Nina Strohminger explains why your moral character is the key to your self-identity. “‘Know thyself’ is a flimsy bargain-basement platitude, endlessly recycled but maddeningly empty. It skates the very existential question it pretends to address, the question that obsesses us: what is it to know oneself? The lesson of the identity detector is this: when we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are.”
self-identity
Plot twists in the story of your life
How and why do people change? For those big changes, Will Storr says that “when the storyline of one’s life hits a dead end, a redemption narrative offers an alluring, if dubious, transformation.” Quite a few interesting points about self-identity, including whether there is such a thing as a self.
An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula
He is not the first philosopher to think so, but he “is thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world.” Larissa Macfarquhar’s profile of Derek Parfit.
(Until July 21, only subscribers had access to this article on The New Yorker‘s website. It may go back behind the paywall when the magazine sets up a “metered paywall” in Fall 2014.)
Is there such a thing as the self?
Jim Holt’s review of two books that both claim, contrary to a very strong trend in contemporary philosophy and science, that there is a self.
Jerkitude
Eric Schwitzgebel’s philosophical theory of jerks. “Are you surrounded by fools? Are you the only reasonable person around? Then maybe you’re the one with the jerkitude.”
Alzheimer’s, memory, morality, and self-identity
Alzheimer’s challenges our understanding of memory and self-identity. There is reason to think your moral beliefs and practices may define your “true self” more than your memory.
How to have an out of body experience
… and it isn’t even that hard. It won’t be the kind of experience you might have seen in sci-fi movies, but it can help you think more about the philosophical question of self-identity.
You’re like traffic jam
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette explores the emerging science of the self, a body of research that examines not just who we are, but also … if we are. “Ouellette ultimately concludes that the self is an emergent property of the billions of neurons of our brain all interacting with one another. What’s emergence? ‘A system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,’ writes Ouellette. ‘A traffic jam is emergent,’ she explains. ‘You have all these cars interacting. If it gets dense enough, enough interactions, you’re going to get a traffic jam. But that traffic jam is real.’ It is more than the sum of all its cars. Something similar goes for the self.”
Who are you deep down?
The deepest self. One model of the self is that you are unconscious impulses that are sometimes but not always restrained by conscious rational processes. But David Brooks says this is not your deepest self. Instead the deepest self is “built through freely chosen suffering” arising from the commitments you make over a lifetime.
Why do your procrastinate?
Is it because you are a succession of selves and not a single self moving through time? “We think of our future selves as strangers.”
Socratically Speaking 