Art - By Harry Wareham

This weeks artist was Harry Wareham


The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37

To be is to identify - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

To be is to identify -

I -

The only way we know ourselves is by being ourselves. We can perceive other things, cups, tables, computers, but only get certain types of data out of it (how hard/soft it is, how it appears, and so on). Our own selves we can know to an infinitely greater extent, even without any scientific knowledge of the inner workings of the body, by existing inside our bodies. We know what it is to be ourselves and this is beyond the understanding of anyone but ourselves.

II -

If I am all that I experience, then everything that I experience (the wall, the sensation of air against the skin) is part of my identity. I am still individualized, separate from all of these things (as I have the ability to close my eyes for instance), but without this external world, what is left inside me? Imagine a child who spends her entire life in a dark abyss, what will she know, and what will she be? That child would only be darkness itself. She would not know what it meant to be alive, or dead, having no way to distinguish anything. She would not have an understanding of anything, with no means to think of anything, but would only feel raw experience itself. To my mind, this means that by nature we are only provided with the means to deal with the world as we sense it, as opposed to our nature having any kind of meaning or significance on its own.

III -

In terms of understanding other people, we know only so much about them: We cannot always fully interpret ourselves, let alone another person! Other people have secrets and memories unavailible to us - it is this that differentiates them from yourself, or any other person (it sounds obvious enough, but sometimes philosophy is here to restate the obvious). And to push things further, let us imagine being in a state where we know all that there was to know: To know all things, we would have to constantly observe them from every distance and direction simultaneously. This is equivalent to being part of everything.

IV -

Our identities are built then on human limitations. It becomes harder to understand the further we move away from this humanity (what is it like being a jellyfish - is it anything at all or just a natural process?). We cannot begin to conceive how immortality, or extending the human being to massive far-reaching proportions will alter what the individual identity means. Imagine existing in two places at once, or at every point in the cosmos at once! It would be quite a significant change (again, with the obviousness).

V -

To be is to identify. All of our experiences are part of this identity, and it is only by our limitations that we are able to have an identity at all.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37

CBT, psychiatry and identity - By Ellese Elliott

                                          CBT, psychiatry and identity

A sense of autonomy? Ha?  I thought as George Szmukler, a Professor of Psychiatry, stipulated informally that Psychiatry promotes autonomy.  I was reviled by such a comment as he went on to suggest that he aided a patients autonomy when he paid a patient their own money that the psychiatrists had withheld in order that the patient would take the prescribed medication for their ‘mental illness’.  I don’t know the details of this patient’s case, except that the patient was frivolous with money, and that the patient was in debt- according to Szmuckler.  Exploiting the patient, however, to take medication is not the part I want to address here. The point I am addressing asks how is psychiatry aiding a sense of autonomy, or self actualisation? Unless Szmuckler has a completely different meaning of the word ‘autonomy’ I would argue that psychiatry does not aid self actualisation:- involuntary treatment, reprogramming therapies and being labelled ill for behaving outside of the box is insanely oppressive.

  It’s the brain, it’s the chemicals, and it’s the neurons. What about all the shit people go through, heart break, hostility, poverty, etc... the daily nuances that make life that little bit more unbearable, which we bear and bear until cracks appear, our glands begin to secrete sweat, our heart races, and we tremor with anger; but oppressed by the force of watching eyes, always watching, we act in strange, seemingly inexplicable ways and we are burdened with the blame which should lie with the many flaws that pervade and permeate the organised crowd. How dare you react outside of the appropriate list of reactions!

And what of CBT, the new revolutionary treatment which is but a stone throw away of the philosophy of the stoics? CBT is not challenging the arseholes on the train that won’t let other passengers on, or TFL who increase rail fairs more than the rate of inflation, or the pricks at work who talk to you in manner that suggests they are less lowly then you, or the cunts at the bank who smugly tell you they are charging you for being overdrawn, when you never told them to give money that you don’t have. No, they teach how to cope better with it, so you crack less. To help you cope with the cesspool of a society where people get off on screwing over other people, ride their ego trip over the moon and pass the pain and suffering of the so called innocents. Programmed to withstand - even now I am reduced to writing my thoughts on scrap, not because I fear that people will judge me if I shout aloud, but as it isn’t even in my nature anymore.

From the periphery of my blood shot vision, bloodshot from the toxic caffeine ritualistically consumed  and the deprivation of respite, I see a parent commanding their child into subordinance, to sit, to hush, to not disturb the empty whims of this tube carriage. Do not disrupt them, lest they may be stirred and let the zombifying rhythm ensue.

Learning is an awful practice, at first it may be met with some repellence, then neutrality, then it is sucked in like a black hole into an abyss of detritus; all the teachings of others, or rather of the other. We are all bombarded.  Its not a plethora of ideas, but one gargantuan, repugnant, enforced idea. Enforced with violence on a mass scale.

Man, woman child, but an EROM – An erasable read only memory with structures that are fixed and units to be filled. Oh where is the will? Beaten into passivity? Disgusting. And even as my thoughts seem to challenge this oneness, I cannot escape. Clichés wish to pour from my pen. I won’t. Every thought is a thought transpired, as is every sentence, every word, every meaning; already in the mind of a machine.  Imprisoned in language, how I wish to have never received it, infecting every bit of my being.  Leaking into me and mutating the ineffable qualities of the ’I’.  The ‘I’ that perhaps once was, before.
I wish to see again, without the perceptions of the master race of men, and hear unswayed; to smell the scents without civilization; and taste the blood drawn from my own touch.

