some thoughts on identity

There's a few places I want to take this blog, but I think essentially I want to talk about identity and how well we can really know ourselves and what kind of things can change our identity. Personally, I really don't like people thinking things about me that aren't true. If someone gets the wrong impression of me or something, it upsets me. When I was just spewing out a handful of completely untrue facts about myself on plurk, even though I clearly stated that they were lies, it still made me feel just a bit uncomfortable. Why? Why does it really matter if people know the real me or not? Who even is the real me? I don't even fully know myself, so why do I have this drive to make sure people are getting an accurate picture of me? Technology especially, allows us to be whoever we want, but somehow I still don't like being someone I'm not.

This kind of leads into the 4th dimensional image of ourselves we were talking about today. We've created this whole other level of ourselves for the world to see and to get to know us through. We've discovered and taken full advantage of this new level of self expression and presentation of image. Why? Why do we create all these images of ourselves, and not only create them, but save them? Maybe we're doing it for posterity's sake. So that we can feel like we left a physical impact on the world when our physical selves are gone. Maybe it's because we all like having these things that identify us, but we've never really been able to make those things as tangible and physical as we can now, so now we're obsessed with saving them. Maybe this pack rat behavior is just an intrinsic piece of humanity, as was suggested in class. Maybe we collect and save things about ourselves because we like the idea of having more intelligent and accurate knowledge--our own memory really isn't that great and technology can expand our abilities to be able to hold a LOT more information. Maybe we're just information whores like the characters in QCJ with their access to the Hive mind or in Postsingular with access to the orphidnet.

So then if we have this so called identity and we like to keep an accurate representation of it, what happens to that identity when we engage in fiction? Or when we go back in time like in Primer? The time travel clearly changed Abe and Aaron to the point where their friendship was destroyed and they were attacking their former/present selves and taking risks they wouldn't have taken before. Which version of themself is more true? Which deserves to live? Which one is the real identity? Is there 2+ identities now? Or is there exact duplicates of the same identity? It seems to me that the more times they travelled in the box, the more crazy and desperate they got. It changed them. And not surprisingly since our brains would probably have a difficult time adjusting to that kind of leap through reality.

Do we also change when we engage in fiction? Or how about when we're dreaming? We do all kinds of things when we're playing a video game, or dreaming that we would never do in real life. But who's to say which one is "real" life? Why doesn't something you do in a game or write in a fictional story, or do in a dream count towards this image of yourself that gets projected to others? When in fiction we get this pass, this excuse, to do things we wouldn't "normally" do. But engaging in fiction is a pretty normal and frequent thing. The things we think and do in fiction are just as "real" as the things we do in real life. Maybe even more so since we're free to feel and think things without any social expectations or rules, since we have escaped to this fictional realm.