I want you to take a moment and think about someone (friend, significant other, whomever) saying your name. What comes to mind, if anything?
I can honestly say I really can't think of anything. I don't imagine my face and how I look now or anything like that. I am wondering what other people think of or see when they do the same thing.
I tried thinking of friends and doing this same thing. What do I think of when I think of (insert name)? It is less of an impression I have of this person and has more to do with my memories of him or her.
I know lots of folks who say things like "I'm a writer/filmmaker/scientist." However, maybe there is a flaw in this mentality or maybe it is just a flaw of language.
I am not a writer. I am a person who writes.
I am not an engineer. I am a person who studies engineering.
I am not a girlfriend. I am a person in a relationship.
I know the second sentences sound a little stand-offish or maybe even pretentious, but are they any worse than declaring you are something you do for maybe a small percentage of your life. I am talking about being versus doing here. I know have not payed homage to several classical philosophers, Rousseau, and probably Sartre as I am writing this, so I'll probably have to add some addenda after posting.
What I am also getting at is the identification of being through one activity also implies the exclusion of other activities. I'll give you a real-life, lavacaflaca example:
I am listening to my brand new engineering dean give a talk at a welcome event for him. He talks about how engineering is so great because it can prepare you for any career path..."except maybe poetry" he says, followed by, "I hope there aren't any poets in the audience." Now, I smiled at that and internally rolled my eyes. First, because I won a poetry award at this same university about 4 years ago. Second, because it was just a silly comment to make.
Part two, my old comp lit colleagues ask what I am up to and I tell them. The response I usually get is, "don't lose your comp-littiness" or something similar.
The whole thing makes me want to shout, "the two aren't mutually exclusive!!!" I am a person who invests a lot of my self-worth into the work that I do, but I will not identify myself as being any one thing to the exclusion of all others. What I mean is first I am a person; then I do things as that person. The consequences of that may be anywhere from great to awful - such as this post.
Not everything is being articulated as I want it to be, so, uh, my apologies. I just wanted to start a conversation. Still trying to hash this mess out.
PS: I am not trying to be funny. =)
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Perhaps. Aside from the being / doing distinction, it seems like there's perhaps a self-identification vs. identity assignment issue. I'm reminded of an old military observation. If you ask someone in the army what they do for a living, they say, "I'm in the army." If you ask someone in the navy, they say, "I'm in the navy." And if you ask someone in the marines, they reply, "I am a marine." To some, a definitive label is not only acceptable, but preferable. As always, each individual is a product of their own microcosm, and they will simply assume everyone goes by a single encompassing label.
ReplyDeleteIt's also important to realize that words are not absolute. Barring a Clintonesque discussion of what we mean by "is," to some the term engineer may just mean someone who happens to practice engineering as the professional portion of their being. Obviously, we all do this to an extent. When someone says, "I'm a doctor," few of us would assume all this person does all day, everyday is be a doctor, at the exclusion of all else. But language is messy and lazy and relies on a lot of implication and understood common ground.
All that being said, I *am* a philosopher, but I am not a cultural anthropologist, I'm a person who studies anthropological phenomena. In the latter, I might even go as far as to say "I am a person who happens to study anthropological phenomena." That means something different to me, but that's not really what matters when I'm trying to communicate the idea.
Good stuff, thanks.
Oh man, if ever there was a time to whip out a coffee-shop-level discussion of physics influencing personality, this is it.
ReplyDeleteIdentity. Labels like "poet" or "civil engineer" or "ferret showing enthusiast" act to categorize us into easily sortable bins. If you are a specific label, I can place certain expectations and assumptions on you. I do this with a certain amount of error bars, as I know full well not all civil engineers have the same viewpoint and opinions as ferret showing enthusiasts, but some might. One could argue, and what is seems like you are struggling with, is that society and all the souls who make it up are placing these error bars on you unsatisfactorily. Your dean has clearly made his too short. But this is not his fault, it's human nature. We like to categorize. It's just our nature. Or so it seems.
What I'd like to tell you, if you don't already know, is that there is a perfectly good rational for you not feeling comfortable in the presence of finite, limiting labels. It's because in reality, we don't fit into boxes. I could go into a diatribe now on how we're all unique individuals with labels simply describing a small part of the complicated paths we've taken in life, but I assume you know that. No, I'm talking about quantum mechanics.
Imagine we are sitting across from each other sipping coffee. Or tea. I don't really care what you're drinking, but mine is either a large latte with a shot of sweetened condensed milk (a Spanish latte, as it were), or an iced black coffee. This is what I would might say:
You and I, we're made up of atoms. Ignoring everything else around us, there are just my your atoms and there are just my atoms. Oh crap, don't forget the coffee! There are also the coffee's atoms (they are delicious atoms). If I were to ask you to describe this system (you, me, and the coffee) on the atomic level, what would you say? Little points floating in space? Loosely interacting with each other somehow?
