Identity

Like most people, I've spent some time thinking about the question of identity, and whether or not it's a credible concept, or just a palliative comfort blanket for the cold winter months.
Against it's credibility are a whole bunch of issues, including the existence of over seven billion of us, our biological and cellular composition, and the seeming lack of free will.
I first noticed the power of the first of these, the numbers objection, on my first trip to China. To live there one must be prepared to compete with 1.3 billion others, and that seems to spawn a less individualistic mentality than living, as I always have, on a small island. Many Chinese I have met lack that self-obsessed identity-building character that one meets in the west. To the extent that many Chinese people seem themselves convinced they cannot be in any way special. As a subjective generalisation, that doesn't apply in necessarily even a majority of people, but I had not met it before and it does seem a common belief among Chinese people that 'I cannot be special'.
Our biological composition also argues against the notion that we are individuals, with particular justifiable identities. We are, after all, composed of trillions of bacteria, for example. Do each of them have an identity? Also, each cell in our bodies is frequently compared to 'a city', yet although we could consider ourselves walking communities, or collections of such we seem to retain the idea that just our brains are 'us'.
If I had an arm amputated, I should not be happy if that arm pursued a career as 'me', as the brain assumes band-leadership. In plain speech - my Brain is the Jim Morrison of the band.
As for free will, that's been a concept under fire since Benjamin Libet's experiments in the 60's demonstrated that our conscious mind does not seem to be 'in charge' after all.
Nisbett & Wilson's amazing study from 1977 also suggests the conscious mind is, as Dennet says, a 'treachorous incubator of lies'. But what it does provide, also according to Dennet and others, a filter to prevent wrong actions rather than the originator of new ones.
All of that added to by the increasingly evidenced finding that we are 'copiers' who follow one another, creating memes as we go, being suggestible, falling into trances and following leaders.
So, a heady brew of objections to deal with then. One's 'identity' is starting to feel like a convenient fiction.
Yet we all know what it 'feels like' to be conscious, and to have a name and a family.
Unlike many species, we rely on one another for survival. Each bringing our own skills. The strong, the wise, the clever, the nurturing, the hunting and the child-caring. For that reason of bringing different survival strengths to the tribe, a sense of  social identity feels inevitable. 'Hunter, son of hunter' feels a necessary identity just for the purposes of tribe survival.
Then, unlike many species, we need to plan ahead. Lack of natural excellence in strength and speed force us to plan our hunting and child-minding, and a similar requirement surrounds our need for a fixed habitat. All of which again points to fixed and multiple roles for individuals in a tribe, similar to chimpanzees but with even more dependence on one another.
We also know that subjectively, despite being natural copiers, we can also be natural objectors. Objecting to an idea based on who proposed it is an almost universal trait, but objection based on general categories of thought is also normal too. Religious and secular thinkers are great examples of this.
In terms of biology too, we have some justification for our head-centricity, and, should it happen, the first successful brain transplant will only serve to reinforce this.
The seat of consciousness seems clearly to be based in the brain, even if we still have no reliable and agreed definition of the term.
In fact, defining and understanding consciousness is at the very heart of our notion of identity. It almost 'is' identity for most people, and feels like the extraordinary outcome of our biological composition that makes identity a sensible construct, and one which actually does imply free will.
For in order to simply write these notes I must have a freedom of volition. This must be an enquiry that has mattered to me significantly on a personal level to make me use my precious time summarising my thoughts here.
That we are swayed by marketing, politicians, orators of any kind and are suggestible, susceptible to manipulation and capable of being 'entranced' does not of itself deny the existence of free will so much as confirm that those states of susceptibility are the exception, not the norm, and that therefore, for the most part, most of us are in a state of freedom of volition most of the time.
So our role in a family or tribe are the basis of our identity, and our skills are a second layer, with the model completed by our free thoughts and subsequent actions.
These three layers seem to me a compelling way to consider identity. They do not disallow a change of identity for those minded to change direction either. In fact, quite the opposite, and it is that freedom, to re-learn, re-train, re-direct energies and realign one's filial and familial relationships that provide confirmation that our sense of identity is sound, biologically supported, evolutionatily necessary and socially helpful.

D Unsworth
6/4/18