@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
What a nice thing to say. Thank you. :)
Long post ahead. The verbosity of a rambling, not the lengthiness of a carefully constructed argument.
What I was trying in vain to get onto the digital paper yesterday night is that a person’s demeanour (i.e. the impressions one makes on those around one, perhaps the essence of identity in this sense) is an inherently fundamentally subjective thing, that only exists within the minds of people who perceive it. It is a set of impressions that are considered to form a whole.
In objective reality, if you strip away all the subjective interpretations, if you look only at what physically exists, all that is left of demeanour is a diverse set of subtleties like habitual gestures, voice intonations, idioms and the like. Demeanour is a model of someone else’s mind that we construct based on these data.
What still keeps me from being confident that the above is right is the fact that I’ve shifted the focus from identity (/personality) to demeanour just now. I’m not sure if I should do that.
I’ve only said something about one’s own and other people’s perception of one’s personality. But of course there also actually is a mind that people make models of, one true state of affairs that people try to understand.
I suppose that means personality has some form of objective existence, coded within that grey matter up there, but that’s not what we perceive. I suppose it’s like the difference between a movie and a collection of microscopic pits on the downside of a DVD. And the human mind decodes it and manifests it in gestures and habits and the like.
But in that sense, everything has an objective existence in the brain of the one perceiving it, making it a bit of a meaningless attribute to exist like that. The difference here is that there’s supposedly one “true” identity in one person’s brain, that everyone tries to reconstruct, but I wonder if that true identity is really there, if there’s anything in there that could be called so.
Dang. I managed not to get confused by your opening question with its four nested embedded clauses, and now I end up confusing myself.
It’s hard to talk about the insides of a human skull objectively. Even if the observer manages to keep human subjectivity out of his observations, the user of the brain himself cannot be guaranteed to.