[MURG] Defining the sense of self and personal identity

[Thomas Weber]

Defining the sense of self and personal identity

Written by Thomas Weber

The sense of self is an awareness of being a unique
individual entity sepparate from other humans and from
our surroundings. It is probably the most important to
us component contributing to the experience of being
alive. The self exists in the environment and without
it the self would lose it's meaning. This indicates
that the self is a sense of relationship with the
world around us. Awareness can be divided in two
parts: the part which we can call the self and that
something which the self is aware of. Therefore it can
be said that awareness is a binary process. In most
general terms the part that we are aware of is our
environment which we all share. It is relatively easy
to define. From our stand point the environment is
eternal. It may change over time for better or worse,
but it will not cease to exist. The self however is
temporary and fragile. Trying to better understand
what makes the self so unique we may analyse it from
the very beginning. A child is born. Most of us will
agree that the child's awareness is less developed
than ours. The child is born with very little memory
stored in her brain and she will not remember her own
birth. She will express some sense of self reacting to
the pain of the first vaccination, crying for comfort,
care, etc. As she developes day by day she accumulates
new memories. Her brain already partially grown is
like a blank tape being recorded. It is believed by
some psychologists that infants perceive themselves
and their surroundings as one whole reality. That
reality gradually records itself in their brains until
at about the age of four some "critical memory mass is
reached". When we now adults try to recall when our
lives begun it is about the age of four as we remember
it ourselves. Before that we probably lived for the
day only vaguely aware of the past or future. Our
sense of self must have been limited to a relatively
narrow location in space and time. Our awareness was
probably mostly phisical. Accumulating memories was
kind of fun, playful activity. When at the age of four
the "critical memory mass" is reached the small human
starts living her life in time. She starts to
understand time as a dimention in which processes take
place. Grasping the continuity of time and realizing
there is going to be future the child starts
projecting memories forward and says: "there is always
going to be mom amd dad and the sun will shine
forever.The child just started using her imagination.
To make imagination effective events of the past must
be arranged in sequential order. It is particularly
important for cyclic pattern recognition and
application. As the self is born it can be described
as a system made of past memories, the sense of
present location and situation which at any given
point in life is the final outcome of all experienced
past, and the sense of outlook to the future. The last
one are our intentions, our dreams, our plans. As we
grow older these three elements are so uniquely ours
that we have a good reason to call it self. The self
is the experience of one's past, present and future.
It is the dynamic relationship between one's personal
history - the current strategic location and his
ambitions. It is the inner converation going on as the
present moves thru time, as the events planned in the
future move to the past and the accuracy of our
planning undergoes a reality check. These three
entities - past, present and future engage in team
work toward our unique purpose. As the game goes on we
are cheered by arrays of emotions. In the deeper sense
our emotions are so strictly ours that every person is
the only person who can possibly feel them. The past -
present - future in the background of our emotions is
our most uniquely self. But most of all we live in the
present. In this now and here we directly interact
with the environment and that includes other humans.
We are not alone. We as individuals live in our self -
relationships and life becomes more complex as we
enter relationships with other humans. Each and every
one of them is engaged in their own self - 
relationships so the whole system becomes a
relationship of relationships and so on. If each of us
were only one person in our environments our past -
present - future selves would be just fine and the
personal identity would not be an issue. But as there
are more other selves around we must be able to
identify ourselves among other humans.
The sense of personal identity seems to be taking care
of proper harmony with others. It helps us in our
existence as persons in the context of other persons.
At the current evolutionary stage as the human species
we are designed for progress and creation. Some mega
projects that we undertake require highly organised
cooperation. Humans organise in families, friends,
cities, countries, etc. At the funtional level we are
specialised for our unique professional or vocational
capacities. These particular work capacities were the
basis for personal identities within the progressing
social organisation. We can observe today reading any
telephone book that many names are derived from
occupational titles. Personal identity has attached a
name to it. That name is to be used by others relating
to us. As we try to live useful lives we accomplish
things to our name. We start connecting out personal
identities to bigger concepts and this way some of us
become famous. The concepts continue beyond our lives
and perhaps meke the history. Humans like Socrates,
Gallileo or Albert Einstein have all gone home and so
gone is their sense of self, but their personal
identities will continue still far into the future.

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