This one’s been brewing a long time, since before Eric catalyzed it the other day by claiming (in an email) not to have been talking about DigID. In the entry to which he was alluding, Eric referred with approval to James Hillman’s particular spin on personality (was this in response to something from Chris? or was it Doc?). Now, how far removed is “personality” from “identity,” Eric?
One of Hillman’s points — and it’s been years since I read him, so he may have changed tack, and I almost certainly have forgotten key elements of his argument — was that the West’s monotheistic religions had warped the spirits of their adherents by imposing an unnaturally singular, centered model of reality (and consciousness): one deity, one true centered personality per believer, and so on. Hillman, last time I checked, thought that polytheism was truer in the sense that interested him — that is, truer to the life and experience of his clients. (He opted out of metaphysical arguments; so long as his clients made more satisfactory sense of their lives on premises congruent to polytheism, he was satisfied.) As best I remember.
That’s how Eric got me thinking about the ways that we constitute, identify, recognize personalities.
Once I started thinking about recognizing a person, the following premise came together i ways that I’ve been trying to fine-tune since last October (I bent Phil Windley’s and Jon Udell’s ears with a stream-of-consciousness version back then). The primary concern that I have regarding DigID involves the possible effects of DigID alienating radically us from that-which-marks-our-identities.
Think with me: We mark identity primarily with reference to faces. When the Army want to catch Iraqi fugitives, they distribute cards with those fugitives’faces. If we want graphically to represent one person recognizing another, we can show a thought balloon containing a picture of the second person’ face. When airlines want to endanger constitutional liberties to make plane flights safer, they ask for identification cards that include pictures of our faces. (Although we probably recognize people’s appearnaces by a gestalt of their height, proportions, carriage, and so on, the sign, the trump card of appearance is the face, such that in all these examples, the face serves as the shorthand representation of the whole body.) Moreover, notice that our faces are fundamentally public; there’s nothing particularly secret about my face, and anyone who wants to defraud the world by pretending to be me will have ample opportunity to record my face and adjust his or her appearance to match mine. My face is public, and yet it is something undeniably mine; I see it in the mirror every morning when I brush my teeth, and if I want it to look different, I’m the one with the prerogative to go to a reconstructive surgeon and request a Michael Jackson job.
At one remove from facial appearance come subtler identifiers: my handwriting, for one, and my fingerprints. These mark me as myself, and I recognize my connection with them; Still, there’s a remoteness to that connection. My handwriting seems to manifest something peculiar to my identity, but it wouldn’t be that hard to simulate. My fingerprints would be harder to forge, but I don’t have only a mechanical association with them; they’re the imprint of my fingers, but I never spend any time looking at them, I don’t identify with them. I acknowledge that my fingerprints or my handwriting adequately indicate my identity, but that indication lacks the affective dimension that my face evokes. Moreover, these are only tangentially public; I can more readily withhold them from the world (though at the cost of a certain eccentricity).
The same principle applies, to an even greater degree, to the miracle-identifier of our day: DNA sequences. I acknowledge that my DNA is mine in a theoretical kind of way; but I have no direct way of knowing what my DNA sequence is. I can look at my fingers to see my fingerprints. Where do I look to see my DNA? The opacity of DNA (and other sophisticated biometric identifiers) comes at the price of remoteness from what I (or you, or any non-forensic-expert observer, such as a typical juror) can perceive as my identity.
So this is what concerns me: if our identities become more and more remote from what we understand actually to be us, how does that change us? Do we want to set those changes in motion simply in order to use eBay and Amazon with more confidence, or perhaps to file taxes and vote online? Is there a way to attain the goal of a reliable, sound DigID scheme that respects my need to feel a connection with what effects my public identity?
Posted by AKMA at April 15, 2003 09:14 PM | TrackBackFrom what I've observed, anyhoo...
"So this is what concerns me: if our identities become more and more remote from what we understand actually to be us, how does that change us?"
None whatsoever. Face IS an important identifier, but only to those with sight. Although the eyes may be the windows into the soul, the heart is the window into the essence.
