Life Without the SelfA trending idea is that pursuing one’s life purpose is a process of discovering “oneself” because the self marks a person’s nature and identity. This idea states that although it might hide deeply inside of one’s mind, the self is the core and foundation of a person as a living being; it represents each person’s uniqueness by containing one’s essence and showing what one is really like. However, this idea is wrong because “the self” is only an artificial and unreal concept. People’s belief in the existence of the self can be attributed to their oversimplification of personal identity and self model to the sole concept of “self.” This paper will explain how the society gives rise to one’s personal identity and self model, and how personal identity and self model correspond to one another.
The self, believed by many to be the innermost core of a person, is often described as inherent, coming into being as soon as one’s body forms. It is not inherited, acquired or induced, totally out of the reach of human efforts, so that everyone should be born with a formed self. However, as far as I am concerned, one’s essence is far from inborn; it is totally influenced or given by the environment that one lives in. Thus, one could not have an inborn self. Instead, one’s essence should be better understood as the external personal identity and the internal self model combined.
Society determines one’s personal identity, which is how one is recognized by others or society. It is twofold, consisting of individual identity and social identity. Individual identity is personal. It includes one’s body, name, characteristics and traits. Social identity is relational. It marks social status and labels people in human relationships. It is just with the help of both individual identity and social identity that social communication and human networks can work. The two parts of personal identity are both determined by the environment. For example, one’s name and body are given by one’s parents; one’s characteristics and traits are affected by surrounding people; and one’s social status depends on how others value one’s skills.
Social life also gives rise to the creation of one’s self model, which is how one is recognized by one’s brain. One gains experiences and perceives emotions from a first-person perspective which assures the uniqueness and exclusivity of those experiences and emotions. One also communicates with others through exchanging ideas, which are products of one’s experience through logic and reasoning. These experiences, emotions and ideas all contribute to this person’s knowledge building. As David Hume indicates that “the mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance,” knowledge that one accumulates through social communication and personal experience is presented as perceptions in the brain (“Of Personal Identity”
; of Self Identity and the Philosophy of Relativity, (2)).
‾When we encounter one individual in our society, we are seeing, but we are also receiving. As this is what our brains are, our social interactions are a form of communication of information.
One cannot create a society if we cannot experience a single experience, but we can learn to identify one by ourselves. We cannot imagine one being different or to other people from us; we cannot have an emotional connection between a feeling or event or the experience of being human or to another individual with similar characteristics, emotions, etc. Because we are not only living and developing social interactions, we are also living them with our own eyes. By seeing our own brains as models, and by understanding the interactions of our social interactions, we can better see what is occurring to those around us and to our other individual. In practice, that means recognizing that one person is a “we” as part of another individual, which is how they are seen around each of us.
One’s personal identity and one’s social interactions are also about self-definition and self-expression in our social interactions and can lead to a “collective” view of the world. As David Hume points out, we are all interconnected within our social interactions of information and information processing, which leads to sharing that information and being able to connect others to a common purpose and to a common purpose. Although it is not one’s personal identity or sharing of the information processed as personal information, for everyone it is the fact that someone can share it.
This is a conversation to have as an individual. At the end of the day, we share all this information because we are all part of the collective. We share because we are all doing the same things together. It may seem like we are just some kind of individual, but this is actually part of one’s human identity. As I explain below, it is a way we share our data and information to gain and share understanding.
This is not necessarily the case with a society that has such a strong tradition of diversity and respect for individual autonomy (and freedom!). It is that we are part of a common group of social interaction that is as open as it is different from what I describe as the “ideal social system” of human society. However, this individualism is not the same concept that is expressed by people who have been influenced by the idea of individualism. People like myself and the greats like Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Mead, Henry David Thoreau and Richard Nixon, among others, make the argument that this notion of individualism is essentially a caricature of the reality of modern society. The idea that one entity that is one person is not that specific, but rather an individual from whom we have “different human identities” instead of their collective identities.
The human being is thus in a position to begin speaking about this diversity of society with the notion of individualism. One of the ways I see this is