Who are you?

Note: I never actually finished this blog! It was taking up too much time unfortunately. It might be an interesting read about consciousness and identity though.

Are you the color of your skin? Are you obese? Are you a hometown hero? Are you a farmer in a rural village? Are you a serial entrepreneur? Are you what your parents fantasize you to be? Are you a spooky lump of self aware atoms? What makes you, you?

I'll volunteering to be the guinea pig in the following introspection. I've been thinking deeply about this lately, in attempts to get at the core of who I am. I won't delve into too much detail about myself as we are about to unravel the fabric of my own reality, but I'm 24, a software developer in Austin Texas and am trying to figure out what I want to do / should be doing with my life. In doing, so I believe this will help you find your true identity, what truly make you, you. I do want to preface this in saying that I do not have a PhD in this subject and you must ultimately decide who you are for yourself.

Fortunately (because our existence would be otherwise be boring if it were unfortunate), there are many many facets in examining who you are. If you aren't careful, you'll end up with analysis paralysis and know less about yourself than you when you began your search. This is analogous to using google maps. Imagine you were starting in New York and your destination was Austin Texas, you wouldn't start out from the extremely low level details of the street view and try to navigate to your destination with just left and right turns. You would get lost. You need to start from the country view, then the state view, then the city and so on. You cut out the unnecessary details. I don't need to know where Europe is with respect to Africa to go from New York to Austin.

We'll be examining my identity in a similar fashion, slowly unraveling layer by layer till we get to the destination, the core. We'll be removing unnecessary dependencies along the way, much like ignoring the spatial relationship of Africa to Europe. So, lets imagine you were to run into me on the street, who would I appear to be? I mean, if I were butt ass naked and there was no signs of culture associated with my physical appearance. Diet and physical fitness are irrelevant in this example. Assume these to be the same between myself and the entity or observer. We are examining my raw appearance.

Physical Identity

Well, upon first encounter, my natural appearance would resemble a 6'4" white male with brown eyes and brown hair at around 200lb. But what is it that you are encountering when you first meet someone? I didn't choose to be 6"4. I didn't choose to be white with brown eyes. Can you really draw any conclusions about a person's identity, who they are, from their raw natural appearance? My raw natural appearance was decided before I was born. It was decided when I won the galactic lottery, at conception. It had been coded in my DNA, the genetic instructions for building me, including my physical raw appearance as I mature.

You can deduce a subset of what my DNA might be that had produced my notable physical traits. You can deduce that the I interact with the world in a uniquely different subjective reality than your own. For instance, no two people stand the same height. No two people have the vision. No two people have the same hearing capabilities. We often judge people as if they are interfacing with the world in the same way as you. In this way, we can only be empathetic to a degree, we cannot truly step in their shoes. My model of the world is not the same as yours nor is yours is the same as anybody else. My unique model of the world is built through my interface with it, via my body, that is the permutation of all the feedback loops produced from my senses. This subjective reality, this model of the world I build is known as your umvelt

Below is a taste of what comprises your umvelt,

Senses (feedback loops)	Attribute
Sight	long/short sighted / depth perception / lateral masking / facial recognition / perception of color / light sensitivity / motion perception / resolution
Hearing	frequency range, vertical spatial locality, horizontal spatial, locality, mechanical to neural transduction loss
Smell	perception of an odor, distinguishability of odors, aversion to odors, general ability
Taste	sweetness, sourness, saltiness, punginency, astringency, metallicness
Touch	pain tolerance, pleasure, fine touch, crude touch, passive tactile spatial acuity, balance, temperature

Your umvelt, or subjective reality is built upon the permutation of these senses (plus other mental capacities like the perception of time). This is a short list. I couldn't possibly list out every permutation, as there are gradients to each attribute. For instance, there are thousands if not more levels to sweetness. The uniqueness of my umvelt can really be grasped after considering the uniqueness of something as small in totality as my fingerprint. However, just because I interact uniquely with the world does not mean that defines who I am, it's just merely what I've been given by my DNA to use as my unique set of tools to interact with the world.

So, the observer on the sidewalk that sees me can draw a conclusion about what I interact in the world with, but not who is interacting with it. This one of the greatest facades that we live with on day to day basis. The physical manifestation of a person is merely the person's interface into the world. For example, the keyboard, monitor, webcam, and microphone don't describe the computer, they are purely peripheral components for interacting with the computer. You can swap them out and upgrade them as long as the components send signals the computer can understand. You are interacting with the computer through the peripheral components.

