94. THE IDENTITY ISSUE
David Dixon has a Stanford University PhD as well as degrees in Sociology and Management Science & Engineering. He researches and writes about how technology and humans are getting along. In a Medium article, he raised some questions, which are worthy of pondering.
In his article, Dixon remembered comments like these, which appeared in his high school yearbook: “never change” and “stay who you are.” But he wondered, “Why on earth would I never change? What could possibly be so precious about my 18-year-old self that I ought to solidify it into an eternal self-ness? This threw me into deep thought on what it is that we all think we are, and why we fear change. … What is my identity? Or in other words, are we what we are, or are we what we do?”
Dixon recalled the eminent scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace who made the claim “that an Omniscient Calculator, provided with the exact knowledge of the state of the universe at present, would be able to predict the entire future.”
“This assumption,” added Dixon, “that we could achieve absolute knowledge of people, led certain thinkers such as Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner to establish a major stream of psychology, behaviorism, that believed that with sufficient knowledge of past and current facts, a perfect prediction of future human knowledge could be made.”
“As beings of a physical world, this thinking suggests, our behavior could be just as concretely predicted as any other interacting objects in space, simply by knowing the forces at work upon them. This thinking pervades most of the social sciences. It is very attractive because it promises both to tell the future and uncover the ‘nature’ of our human lives and selves. But there is also something profoundly uncomfortable about it.”
“Quantum mechanics shows classical mechanics as incomplete to describe the realities of the world around us. Quantum physics makes seemingly outlandish assertions such as that pairs of foundational particles, which contain a charge, are neither defined as positive or negative until they are observed. Even more crazy sounding, simply observing one particle will change the charge of the other particle, no matter where it is in the universe at that time.”
“What quantum mechanics brought us was a view of the universe as dynamic, wild, and undetermined.”
“It is not uncommon, even within a few minutes of meeting a person, to hear a whole list of static descriptions of what they are along the lines of: ‘I am not good at math.’ ‘I’m not a seafood person.’ ‘I’m not good at writing.’ ‘I’m straight/bi/gay/etc.’ All of these assume, at their base, a world where we truly ARE, at our core, some descriptive something, and finding that out determines our identity.”
“According to the most extreme take on the ‘we are what we are’ view, life is not dynamic, or under our control, but is instead a journey, perhaps even an adventurous one, but one of discovering ourselves, not creating it. … This leaves us, at best, as life-long explorers, not creators, of our own selves, setting out to ‘discover’ and then ‘be true’ to what we are.”
“What am I to do if what I ‘find’ in myself is not particularly useful to the world around me? How then can I be of service? Why then am I here? Indeed, instead of finding out whether or not I am a ‘math’ person, isn’t there something inspiring about simply deciding to become good at math? Instead of determining I married the wrong person after six years, isn’t there something romantic about continually deciding to be the right person for the one I married, even if I wake up one morning and don’t ‘feel’ like it? I think there is. So, to my high school friends, don’t tell me to ‘never change.’ I’m looking to change.”
“It seems just as extreme to say, ‘there’s no such thing as free will’ as it does to say, ‘we are one hundred percent free will and self-determination.’ That doesn’t make room for the lived experience I imagine we’ve all shared, that we very often do seem to come with strong affinities and proclivities towards one thing or another.”
“The ‘we-are-what-we-do’ side claims that Helen Keller was a scholar, a speaker, and a leader. The ‘we-are-what-we-are’ side claims that she was deaf and blind. But can’t she be both, or to some extent neither, if she chooses? Surely, she was deaf and blind, yet despite those challenges, she became a powerful speaker and scholar.
“It seems to me that her physical attributes created situations for Helen Keller to act within, and no doubt had some influence in the direction of life. Yet the key point, and what makes her so powerfully inspirational, was that she was not directed by those characteristics, but charted her own course, overcoming challenges presented by her physical ‘nature’ when it wasn’t helpful, and using them when it was. She couldn’t change everything, but she became the master of her own life.”
“If I have the power to act in any given situation, then I am a free agent, full of self-determination and will, yet I would be doing myself a disservice if I were to also not admit that much of what those situations are influenced and defined by what I am at any given point. For instance, I believe that there is an innate goodness in all human beings. Admittedly, it’s a statement of faith, but I see evidence of it every day. I also frequently see, however, evidence of people choosing to ignore their good nature, or even to follow after other, more destructive, aspects of their nature.
“Perhaps the one place where I can most powerfully exert my own will is in deciding how far towards either of these claims I decide to build my reality.”
Q: Who are you — really?
