So yesterday I used the word "identity". I don't like this word. I don't have a clean intuition of what it means, and I see a lot of people being angry about it. I find that usually when people are angry about a word, they don't know what it is¹. So I don't want to use it.
I had a shower - yeah that's always where stuff goes wrong, never have showers kids - and I made a terrible definition of "self" that would allow a terrible definition of identity.
Now that I have your enthusiasm, I'm going to: 1) Rant about it, 2) Maybe check online if someone smart made a definition.
Obviously, the "similar" is subject to subjectivity. So now you have to precise a scope, a group from which you are differentiating.
The good news is that it's intuitive to me: I can easily see my "identity" relative to other devs, to my friends, my country, and with a bit of a stretch, animalia.
Now you just have to come up with clean delimitations for groups. Sounds easy.
I'm not sure how autonomous the brain is. Maybe you could just include the brain.
It has unclear edge cases. Which is expected but still annoying.
Nails, hairs? Def hurts when you pull them, so in some way connected to your nervous system.
If you don't count "physical" connections through tissue pulling/pushing on nerves, now you're removing most of the thing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but unexpected. Also you would have to explain people that their penis isn't actually that big of an identity. I think that's how civil wars start.
But if you do count it, is there anything not connected? Everything you perceives touches your neural system, or you wouldn't perceive it. If it's everything then you should just say "everything". But we're trying to make a definition here, theoretically for communication, and replacing every word with "everything" does not get things done.
Anyways, I have a patch: everything that the nervous system regrows with DNA similar to its (the nervous system's) average.
Science, yaaay.
So yeah, it doesn't imply a soul. I don't have much to say about it. It's lame, but it kinda works for me, where a soul would just put magic behind everything.
Like actually though. I'm spending way too much time on a shower thought. I don't need to know what identity is to live, and I wouldn't do anything with the definition if I found a perfect one.
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¹ Capitalism, socialism, patriarchy, our values, god, natural, freedom... does anyone knows what anything means? I don't.
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