(Need to go and fix this section on cochlear implants)

Think about cochlear implants, a device that processes and transmits sound waves from the outside world and stimulates the auditory nerve of the patient enabling the ability to hear. This capability is yet just another feedback loop that the patients can utilize to have a wider and more robust model of the world. Does the cochlear implant change the person, does it change who they are? I mean, the implant didn't magically kill the old person and birth a new one that could hear. It's the same person, except now they can hear music, their children's voices, and their annoying family member that they were blessed previously not to hear. This new hearing capability is simply added to their list of feedback loops that compose their umvelt.

Okay. I get it. Don't judge a book by it's cover. I'm not just that 6'4" white guy on the street.

Societal Identity

If my physical identity isn't really the true me. Then, surely it's what I do for hours on end, week after week right? I mean after all, whenever people ask who I am, they say I'm a software developer. I call this your Societal Identity. It is who society perceives you to be, by the actions you take.

Unfortunately there's a multitude of problems identifying yourself by your profession. This might be what I do, but it is still not who I am. There are too many external influences that affect what I ultimately end up doing.

Time and Place

Time and place are by in large the biggest in influencing factors. If we just for a second assume that I wasn't born a millennial in the technological revolution, I would not at all be coding. What I'm doing for at-least 8 hours a day is entirely, 100%, dependent upon the era in which I'm born. My occupation has been around for less than 100 years. The first software conference was in 1968. In contrast, the start of the human lineage containing chimpanzees and gorillas began around 6-7 million years ago while modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago. Given equivalent DNA, I simply would not be a software developer at any other point in time. It's simply not possible. I might've been a pyramid architect in 2500 B.C., but I sure as hell wouldn't be a software developer.

Nuture / Environment

• Parental influences
• Dogma
• You are who you surround yourself with
• Looking at era's, people aren't that fundamentally different in terms of our DNA, but vary drastically in behavior like racism depening on when they are born.
• Moldability
• Epigenetics

• Vulnerable in early years.

  Behavioral Identity (Wants / Desires / Tendencies)

My behavioral identity, is the behavioral traits and attributes I harbor agnostic of time and place. These traits and attributes are seen in the form of wants, desires and tendencies. Further, theses wants, desires, and tendencies are realized through things like the desire for fame, the tendency to over react, and the want for material possessions.

For myself, I tend to over indulge myself on grocery day, consuming half the groceries for the week in one sitting (seriously). The urge is just too strong with all that good food at my disposal! I tend to be a more independent and non conforming thinker. I tend to be a nice person... to a degree :). My level of introversion or extroversion tend to vary depending upon the group of people I'm with. I desire to live a healthy and active life style, where I can do the things I want for as long as I can. On a more abstract note, I want to do meaningful work, work that I can be passionate about. Work that isn't merely an exchange of time for economic output.

All of these tendencies that I attribute to myself as being part of my identity, but where are they coming from? I might've chosen to act upon the urge to eat half my groceries in a day, but where did the urge that provoked my over indulgence come from? I didn't choose for that urge to be there. But, my tendency to be nice, surely that was me.. right?

Origin of wants / desires / tendencies

I, (we), tend to give ourselves full credit for these behavioral traits as if we authored them, ourselves. I chose to be a nice person. I chose to eat all my groceries the same day I bought them because damn, that salsa was just too irresistible. I chose to want meaningful work. I chose to be healthy. It's easy to fall down this path of believing, after all it's seamlessly interwoven into your subjective experience.

An analogy that I love to use to illustrating this illusion is about a young king who inherits the throne. The young kind is quick to assume credit for everything in the kingdom but is blissfully unaware of the thousands of staff, soldiers, peasants and other workers who maintain it, keeping the system running without a hiccup. Further, he is unaware of the millions of humans prior to his generation that slowly evolved the technologies and agricultural practices to make his life even remotely possible.

Much like the young king, I inherited the functions and abilities of my brain. At the time I was born, I was instantaneously able to perceive and build a model of the world through my 5 senses. I was able to have a heart beat, regulate temperature, and respond to pain among an seemingly infinite number of feedback loops that composed my umvelt.

How could I possibly take credit for something I didn't author? For something I inherited?

