The importance of identity in decision-making

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We seem to delegate the identity question to circumstance. We are who we are because of our place of birth or our situation. That is human nature and not something that we can blame on any individual. However, humans often find themselves in strange situations where they seem to forgo their essence in favour of personal benefit, or in favour of the benefit of a seemingly unrelated party.

Spies, family murderers, traitors, they are all human. We cannot lazily delegate the explanation of their existence to "they're freaks". Their decisions were accompanied by circumstances which told them it was better to do what they did than the "virtuous" alternative. Virtuous to the observer, of course, since every human sees their own actions as the correct choice.

What makes these people think that treason is correct? Moreover, what makes us create words such as treason?

Let us imagine that Bob has two friends: Alice and Eve. One day, Eve needs a pencil, and Bob feels the urge to steal one from Alice and give it to his other friend. Alice will remain without a pencil. Bob feels that he is friends to both, but in his mind, there is more weight coming from Eve's needs than Alice's. This is a typical situation that humans often face, though not in terms of stealing or pencils, but 1 and 0 decisions that will inevitably favour someone or another, or one circumstance over another.

In fact, this is the essence of decisions. In the blueprint of the life circumstance as described in my previous post, we are like planets with varying degrees of gravity, which grows weaker the farther it is from us. Unlike planets, however, the level of dilution of our sense of identity does not depend on how big or small we are, but simply what our priorities are. What do we feel is ours? Who do we feel are our people, our friends? What are our goals?

Personally, as I stated before, I did not feel like I belonged or that I had any people. In fact, I have often been stranded without myself, imagining my being as a consciousness floating in a random body, picked by accident. My dreams don't help, as I travel from person to person, from perspective to perspective. Another commenter on my previous post expressed a different view, wherein he tries to expand his sense of identity to contain as many people as possible. If I am a minimalist, he is a maximalist.

What direction should our decisions point toward?

One way to live our lives is without a master direction. Many people live like that, simply following what little impulse there is, and if the stimulus suddenly disappeared, they would as well feel very lost. Another way is to understand who we perceive we are, what we perceive our surroundings to be, and then to draw a decision map rationally.

I, for example, see myself as a lone individual in a tide of obstacles. My decisions are therefore to fight the obstacles by steadily rowing toward safer areas, but at the same time, I wouldn't want to end up anywhere, so I always check my map and see if I am going in the right direction, and often adjust without any warning. This makes me unreliable to others because I will, without hesitation, quit something that is not favourable to me.

Others see themselves as citizens of the world and siblings to all, walking on a road to communal salvation. Often, this view takes the shape of utilitarianism: making choices that will favour the majority, taking care not to stir the pot and cause unstable chaos that often brings casualties. Others see themselves as starving lonely wolves, continually looking for sustenance which takes the shape of prey.

All decisions come from our perception, and our perception of the world is tied to the perception of ourselves. We see everything in its relation to ourselves, and never in an isolated manner. Our decisions must, therefore, come from our perception of ourselves. It is essential to recognise this to be able to think carefully about the world. We cannot understand our decisions and the world outside without understanding exactly what we perceive ourselves to be and what our role is in this place we call life.



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2 comments
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Thanks for the linked mention. I appreciate it, and I enjoyed reading your continuation.

As a foreword to my comments about this post, please do not mistake my critical tone for hostility. I certainly respect your positions, and so I freely give and take criticism as a means of mutual self examination and improvement.

"Their decisions were accompanied by circumstances which told them it was better to do what they did than the "virtuous" alternative. Virtuous to the observer, of course, since every human sees their own actions as the correct choice."

This seems to presuppose freedom of choice and to neglect the various environmental forces that can sway, enable, or deny particular decisions. Coercion and incentive are great factors that shape, and often restrict, the set of reasonable decisions one has at their disposal. One quite often may see only a single decision as feasible at a given time. The commands of supposed authorities, clear and present danger, or overwhelming incentives for instance can reduce the complexity of decision making to only a single realistic option that in practice virtually all people would take. One leaves their home upon eviction, one runs from gunfire, one accepts the 'offer you can't refuse' and so on. Even with these considerations there are still the issues of forced action (like being physically removed from the house by police in the eviction example) and whether we even have free will to begin with.

I personally deny the existence of free will, as I deny the existence of many things. To me it seems entirely plausible that the conscious mind is well subdued by the unconscious. I often use necessary biological functions to illustrate this. Though it may seem from the first person that one chooses when to retrieve, open, and drink from a bottle of water I would contend that drinking water and everything that goes with it is presupposed by the unconscious mind. Given a locked room containing only a person and a bottle of water it's essentially guaranteed that the person will drink the water, and in relatively short order. I see no choice whether to drink there, and it's easy for me to generalize that to various other functions and their abstractions like government, economy, and society.

That is not to say that the illusion of choice is any less palpable or comforting. It definitely has a place in softening the blow of existence so to speak. I'd also guess that it has some adaptive function on behavior or cognition, as every quality of an organism is motivated by evolution.

"Others see themselves as citizens of the world and siblings to all..."
"Often, this view takes the shape of utilitarianism: making choices that will favour the majority..."

I actually used to lean towards utilitarianism myself, but utility monsters dissuaded me from it. Maybe some modified form of utilitarianism would be more personally satisfying to me, but I reject responsibility, blame and similar concepts as follows from rejection of free will. Responsibility to the collective seems to be at least loosely implied by utilitarianism. That's not to say I don't experience reactions of objection or support for various events in the world, just that I assign no intrinsic meaning or moral value to those reactions.

Really life seems to me at it's core to be just the various convoluted ways in which the glow of the sun plays on the wet surface of the earth. All the energy in my body is from that light (except maybe the mass-energy of particles manufactured in distant ancient stars, but that's a digression). Every breath, each heartbeat and all the neuronal activity is just the sun's radiance bending through the muddy puddle that is my body. Everything in life, from the motion of my own typing fingers up to the inconceivably intricate goings-on of entire ecosystems, is rays of sunlight refracting through the metaphorical jewel of our biosphere.

No one decided that, no one is to blame, and no one will receive my praise for it.

Still I feel overjoyed to be a part of it all, whether I have a choice to or not.

Stay safe out there!


There is a pandemic on after all.

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