Don’t give me this idea and tell me it is right. Don’t tell me your reasoning of the origin of a sound. Could it not be the sky that hums every time I board the train, or the moon that howls when full?  Don’t give me that plate of meat from a being that was perhaps more sentient than I.

I want my will, my way. And I am not ill, I am not ill; in the mind or the body.  And the agents of psychiatry will not inject me with the will of the master race, as they did from birth.  I am too far gone.  Psychiatry will not let me realise myself, psychiatry does not aid the realisation of the self. Psychiatry is a tranquiliser of the will, and CBT is a Red Herring. Ha.

By Ellese Elliott

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37

Pinocchio: A real boy?

'What is real, Neocchio?'

The young Pinocchio has entered into a debate in which his claims to be a  ‘real boy’ are deemed fraudulent and fantastical. Others claim he has no more right to consider himself human than the fire wood from which he came. Pinocchio claims he is being discriminated against due to his ‘flesh deficiency’ and argues that any object which displays intelligence, whether of wooden or computerised origins, can be considered human if these requirements are met: 

1) To be human requires comprehension of the external world

2) The demonstration of emotion

3) A physiological response to either internal or external stimuli

4) The beginnings of life and an awareness of one’s mortality

His father Geppetto points to Pinocchio’s ability to fabricate tales as proof of cognitive reasoning and intelligence; a product of not only surveying the external world but the capability to disseminate the information and formulate an alternative sequence of events, and his ability to be educated as further proof of mental activity. He argues that as both human brain matter and wood are organic in nature, and the point at which mind and body are assimilated are unknown and unproven in either, he too can be said to possess his own epicentre of thought.

Further to this Geppetto adds that the generated physiological change which occurs when lying (the extension of the nasal passage) is akin to the “human” response of the endocrine and haematological processes which commonly occur during a tales fabrication. Also, his father argues that if these displays of intellect and physical responses are not enough to prove his humanity, his emotive reactions to situations about him, including fear and excitement in the face of danger or amusements, indicate a human-like response to external stimuli. 

In addition to this Pinocchio is able to trace his origins, as such is aged, and possesses an awareness of his own mortality in his fear of fire. This, he argues, places him above animals which he protests demonstrate only a fear of the predator and a visceral reaction to the predator approaching, not a conscious understanding of the consequence of the predator successfully catching them.

Marionette or man, Pinocchio goes on displaying those signs which Geppetto considers life and wonders what more it would take for society to consider him too, to be a real boy.  

Johannon Davis

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37

Identity of Reference and Identity of Properties - By Martin Prior

Identity of Reference and Identity of Properties

It is perhaps self-evident that if p and q have identity of reference then they will have the same properties.

Question: if p and q have identity of properties do they have identity of reference?

This issue is important across time, when there must be a sufficiency of identity of properties for p now and p earlier to be the same thing, but there must also be difference in properties for there to be change and without change, time cannot exist. 

What about identity across possible worlds?

By Martin Prior

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37

Identity - By Perry Smith

Identity

Identity; identity is something you're born with. You are born to be your father's son. You are born to be such and such a social class. You are born to be privy to certain experiences and not others; in essence, you are born to live a certain life. Identity is not who you are, but what others have made you; this is why we qualify ourselves in terms of our relationships to others: on our family, on our friends, and also on what we do for a living (of how we spend our time, no matter how trivial this is).

We are also a product of our material circumstances. Freedom, for me, has always, as a definition, been at odds with itself (the same of which, I feel, can be said of autonomy). This is what I would ultimately argue. You are everything that others remember about you. Even momentary lapses in your past, others will use to construct the identity of you. There would be no personal continuity in this sense, otherwise. How you feel one day is entirely different, and non-comparable to how you felt the previous day; hence is the transient nature of experience.

Though, I am not denying, here, the continuance of certain feelings brought on by physiological considerations,but would say, that are experiencing of them can be differentiated - on an immeasurable, moment-by-moment, basis. You may say that you hold, generally, certain moral principles. And yet, seemingly, when you fall from these, this is what people will remember; never mind the intention you held before, during and after. Also, the very fact you can be deterred from being such and such a way, proves that it was not, necessarily, an integral part of what you are. Thus, a distinction must be held, personally, between identity as objective, of how others see you, and identity as subjective, of what you believe yourself to be - though this, I would argue, is 'fluid', always in flux, rather than 'fixed' (which is what others try to make of us, due to some, seemingly, indescribable quirk of human nature - if there is such a group as humans, there must be something common to all of them, to group them as such), regardless of rational, outward deductions, by others, based upon previous inductive 'evidence' to the contrary. And this is instrumental in maintaining individual wellbeing, also, though I acceot others' judgements can also be positive. Identity, itself, I believe, already presumes the existence of others. And in the true deciding of the self, how is this tenable? In conclusion (and this may seem somewhat anti-climactic), we are what we are; and what this is, may not, necessarily, be known by the individual. All I am certain of, however, is that the need for organisation and understanding seem to be prerequisites of whatever condition we seem to suffer from, and focus much of our attention on, for some unbeknownst reason. Here, as in most things, I find myself wanting to cite the idea of human constructs, and the true ineffability one finds themselves under when trying to rationalise any such things.

By Perry Smith

 
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37