My brain, like yours, is the culmination of millions of years of evolution, slowly evolving outward forming new structures and functions. The brain has been compared to a museum, carrying with it remnants of the past. Below is a high level view of the brain, showing this outward expansion. Being the most complex object in the known universe, I find this proves to be a simplified and useful framework for understanding the origins of our behaviors.

Let's take a moment to appreciate what we've inherited starting with our reptilian brain.

Reptilian Brain ( ~ 500 Million Years Ago)

500 million years ago, there wasn't a need for to have meaningful work. There wasn't a need to be nice. Emerging from the sea, there was a primal need to survive and reproduce, which obviously still plays an enormous role in our behavior and decision making today. These basic reproduction and survival needs were comprised of some the following,

• Heartbeat, Digestion, Hunting, Mating, Territoriality, Balance, Breathing and Metabolism

That irresistible urge I face coming home with 3 bags full of tasty groceries, (and HEB salsa), has been planted in me from that primal need to survive. That primal need to meet the requirements of my metabolism. Rationally, we know that we can wait, we're not going to starve.

Subconsciously, however, my reptilian brain is firing off millions of neurons at a million miles per hour convincing or simply overpowering my rational decision making that eating all of this in one sitting is a good idea. I get mad at myself for doing that, but who am I actually getting mad at? How is it, that you can even be mad at yourself? Isn't this a paradox? Who made the decision to eat? Why do I have to say no to myself? Who am I even saying no to?

These are some of the first workers in the kingdom of the brain for which I'm completely and blatantly oblivious of.

Mammalian Brain

As we evolved into more social animals, the need to fit in, identify foes and friends, perceive emotion and sympathy became increasingly important. It's important to note that we weren't replacing these new needs with the old ones. We still needed to have a heartbeat and reproduce. We were simply building on top of the framework that has worked so well in the past through the process of natural selection. Some of the brain structures we gained include,

• Hippocampus : The memory factory. Short term memories are turned into long term memories here.
• Amygdala : Emotions. Fear, joy, sorrow.
• Thalmus : The coordinator of the signals. The area that directs signals to be processed in different areas of the brain.
• Hypothalmus : Regulates body temperature, circadian rhythm (which can be a b*tch), and aspects of reproduction.

This is where I believe my willingness to be nice originated. Somewhere in my evolutionary history as a mammal, it was beneficial for a social animal to be nice to others within the pact. Groups produce much greater results than individuals alone. I sure as hell wouldn't want to go on a hunt alone or sleep in the wilderness by myself. Nature is a ruthless and unforgiving place. It was extraordinarily beneficial to have each others back.

Perhaps more importantly, my ability to create memories emerged here. As I began to concern myself with my own standing within the pact, I began to develop a basic ego.

Neomammalian Brain (Human Brain)

Now we welcome in the young king, the latest in the brain's evolution, the cutting edge Neomammillian brain, or simply the cerebral cortex. This is the part of the brain we attribute to being the most "human". This is the most recent formation in the brain. Unlike the vast majority of the brain, this part of the brain doesn't process sensory information. Rather, it is responsible for higher level cognitive behavior, e.g. rational thoughts and planning, or modeling the future.

The primary structure we gained was the,

• Cerebral Cortex : The highly convoluted and wrinkly outer layer of the brain - responsible for rational thoughts and planning.

  • Neocortex (meaning new bark) : The latest and outermost layer of the cerebral cortex. - responsible for the highest level of cognitive behavior.

We tend to distinguish ourselves from animals because we love to be special, but it is only this, the latest formation in the brain that distinguishes us. Like I mentioned, the brain is a museum and we harbor much the same components as our relatives in the animal kingdom. We are much more alike than many prefer to think.

The neocortex is what allowed us to rise to the top of the food chain. Humans don't have much tools at our disposal to physically defend ourselves, but we are damn resourceful. For instance, if I was stuck in a cage with a bear, I'd be mauled to death in minutes. Given the space of nature, I'd be able to devise a plan to trap the bear or simply construct a tool to kill the bear with. Bears and other mammals aren't concerned with building tools because they are only concerned with what is right in front of them, from moment to moment. They have yet to develop an advanced neocortex.

This is where I believe my abstract want for meaningful work developed. It was built on top of this neocortex framework. The framework that takes the state of your well being into account as well as your current and past experiences in efforts to make predictions, (thoughts), about the future. Predictions that are best for your survival and reproduction. Huh, that's funny. Wasn't that the initial need, to survive and reproduce? It seems like we are still trying to fulfill this.

