Gush

I’m surprised Facebook hasn’t just made it’s own web browser.

Identity

I’m stuck on a paradox.  It goes like this:

There’s this thing in the world, running around, making tiny differences, interacting with people and objects, and I call it “myself.”  According to me, myself has thoughts and ideas about things, and, generally speaking, there are reasons why myself does the things I do.  That’s where the trouble starts.

The main trouble being that there are a lot more people who know about me than the myself that knows about me.  Myself knows my ideas and thoughts, but everyone else doesn’t.  And there are way more of everyone else.

Let me put it this way:

If 100 people were in a room looking at a rock, and 99 of them said the rock was blue, but one person said the rock was actually red, who would be right?  In day to day life, we live largely based on the assumptions of others and the consensus of the masses.  Saturn, for instance, is a planet that’s really far away and has rings and orbits the sun.  I’ve never seen Saturn, I have no firsthand proof that it exists or orbits anything, and yet I firmly believe in Saturn, because enough people have said “Hey, Saturn is a planet with rings that orbits the sun,” and so on.

So here’s the dilemma:

I (and most people, I think) would make the claim that I know myself better than anyone else.  But that can’t be right, because everyone else is a lot more people with a lot more observations and a lot more evidence of what makes up me—the outside world’s definition of me is logically more accurate and truer than my own, simply because of the data sets involved.

Even more dismaying, since my definition of myself is held by no one else (because of the inherent differences in personal experience), who’s to say I’m justified in saying anything at all about myself?

I’m the only person who knows what myself thinks, but no one else is privy to that, and if that knowledge fundamentally cannot factor in to their definition of me, who’s to say I have thoughts at all?

To lay it out more formally:

Assuming motives and thought are fundamentally personal and never fully communicable

AND

Assuming everyone who is not me has a definition of me

THEN

The data set used by the majority to define an individual (me, in this case) is fundamentally different and infinitely larger than the data set used by the individual to define him or herself.

Alright, so that initial conclusion is bad enough—but it gets worse.  If you take the statement that each individual is better defined by everyone who is not that individual and wrap it back on itself, everything really falls apart.

To clarify: if myself is just a composition of everyone else’s definitions, then the same holds true for everyone else—but if all the people who are not me are similar constructions, then their definition of me is invalidated.

So that’s where I’m stuck.

No one can know why an individual does anything in the way that the individual knows it.  However, everyone else uses a data set that doesn’t include the things that only that individual knows, thus invalidating the individual’s thoughts.  But if that’s true, than no one’s thoughts are valid, and every person’s definition of every other person is just smoke and mirrors, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, and the world just operates on whatever equally invalid, arbitrary definition has the most subscribers.

It’s all very confusing.