If you have reached this blog, this page, you probably know that I’m Farid Nakhle.
But do you know who you are?
Speaking to a colleague at work, he mentioned a lecture stressing about the importance of having a private and quiet place to think.
I am sure that, at a certain point in your life, you probably have had a quiet thinking time where you’ve wondered…. who am I? If you haven’t, here’s your chance to think about it … do you really know yourself? what makes you special? what makes you, YOU?
It is possible but very rare for two or more people to look the same. Our look is unique and is not limited to our physical traits. But our style, sense of fashion, and all the details add personalizations to us. Some people who take extra care of their looks explain that it is very important because it reflects who they are. But does it really? No matter how much people tell a good looking person how beautiful he is, the person would often hate the way he looks in pictures. This is natural because he is only used to see a mirrored version of himself, and when seen in a straight image, the person would think it is weird. That’s why some selfie cameras mirror our image. What I wanna say is that our look or the way we think we look is not really what others see. Even more, our look naturally changes with time and age. Not to mention how often we change it based on our mood or feelings or even based on social events. The point is, although virtually unique, our look does not reflect who we are. Maybe it reflects our mood but not ourselves.
Humans, us, we have characters. A set of behaviors that trigger reactions in different situations. But how well are we aware of our own character? and how does it define us?
Doctor Faryl Reingold made an experiment to help test subjects discover more about their characters. The experiment required four volunteers to write down their date of birth, their city of birth and their favorite color. Based on that info, Dr. Faryl wrote a description of each individual’s personality and handed them correspondingly to each test subject. Each one of them had to read the description in private and note how close or how related he felt to the description. 3 out of 4 felt extremely related to their personality description and 1 felt somewhat related. At the end of the experiment, Dr. Faryl reunion the test subjects and asked one of them to read the part where he felt most related to. Surprisingly, the sentence he read appeared on all of the descriptions handed to the test subjects. Dr. Faryl then admits that she handed the same personality description to all of them. This is what you would find in online personality tests, online horoscopes, Dr. Faryl explains. The description is so generic that it could apply to anyone and still feel pretty personal.
This helped me realize that characters, although they seem pretty personal and very “me”, are always abstracted. Whenever you read about them, they are categorized. And once you categorize, it means you can generalize. And once you generalize, things are no longer personal. The question remains… What makes us us then?
Maybe it’s something more personal to us. something like our memories?
This theory is very popular and pretty convincing. We see our memories in a subjective matter and a lot of decisions we take are based on previous events that have happened to us or that we have witnessed or experienced. David Hume, a well-known philosopher, explained in one of his most notable and important work, “A Treatise of Human Nature”, that our sensations and impressions of things around us give us the idea of a “self” and our memories are what makes this “self” last in the long run. Hence our memories shape a lot of our selves and who we are. But what about people who have encountered some memory loss? or memory injection?
MIT researchers Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu were able to successfully implant false memories in brains (read about the experiment here).
On the other hand, we tend to notice that we have forgotten a lot of our memories that we at some points fail to remember. Maybe because they just weren’t important to us, or maybe, for no specific reason, we’re just not able to remember.
In addition, there are a lot of cases where people suffer from severe memory loss.
So memory alteration or loss is possible. When that happens, do we change? A person who has experienced a complete memory loss would surely act different, take different decisions, get confused about different things. It’s expected. But is he the same person? I believe that memories do shape us and affect us, but even without our memories, and although we might seem strange, unreasonable and different, we would still be us. We would still percept the same things in the same subjective way, except now we have missing information about it.
So if we percept things in the same subjective way, are we the decisions we make? Could our perception of things be the missing key to who we are? the way we calculate the output of certain events considered input? and the choices we make based on that output? is that what makes us unique?
Peter’s Johansson’s experiment proves an interesting concept called choice blindness. Choice blindness is an idea that claims that we are blind to what we choose and that we can easily be convinced and become defensive, of choices that we didn’t even make but thought we did.
In his experiment, Peter present test subjects with a set of cards containing pictures of female faces. The subject sees the set in a pair of female images and is asked to choose one of the two pictures. One that he finds more attractive. During the process, the presenter, with a slight of hand, switches few of the test subject’s choices. At the end, the test subject is asked to explain why did he choose each picture (without him knowing that some of his choices were swapped). The test subject fails to detect that some of the images were changed. Furthermore, he defends his “fake” choices by saying, for example, I chose this face because I like blonds while in reality, he chose an image of a brunette.
This proves that, when we think we want something and we are given something else, we find reasons that make us believe that what we have is much better than the alternative. We are blind to our decisions and sometimes we don’t really know what we’ve decided, but we are convinced of what we are given. That’s why I don’t believe that we are the decisions we make.
So, who are we?
You are always changing, your look can change, you can forget your past, you can have memories implanted and choices can be made for you without you even noticing! Who are you?
One of the best answers that I have found came in professor Brian Little‘s book named “Who Are You, Really?” where he explains that, irrelevant to our every-day personality and how we act in our social groups, each and every one of us have a secret life, an “aside project”, a personal project that nobody knows about it. For example, a story that relates to your kid, he’s been three times to the hospital and they still don’t know what’s wrong with him. Or it could be your mother. These are personal situations that make us act differently. Personal situations or events that push us to act out of our normal character, these are what professor Brian call “free traits”. Free traits are traits resulted of us enacting a “script” in order to advance these personal projects. And they are what matters. Professor Brian gives an example of himself by explaining how he enacts as an easy going, fun extrovert when he needs to profess his students while he is, in reality, an extreme introvert. Professing is his aside, personal project.
These acts, that are out of normal, out of our comfort zones, are us. Our free traits. We are the stories we tell ourselves in our personal secret projects.
Note: Unlike my previous “tech” articles, there is no exact science here, and the answer to the question “who are we” is completely subjective and arguable. But here I am, sharing my thoughts and personal opinions
And as always,
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