But what does meaningful work have to do with making predictions on how to best survive? In the absence of the primal need to survive and reproduce I'm left with an enormous optimizing function that is still trying to model the best future with me in it. My neocortex, or human behavior optimizing function, can't by design choose an action that isn't in the best interest of myself. The want for meaningful work, is simply the path of least resistance or most optimal path for me. It's the path with the least anxiety, depression, pain and one most passion and pleasure. There's trade-offs, but it is the best decision.

I want to stress that this might not the real optimal path for myself. This is the best guess I can make for the information I'm given and experiences I've had. Perhaps If I was given new information about the pleasures of living a simple nomadic life in a 3rd world country, my neocortex would adjust and produce wants, wants that would lead me to quit my job and live that life.

If my physical, societal, and behavioral identity are served up to my conscious experience

Meditation

• removal of (behavioral identity, societal identity, & physical identity) -> You
• Thought experiments surrounding the volitional control of my actions.
• Are my wants / desire given to me or do I manufacture them?
• Compare the wants/desires/tendencies to a corporate structure with a CEO.
• Talk about the overwhelming role of your subconscious and draw out important parts of the brain.
• Remove participation in these wants / desires / tendencies through meditation. You are still alive, you are still you, but what is you at that point? Talk about deprevation tanks.

Conscious Identity

Consciousness, the core you. The you after everything else dissolves away. No sights, smells, sounds, tastes, or physical sensations. No thoughts or even the perception of time. No ego or sense of identity remains. Without these components, we are left with something that is indistinguishable from one another, gender and life agnostic, a universal constant. We are left with consciousness. A state of pure existence and being.

How does consciousness emerge?

It doesn't. Awareness of consciousness, or the ability to draw a conclusion about your awareness emerges. Consciousness does not equal intellect, rather intellect gives rise to the ability to conclude that you indeed exist in this universe.

Take a moment to ponder your own existence. Why do you think you exist? Is it because you woke up this morning? Is it because you've endured hardship? Is it because you saw your favorite artist a week ago?

Now let me ask you this. What if you didn't remember that you woke up this morning? What is hardship if you can't remember the pain you endured? What is it like to go see your favorite artist if you can't recall who played? What is love without a relationship, a high level construct built on the perception of time.

You believe to exist by virtue of your ego, a perception of self, that you've constructed, day by day, since the moment you were born. This ego is who you likely call you. This ego is realized through the development of a perception of time and your existence within it. When you were born, you were lucky enough to be given a bunch of starter programs, or instincts. These programs help you survive, by giving you a set of guardrails. A program for the fear of heights, a program for your digestion and sight. What you don't come into the world with, is a history of you. What happened yesterday? There was no yesterday. There was only now. You aren't born with an ego. However, you are born with the ability to develop an ego, with two important ingredients; memories and thoughts.

Memories, created within the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, are essential ingredients into building an ego. For a sense of self to emerge, an entity, be it you, has to exist over some amount of time and then at a future time reference the previous state you were in. Being able to reference a previous state you were in, you can can then project into the future that you will exist then too. Note, the previous state MUST be different otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the now. This is how an Ego develops. I existed then, I exist now, and therefore I exist in the future. Every time you think back to your own existence, you conclude that you are aware because you remember what you have done in the past. Memories alone don't suffice for conscious awareness. A memory without something to decode it, is just data; void of meaning. Some engine, must be able to analyze these memories and make high level conclusions about them.

Thoughts are necessary in conjunction with memories in building a sense of self. The generation of them are believed to reside in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for memory, planning and abstract thinking. Thoughts are small or large predictions about the future. Memories serve no evolutionary purpose without something to consume or learn from them.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Consciousness in the animal kingdom

Are animals conscious? Is my dog conscious? Yes. And he's the same amount conscious as you. He's just simply not as aware as you. The animal kingdom has a gradient of awareness. To illustrate, I'm going to borrow an idea from "The Future of the Mind" by Michio Kaku. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and author known for his work in String Field theory.

Michio defines consciousness as

Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g, in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food shelter) - Michio Kaku

• Insert equation of awareness here, and finish the gradient of awareness line.

Vedanta

• Divinity within us all.

