Self identity and the need to discover the same has been the crux of various religious, spiritual and philosophical studies. There has been a strong support in favour of associating identification of self as one of the major goals of human life. Despite the above being fairly subjective and argumentative, birth and death has been accepted as the standard period between which the awareness of ‘who am I’ must come within a person. Seemingly, there can be various aspects that can be discussed when it comes to self identity however as a part of this paper I would like to use personal reflections in order to deep dive and project what I have realized as a part of my awareness about myself.
Dennett’s “Brainstorms” is an excellent support to guide this journey of mine as it will be easier to evaluate the contrasts of a novice experience versus a study based on expert commentary on the topic of ‘who am I”. The first thought is about the physical existence which means whether we actually are there where we are physically present or are we there, where our mind, our brain exists. I believe, after birth which is uncontrollable event in every human’s life, we are present on the basis of our circumstances to some extent, hence our mind also travels and revolved around the environment influenced by our physical presence. For example, if as I child I was in school and used to talk to classmates and spend my time in school my presence both physical and mental were driven by my environment. May be for a temporary phase my mind could take my concentration somewhere else however the environment impacting my physical presence was always strong enough to pull me and my thoughts back to where I was. Hence, arguably I don’t feel that Dennett’s argument of ‘we are there, where our mind is’, had a major significance in my realization of self.
Dennett mentioned about a duplicate brain and gave example of how thoughts and ideas but not body is ‘identity’, even if there are two brains that control a body at two different times, the body will behave in different ways considering the brains think differently and hence the combinations could be treated as a different person despite them having the same look and feel. Similarly, I have associated myself to various people close to my heart and although I identify them through their physical appearance however primarily the responses given to them by my body are based on the thoughts and ideas that come into my brain according to the understanding of those people and their minds. In simple terms, I use my brain to identify how to deal with others and there is a pattern that it follows based on the previous history of how they have dealt with me since the time they have known me. Conclusively, I also believe that yes, it is the thoughts and ideas that govern our body and if that is changed regardless of the same body structure the person will change, he may remain the same one or may just become a different person altogether.
The progressive subject of intentional stance is well handled and defined by Dennett, where he mentions about how we use our predictive instinct to differentiate between various events in our life. Again, in my journey towards self identification, I have significantly had instances where I have used the predictive segregation of concepts and have managed situations. Although, there was no as such attempt to do so however through the default working of my mind I was able to predict the possibility and identify the option to choose. Hence, I have developed that ‘intentional stance’ that regulates my decisions and at times puts me into that space where I can select what ‘I’ want and, this is the same ‘I’ that I have been trying to identify.
Moving on, the dilemma of not having any thoughts if the body is missing is presented as another possibility by Bennett. However, I agree with the fact that despite the presence of physical form the mind and thoughts still prevail and tend to control us may be not physically but mentally. The example of a paralyzed person is exactly suitable, where despite having his entire body to be in a neutral state, the brain still works and has all the needs and desires.
It is true that as mentioned by Dennett ‘Yorick or Hubert’, if they control one body then the thoughts must go similar from both of them, if really it depends upon the physical state. My experience of myself has been that, I am driven by my thoughts, the intentional stance that I have developed and the predictive instinct with which my mind handles the various situations that impact my surroundings is the real me, it is what controls me will remain doing so till the time it is active.
References
Dennett, Daniel C. "Where Am I?" Dennett, Daniel C. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
