Identity, there are two aspects to it: what I know myself to be me, and what others know me to be me.
What others know me to be me consists in what they have in their memory of me: name, address, family relations, work circumstances, social background, schooling, experiences of me, encounters with me, events with me: in brief any data whatever that can link me to me for them.
The key word and idea here is memory. If people don’t have any memory of me, they can’t identify me. The memory we are talking about here is the memory in their minds, insofar as they are the people who do know me and my identity.
For people who don’t have the memory of my identity, and they never had any memory of my identity, for they never knew me, in order to know my identity, they look up records of all kinds of me, about me, and on me; then they can identity me to be me, in accordance with the records they have looked up with regard to me.
Now we come to my knowing myself to be me, my identity. Suppose I don’t have in my memory all the data that others have of me that make up my identity to them. In effect I don’t know who I am, I don’t have my identity in my mind, specifically, in my memory. A man without an identity to himself, that’s what I have become.
Can I lose the memory of myself, all the data of myself enabling me to know who I am? What about amnesia, the complete kind, where you don’t even know your name. Without a name how can I even so much as search records of whom the name belongs to?
Without the memory of so much as my name and everything else that can be used to start my own search for my identity in written records to which I could have recourse, how then can I get back my identity? If I am lucky, people who can identify me will have to fill me up on my identity; then I will become myself again.
But if I find myself among people who see in me a complete stranger, people who don’t even know from where I originate, or from what people I used to live among, how am I going to ever find my identity? Maybe by going all over the earth, asking everyone to look at me and tell me whether they might know me. Or have my picture flashed in every television screen or computer monitor the whole earth over?
My conclusion is that identity consists in memory in my mind and/or in the minds of other people who know my identity, or in preserved records in all media of storage which people can be interested in looking up to restore in my and in their memory my identity.
If you want to lose your identity and that for good, then have your memory data of your identity erased in your mind, in other people’s minds who know you, and in all kinds of data storages of your identity items. Then you will no longer exist as yourself to yourself and to others and to the whole world.
But the self as a subject, let’s say of a sentence, and in actual life as the agent of being and acting, is still there. And you are still an entity specific to yourself, though without an identity. But that kind of a being an entity, with a continuity of consciousness of being the numerically identical entity, that also is an identity; but of no worth and utility except that of being a numerical identity, as in #1 or #574 are not any other numerical entities but those and only exclusively those two: #1 and #574.
Here is the practical application of my mini-dissertation on identity: It can be a bridge to continuity of the self for some kind of prolonged existence or indefinite continuation of life. Here’s how: get someone to lose all his memory of himself, and fill him with all the memory of your identity, then you both live as one in two bodies, with your identity, namely, all the memory of yourself, the original one.
When you die, the other one of the combined you will take over, and start the serial existence with the next loop. But where to get someone for this purpose? What about cloning? just get yourself clowned early in life as soon as cloning for man is possible.
Susma Rio Sep
