Are we, who we think, that our friends think, that we think, that we are?

We are ourselves. How someone else sees you is true to them. It is their perception of you and all they will know. How you see yourself is who you are. How your friend sees you is who you are. But nobody knows your experiences, or your motivations better than you. Nobody has the right to judge your life but you

An objective way?

Does identity even have an objective existence at all? Isn’t it all in our heads, and the heads of those around us?

No. I’m actually Alfred E Neuman.

I am who my dog thinks I am.

@Fyrius

Objective identity? Forensics thinks so.

It would require someone who could see themselves objectively to even begin to view you objectively. Even then, there would be a lot that person wouldn’t know about you.

Only God would be able to evaluate you objectively. You would have to ask him for yourself.

@phoenyx: So, if there turns out to be no god, there’s no way to ever see yourself objectively?

We are who we are, not who we think we are and not even who are friends think we are. Our perception distorts reality.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
A good point.

But I don’t think the concrete, objective definition forensics use is the kind of identity your quote applies to. That’s a matter of governmental registries, bank accounts, DNA fingerprints, finger fingerprints, and any other concrete way to tell you apart from everyone else.
But identity encompasses more, I think. It also includes personality and style, and other inherently subjective aspects that only exist by being perceived.

@Fyrius

Agreed. Identity encompasses more. But do personality and style exist only because they are perceived, or because they are created (developed). How may they be perceived without first being crafted into reality? And how does this crafting occur?

@The_Compassionate_Heretic

Agreed. Does our perception distort reality, or is our perception a distortion of reality? I think our perception is distorted… reality remains intact regardless of our perception of it… or does it?

We can indeed author and craft a new reality straight from the thoughts in our minds. Look, I desire fruitcake… and fruitcake is at hand.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Reality is what it is no matter how we perceive it. That remains constant. Our perceptions are distorted by emotional attachment to different stimuli.

I’m not certain what you mean when you mention conjuring a fruitcake by the power of thought.

My head hurts…

nobody really has the one and propper image of anyone else, even if you sepent lots of time with that someone you only see the hardware(body) working more than / if at all software(spirit/soul).

@The_Compassionate_Heretic

A fruitcake… a bridge, light bulbs, a cheerleader pyramid… all genesis from a thought filled mind into physical reality. Reality… thus distorted (changed) bent by our thoughts.

Can you distort me a new bicycle, please?

To reply to your reply to my reply, I would add that the creation of personality and style, like that of many things, is guided by and crucially based on your own perception of it, too.

I have some further thoughts in my head on personality having no objective reality in the way we perceive it, but right now I can’t seem to formulate those thoughts in a way that I’m confident is not full of sh*t. I’ll probably give it a try again later.

@Fyrius

Oh please do. I enjoy hearing you speak.

I am who I am, where ever I am and with whomever I am with. I’m just plain Dana, and that’s a girl with a big heart, good personality and a good friend and family member.

Still not following @realeyesrealizereallies…

@The_Compassionate_Heretic said:
“I’m not certain what you mean when you mention conjuring a fruitcake by the power of thought.”

Any creation of man begins with a thought. All physical human creations have three ingredients… energy, matter, and information. The thought is the raw information. That information instructs the formation of how much energy and how much matter.

The thought is created. The energy and matter are only reformed. Their reformation is a physical expression of the original thought.

No, it all an illusion. People mask their true feelings, plus they are too fluid to categorize. One minute they love you, one minute they can be jealous, the next minute they forgive you, the next minute they can’t live without you. Better to just be what you strive to be. What others think, as stated is in flux, no matter what you may think, or think they think, or think of what they think is not what they should think.

@dannyc

I think you could be right.

@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.

@Fyrius

I agree with your supposition that personality has some form of objective existence. That’s why I don’t believe it is advantageous to only look at what physically exists. Stripping away the subjective interpretations leaves three ingredients… not just two.

The subject in question consists of more than mere material energy and matter. There is also an immaterial quantity of information. Information that defines the physical makeup of the agent, and information that the agent authors beyond that. Could that authored information be the substance of the objective self?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies —This is such a good discussion I just had to reopen it!__

“You are who you think that your friends think that you think that you are”

It doesn’t matter to me what my friends think that I think that I am. What matters most to me is who I think that I am, and how my actions toward my friends reflect that.

I once had a person come up to me and accuse me of thinking that I was “all that and a bag of chips”. What he thought that I thought that I was turned out to be extremely different than what I had thought that he thought that I thought that I was, which I had hoped was much closer to what I thought that I was.