Rubbish.
Our atoms our not little points. We are not dots floating out in space, like so many "connect-the-dots" puzzles. Our atoms are waves! Where does a wave start? Where does it end? It doesn't! Sure, you can say most of a wave is concentrated here or there, but one of the interesting things about waves is they never really end.
So we've got all these waves interacting right? Infinitely ranged interactions? Well, I'll do you one stranger. Draw a line from you to the coffee to me. Imagine a little wave connecting the three of us, (like a tiny tiny slinky). Now it seems like that wave connects us. In fact, that wave going through you, then the coffee, then me, that doesn't just connect us, that wave DEFINES us. That's you, and that's me, and that is most certainly the coffee (delicious!).
I'm not even going to get into the implications of such a scenario. Nor do I want to describe how true this scenario really is because, frankly, I'm out of coffee. I really just want you to consider this situation. In this "we're all connected by waves" situation, where does this leave the question of labels? Does the Fourier transform of you, sitting in that chair, equal civil engineer? No. Of course not. The Fourier transform of the waves that make you up? Well that's pretty freaking complicated. Nobody is going to look at that and say "ah, this is the equation for a civil engineer"... or poet, or anything! It's just too complicated. It's not going to look like much more than static and noise. So why should you think you'd feel at all correlated. The fact that one comes up with any sense of self identity at all? On the atomic scale, this is shocking! But, if we zoom back out to the macroscopic scale... everything I've said seems nonsensical. I mean, it even seems crazy to me. I mean, there is a whole other conversation (and blog post) on how we choose to look at the world, either through what science and math tells us it must be, or through a monocle of "this makes more sense to my brain".
So yea, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you don't like being labeled, blame mankinds interaction with reality. Or don't. Something to think about, either way.
~Sqrt(1/2)*Exp(-bunnyd/kbT)
Alright, Bunny convinced me...
ReplyDeleteThere is yet another direction to approach this issue from. A brute-force reconciliation of the Platonic forms and categorical stereotyping. The first question I'm inclined to ask is:
Do you know what an engineer is? It may sound silly to someone who has been labeled one, but it has to be asked. Given that you've taken offense to being one and solely being one, your definition of engineer must not agree with your definition of lavaca.
A big puffy, leather couch and a small, hard, wooden stool have very little in common by any applicable adjectives - however, we both understand them to be "seats." Platonically, that's because both are variations on the form of the seat. Somewhere off in the ethereal wastes of nether-space, the perfect seat is placed serenely in the perfect entry parlor of the perfect home. And it is to these standardized measures that we compare everything else in kind.
Perhaps you aren't the form of the engineer itself, but then again, no one in this world would be. But then, aren't you an engineer as much as your chair is a chair, your car is a car, or your hat is a hat? Our perception of reality, and to a lesser, but still extremely significant, degree, our use of language, *demands* that we categorize and compartmentalize the things around us. Math is an excellent example. Try to imagine what "three" is, without thinking of three of something or the numbers relationship to other numbers, like two or one. What if we needed a different word to describe "three" bananas than we did for "three" cats?
I'm opening up lines of thought far faster than I'm going to be able to wrap them up, so I'll just quit instead. Maybe the author isn't an engineer, and maybe the reader isn't a pharmacist, a baker, or an equestrian. But perhaps the author might be an "engineer." But don't take my word for it, I'm just a facet of an infinite interconnecting particle wave.
Guy has stumbled upon yet another amazing aspect of quantum mechanics. Way to go Guy! That being that an object/wave/chair/coffee cup actually exists in a superposition of all it's possible states, until an observation is made. When a measurement (or observation) is made, the wave function collapses down to one specific state. This is usually described by the Schroedinger's Cat experiment. However, I always find Schroedinger's cat kind of a bummer, so I submit to you this cat in a box instead:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdQj2ohqCBk
Full Disclosure: At first, I had no idea how to respond to lavaca's post. Then I watched the above video about 3 times, and suddenly knew just what to say. Once again, the cat's subtle influence over man's understanding of physics is exerted. The Egyptians were onto something...
Holy crap... the idea of Plato having been onto quantum superpositional observations 2300 years ago just made my brain hiccup.
ReplyDeleteThere is no hat.
ReplyDeleteThere is no car
There is no chair.
There is only everything.
I know for a fact that when some people think of me the phrase "Oh that asshole" comes to mind. I seriously doubt they are actually picturing an anus. Being an asshole is not like being an engineer or a poet as neither are a euphemism for an antisocial condition. I wonder if there's a pill for that, does anyone have the number of that greedy phramacorp mentioned earlier?