Time

• neccessary to form an ego
• Time is the entropy wave
• past/present/future is an illusion, fabrications.
• Planck time/lengths and role measuring time Time is the key insight into consciousness awareness. But what is it? A simple way to think about it is, time is change. For something to change, it has to have a past and future state. For the ice in your drink to melt, it first has to go from solid to liquid. When we measure time, we are measuring change.

Quantum Physics

• Heisenburg uncertainity principle 1927
• Depenence upon an observer
• Werner's believe in consciousness as fundamental property
• Probabilites of finding an electron.
• Vedanta

Random

This is analogous to that of machine learning, where in instead a set of memories, there is some set of data set that is fed

Thoughts are largely the ability to take memories and predict the future. Take stress. Stress arises from thoughts. Thoughts that predict a future w

----- societal identity stuff ---

It's a label which makes a rough approximation of your wants / desires / tendencies which is often flat out wrong.

What you do can be largely influenced by dogma. Steve jobs once said,

Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. And don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary - Steve Jobs

You have to ask, why am I in the occupation that I am? Let's do a root cause analysis.

What we come pre-installed with:

Lucky for us, on day 0, our brain isn't a completely empty slate. We inherit memories realized by instincts. We are familiar with instincts and how powerful they can be. The instinctual crave for sugary and fatty foods, or the insatiable want for lust and reproduction can be unbearable for some. Or that universal feeling of nausea when peering over a cliff, is the same instinctual feeling our ancestors experienced. It helped them survive and thus passing it down from generation to generation through DNA, genetic code. These instincts give us guardrails for the purpose of survival. This boot-loader type program is created in the brain during your 9-month journey in the womb. We can look at it as a universal set of guardrails that we come pre-installed with so that we can focus on what matters in our unique environment that we exist in.

What we don't come pre-installed with:

A model of the unique environment that we spawn in. Nor do we come pre-installed with concept of our existence within that model. We just have those instincts that are universally applicable no matter where on Earth you end up. You need food and you need to live long enough to reproduce.

Key components to awareness

One key component to achieving this state of awareness is the ability to create a thought. When we think about being self-aware entities, we are self aware because we can think. René Descartes, puts it elegantly

I think, therefore I am. (Latin for Cogito, ergo sum)

But what is a thought and why does it have the unique ability to draw conclusions about consciousness? Being aware of your own consciousness is tied directly to the concept of time. An entity, be it you, has to exist over some amount of time and then at a future time reference the previous state you were in. Being able to reference a previous state you were in, you can can then project into the future that you will exist then too. This is how an Ego develops. I existed then, I exist now, and therefore I exist in the future. Every time you think back to your own existence, you conclude that you are aware because you remember what you have done in the past.

Humans are incredibly good at thinking about the future and the past.

References:

Books:

• Future of the Mind - Michio Kaku The secret lives of the brain (subconscious) - David Eagleman

Internet:

• What is Vedanta

  • It is inevitable that we will eventually, either in this or in future lives, discover that the greatest truth of our existence is our own
  • God is infinite existence, infinite consciousness, and infinite bliss.
  • Vedanta asserts that the goal of life is to realize and to manifest our own divinity

• Vedanta - Oneness of existence

  • All fear and all misery arise from our sense of separation from the great cosmic unity, the web of being that enfolds us.
  • The Self that is within me, the Atman, is the same Self that is within you—no matter whether the “you” in question is a saint, a murderer, a cat, a fly, a tree, or that irritating driver at the four-way stop.

• Butterfly Effect

  • The pendulum starts with almost the same initial condition. Over time the differences in the dynamics grow from almost unnoticeable to drastic ones.
• Number of people alive
• Wait Buy Why - Wants/Desires
• Stanford - Pain and the Brain
• Time management for kids

• Time Perception

  • The brain therefore reorganizes the information and presents it in a more easily understandable form. In the case of familiar information, very little time is needed for this process, but new information requires more processing and this extra processing tends to makes time feel elongated. This is part of the reason why a child’s summer seems to last forever, while an old person’s well-practiced routine seems to slip away faster and faster. The more familiar the task, the less new information the brain needs to process, and the more quickly time seems to pass. (This is because of the basal ganglia)
  • In evolutionary terms, the ability to perceive time on very small scales may be the difference between life and death for small, vulnerable animals.
• Hearing
• First software conference 1968
• How long have we been human
• Usage of Vision in the Brain