions. My personality, the way I process information and 'live' through what I perceive, is all a result of this.

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
We cannot even begin to know who we are, as a real, true and authentic "who" until at the very least we know who we are not, which is never who we think we are. Only when we know that who we are being, or pretending to be, is simply our own creation, are we authentically who we really are as "not nobody". Other than that, there's no freedom to be authentically true and real, just compelled to keep the story or the drama going regarding who we think we are and are projecting to others as an image of "self".
And so in the end we cannot say for certain, and it's perfectly ok not to know who we REALLY are beyond the roles we play, because knowing that we don't know, if the beginning of self awareness and the awareness of a transcendant ego.

Of course, it is difficult to fully comprehend all that we are on a personality or 'spiritual' level. We are a culmination of so many different processes, it would be nigh on impossible to have a full grasp on all of these factors, both genetic and otherwise. My questions really boil down to this: do you think that our identity derives from shape, from 'what's inside' or both? The problem with both of these is that shape and personality change dramatically over time and therefore, our identity must also change - correct?

Originally posted by hypervalentiodine

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
We cannot even begin to know who we are, as a real, true and authentic "who" until at the very least we know who we are not, which is never who we think we are. Only when we know that who we are being, or pretending to be, is simply our own creation, are we authentically who we really are as "not nobody". Other than that, there's no freedom to be authentically true and real, just compelled to keep the story or the drama going regarding who we think we are and are projecting to others as an image of "self".
And so in the end we cannot say for certain, and it's perfectly ok not to know who we REALLY are beyond the roles we play, because knowing that we don't know, if the beginning of self awareness and the awareness of a transcendant ego.

Of course, it is difficult to fully comprehend all that we are on a personality or 'spiritual' level. We are a culmination of so many different processes, it would be nigh on impossible to have a full grasp on all of these factors, both genetic and otherwise. My questions really boil down to this: do you think that our identity derives from shape, from 'what's inside' or both? The problem with both of these is that shape and personality change dramatically over time and therefore, our identity must also change - correct?

Close. What I'm saying is we are the who that's "what's inside" the shape, but we mistake the shape, or the personality with the who, thinking that THAT's who we are, when in truth, that is NOT who we are at all, just a shape, nothing more, just a role, a way of being, preferably something chosen authentically and with some degree of awareness, not as in "that's just who I am" being the personality, as the who. We are not who we THINK we are! The spiritual person, is the nothing and no one special (it's still special in its own right, as no one and nothing in particular), who although he/she isn't NOBODY they aren't any BODY in particular, what the Zen Buddhists call the no-self self. When self is undone, as an "identity", the true self is then realized, who is of course then completely free to just go back to being that particularlized "who" they were before (if they wish), except with the awareness and the insight that that particular who isn't REALLY who they really are, not the true self, that's just an image projected, an "identity" which we've adopted, it's nothing we can or ought to be constrained by, or limited almost exlusively to, by any means, surely?! Even as a mere nothing we are not that small!

Aside from that there is no particular description ie: my name, my status, my sex, my car, my hair, etc. etc. which can even begin to possibly convery just who we really are - and we don't KNOW who that is, only that it's a who and not a nobody (I am starting to sound like Dr. Zeuss?).

Until we recognize this, or re-cognize it, there is no possibility for any real and authentic self to emerge or to re-emerge, as a choice about who we are being, who we are chosing to be, freely (liberated as authentic, or real), even if only our "selves", as our prior personality! In other words, the only way to make what was inauthentic, authentic again, is to become totally authentic about the degree of our prior inauthenticity ie: who we took ourselves to be as in "our personality" not as a creation, but as a fixed way of being, without much creativity of novelty even possible which is of course something by its very nature which can't NOT operate or function as a severe constraint or limitation upon the freely chosen self expression of a fully individuated or self-realized person. Self realized - that ought to have been our first clue.. duh!

Oh of course we all have our fixed traits, but wouldn't it be nice to be a little more aware of the masks we wear, and to recognize that when we wake up first thing in the morning, before we remember who we're supposed to be, remember and recognize instead that anything and any "one" is possible, each day a new creation, and a new possibility.. And no I'm not suggesting that we try on a new personality every day, like fresh socks and underwear, but we could if we wanted to and still be 100% more authentic than we USED to be, playing the automatic role we've already always assumed, at least until now, to be our "self" and one without any choice in the matter whatsoever. Most people realizing this of course then choose to be who they used to be anyway with a few new things thrown in for good measure, maybe even as the polar opposites of certain personality traits like shyness, or overbearing, whatever will restore balance, wholeness and peace of mind with integrity, to the whole person, the whole system or process (never a mere "thing") "who" then, as nobody in particular, is already perfect whole and complete as he/she already is, in truth, and in spirit: A happy person - since who would choose anything less than that?!

Of course then who we REALLY are, being non-particularized, is also non-local!



But we're STILL "nothing special" or nobody special, provided we remember that when nothing is special, everything is! (how cute).

And I think that when we're clear, that's how we see things, as CUTE or through the eyes of a child, but not without the more mature awareness and understanding of an adult. Thus we get the best of both worlds, which WAS the dream of childhood, without any trade offs.