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This post is loosely inspired by
Contradiction: individualism by Maria
Who am I? Its a fairly simple question. Three words, 6 characters (okay 8 if you include spaces), is all is needed to encode in english one of the most profound and fundimental questions of human experience. From philosophers to psychologist to theologist to neuro-scientist. Every culture of decent intellect tries to tackle the question of conciousness and its ethereal nature as well as the seemingly paradoxical nature of our own conciousness being able to try and analize itself. An observer trying to look at its own self and ponder the mystery of observation itself.
The longer one thinks about it, the more existantially uncomfortable one becomes. A conciousness trying to understand the nature of itself. Define and box our own selves into understandable chunks, rationalizations of why we do what we do, like what we like, hate what we hate, and think how we think.
First lets talk about structural individuality. Its quite simple really, there no objects with any decent amount of complexity in our universe which is perfectly like any other object of the same kind. No tree is exactly like any other tree, as a whole. No person is exactly like any other person.
The universe seems to tend towards complexity as time moves on. Inevitably entropy will win and all complexity will eventually die, but until then Local systems will tend to increase in information.
This means that simple systems like atoms and molicules create complex systems like living cells which create even more possibility for new kinds of complexity to arise like every living thing to exist ever.
Simple processes giving rise to ludicristly complex structures giving rise to even more complex processes. On and on it goes.
Living beings throughout the known fossil history of the planet get more and more complex over time. So to has the amount of variation within life..
It seems that life as a process takes advantage of the universes tendances to instigate immense divergance and variation through the great interplay betweengenetics and enviromental pressures individual organisms face. into developing in fundimentally unpredictable and practically unreproducable ways.
This allows for living beings to be very similar but too complex to be truly identical for any real period of time.
Even for static, inorganic object we consider dead and innert, they still seem to have some "memory" encoded into them by the nature of existing and being worn down over time. No pebble like any other pebble with all its microscopic holes and edges. No comet like or moon like any other with all their uncountable craters and cosmic ray impacts.
Now when we get down to the quantum scales of atoms and quarks and elementary particles and the macroscopic universal scales of suns and black holes the idea starts to fall apart. An atom of gold is the same as another atom of gold of that isotope. Stars of a certain density with the same elemental mixtures are more or less like eachother. Black holes are an interesting case but well save the whole "Informational erasure paradox" for another day and say that structurally all black holes in nature are identical just varying in size and spin direction.
In these extreme cases, the laws of gravity and the strong nuclear force respectively crush any possiblility for complex individual structures out of the local systems. Tiny particles are very confined by the laws of quantum mechanics, very big astronomical bodies are confined by gravity crushing the structure out of everything (which is why all big objects of mass are spherical).
Its in the middle of those two extremes are where all the interesting things of great complexity and variation happen, where possibility lives and breaths. Where individuals live.
So far i have spoken of individuality in the physical context, where natural structures themselves are bound to diverge from eachother while staying true to their nature. How memory of events invevitably impacts all structures both alive and not-alive. But thats not what most people think of when the word individuality comes up.
The social sciences such as psychology, politics, race and gender studies refer to a much more abstract sense of cognative individualism in which an observer conciousness actively enforces statements on itself which it believes it conforms to or otherwise agree/disagree with. This collection of different "I am, I am not" statements begin to culmiate together into a kind of 'mask' identity. Many different mask made of many opinions.
Your political identity is defined by the statements
Your sexual identity is defined by the statements
your emotional identity is descibed by statements like
Perhaps the most interesting of them is all the philosophical and theological identities a person takes. Some of the most interesting questions about the human experience and nature of existance spark innumerable theories, theologies, and perspectives.
Difficult questions with many competing answers to cherrypick from.
If you want to know what kind of mask a person fixates towards wearing, look at their bio on twitter or station or wherever else. Look at what they write about. "I am this, I like that, my pronouns are x, my idealogies are y. This is how we are expected to express and think about ourselves in modern society.
I think it has something to do with identifying with a group. Politically minded people think in a political mindset and want to be a part of political communities. Sexually/gendered identifying people want to be a part of sexual/gender based communities. The emotionally minded seek out more traditional family/friend/comminity structures.
When people describe themselves, as previously mentioned, they tend to rattle off a list of "i am/ i am not" statements about their political, sexual, and emotional identities. My question is this: Which one of these identites, or if all of them, acurately describe the person they culminate around. If we were to create a comprehensive list of every posible true false, yes no, am am-not political, sexual, and emotional questionare a million lines long, would it be enough? Does any of this information really have anything to do with the observer behind the mask?
In the psychedellic community, especially mushroom eaters, theres always talk of "ego death" But what does that mean and what does it have to do with the discussion at hand?
Well, the 'ego' is just another name for the many mask of individuality a person wears without realising it. Its all their opinions and biases and beliefs and philosophies about themselves and the world at whole condensed into an 'identity' or in another name, the ego.
As a side, Freud was one of the first to theorize about the workings of the psychologist understanding of ego with the theories of ID, EGO, and SUPER-EGO. Very interesting ideas to this day if you care to read up on them.
Ego death is what happens during a psychadellic trip when all of these cognative ideas of the self and you as an individual, evaporate. Litterally feeling yourself let go of your self. The insight washing upon you that 'you' at your barest essence are merely an Observer, the very same observer which observes out of the eyes of an ant, an elk, a dolphin, a cloud, a rock, a grain of sand, a star. The very same observer which you see when you look into the eyes of another.
You are a sliver of the godhead, playing its part. Pretending it is anything but the godhead. Your identity truely is just a mask, and you are preforming in the grandest of plays. And when that play is done, the mask is taken off and the wave returns to the ocean.
Only a powerful psychadellic compound or a lifelong commitment to meditation is potent enough to pry you away from your many mask before your time is done.
To me, as someone who has experienced ego death in my life, I say that we as a culture overplay its importance. Everyone has to have a sexual pronoun, be boxed into a certain political leaning, associate with certain kinds of music/tv/celebreties.
I dont care one way or the other about your pronouns, or about your political leanings, or your taste in entertainment, or what gets you off in the privacy of your own bedroom with another consenting adult, I care about You. The ethereal thing behind the mask. The beautiful, undefinable shard of the godhead which no amount of words and statements could ever aptly define. I care about knowing and understanding the true you, the true me, the true individual.