I watched the movie Donnie Darko a while ago and while i was looking stuff up about that movie, i found a guy who posted this on his blog. He was one wierd guy.
I was recently watching an episode of the old British television series The Prisoner in which the protagonist’s mind is placed into someone else’s body. This led me to wonder how I would react to such a thing happening to me. (By the way, I don’t watch TV as a rule, but I’m allowed to watch old shows if they’re of decent quality and commercial-free.)
So what would you do if you woke up one day to find yourself in an entirely different body? Freak out is probably the correct answer. How about something a tad more subtle, and in a way more realistic: what if nothing seemed to have changed to you, yet everyone around you kept telling you that you were a different person? For instance, suppose that you grew up as “Sue,” and then one day everyone starts to call you “Arnold.” Certainly this would be more than a morsel unsettling. I believe most people would simply insist incessantly that they were who they believed to be — id est, Sue.
Unfortunately, that would not be a wise course of action. If everyone calls you Arnold, you must accept the role. How can you get along in “the world” when you no longer live there? You must learn to live in this new place where you are now Arny (for short).
An even more interesting question arises — what is the truth? Who are you now? We have two subjective but usually reliable measurements: what you think of yourself, and what the world thinks. To be sure, this is a question worth a good deal of philosophical ponderance. I would say that you are in effect both Sue and Arnold. You are Sue in that you know of Sue, and you also know that, in your mind, you are the person who satisfies the essential properties of being Sue. You are Arnold in that everyone else sees in you some essential property of being Arnold; otherwise how could they be so presumptuous as to correct you about your own identity!
Which brings us to the question of essential properties. What makes something that which it is? What if two authorities on identity disagree? I would say that essential properties are in fact totally subjective. I will be bold enough to suggest that all identification can occur only within a mind, subjectively. Hence all essential properties are nothing more than psychological guidelines which vary between minds yet tend to agree most of the time due to the fact that we all live in the same world. They are psychological guidelines which we have developed over time to help us distinguish this one object from others similar to it. (Subplot: we need comparison before we can enact identificaiton.) And if two authorities disagree about identity, it should be no great surprise as identity is no longer an inherent property of the object in question!
Identity not an inherent property? Insanity indeed — from two identities to zero (in five paragraphs no less).