"Do we want to set those changes in motion simply in order to use eBay and Amazon with more confidence, or perhaps to file taxes and vote online?"
I don't believe You care for DigID. Thus the question...?
"Is there a way to attain the goal of a reliable, sound DigID scheme that respects my need to feel a connection with what effects my public identity?"
More important than face is name.
How is One connected to One's name...? (VERY connected.. yet not really a-tall. You'd be (more-or-less) a "rose by any other name"...:-D
So why is the connection ALL that important...?? Or is it lack of trust in being DigID'd in the first place...???
Posted by: jt at April 15, 2003 09:56 PMDon't think I phrased that well, especially first part. It goes to the tough question of WHO You DO understand Yourself to be.
What I was trying to get at was this: Learned about Human pheromones many years ago. But also saw a study where young man and woman were really "clicking" in conversation. And their hearts were found to be beating simultaneously. Seems wild, but I really DO believe there's a lot more to people connecting, that's far more subtle than even pheromones.
Animals sense things in many ways, and people are animals.
So I just tend to see personality as the clothes covering the identity, m'self. (And regarding topic of recent threads, a whole LOTTA of blogs is just the somewhat-made-up persona covering the personality.)
Posted by: jt at April 15, 2003 11:51 PMAKMA, what's the link to Eric's blog entry? I don't see it on Norlin's site. Am I looking at the wrong Eric??
Posted by: dweinberger at April 17, 2003 07:43 AMProgressing
The Doc Searls Weblog : Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Reading Doc this morning, wherein he wrote this:
Some day our civilization will mature to the degree that we'll see the evil in that pattern — and therefore in ourselves — and not just in our enemies.
And then it hit me -- I guess I'm not convinced that civilizations "mature" - ever....progress, maybe. mature, probably not.
what does that make me?
[later: I *love* the line of thinking Doc is on. In college, I studied comparative literature and south asian studies, and I spent months and months reading the works of Joseph Campbell and James Hillman. Lakoff reminds me of that. With that in mind, i'd like to recall the work of Jung, Hillman, Campbell, etc --- and bring up something Doc wrote:
Stories persist only so long as there remains a reason to stay interested in them.
On a meta-level, the jungian, hillmanian (and perhaps lakoffian?) crowd would disagree with this. From their point of view stories are as ingrained in our psyche as dna is in our genetic makeup (which is not to say that we can't *change* a story; its just to say that stories persist.).
From this standpoint, the tale that is being played out by characters on the world stage isn't just GWB's story; its osama's and saddam's and Kim's (notice how angry he gets when we leave him outta the story?). And Lakoff is right: the hero's journey (see "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Campbell) is the classic tale of fighting the evil villain (star wars), or discovering one's self (prince siddhartha), or conquering death (jesus) -- the "V" shaped descent that takes the "hero" away from the community that is known (the US pre-9/11) to face dangers and trials and tribulations that *if negotiated successfully* lead to a restoration (at better levels) of said community. A tale that's older than the hills (think Adam).....
So are *all* of the characters playing out this story, or is the story playing out them? I tend to think the second option. The story is living through the people (then again, i tend to think that stories are *more* powerful than us mere humans) - including the members of the UN (which *do* fit under the community expulsion/restoration theme -- think of Jesus and the Jewish community he railed against. Btw, I'm NOT drawing some direct analogy btwn GWB and Jesus -- so don't email me about that!).
At the end of the day, all the world's a stage (my favorite man ever wrote that)......perhaps some of us prefer the romantic comedies over the action movies.....but that won't change the stage itself; its bigger and more important than any of us.
Posted by: eric norlin at April 17, 2003 08:24 AMSorry I didnt put links in; I was on an AOL line and I couldn’t track down the references. . . . I’ll go back and link up now thanks to Juliet’s spectacular wifi.
Posted by: AKMA at April 17, 2003 08:33 AMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Marian at January 12, 2004 09:28 PMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Alice at January 12, 2004 09:28 PMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Joyce at January 12, 2004 09:29 PMSeth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
Posted by: Barbara at January 13, 2004 10:44 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Isabella at January 13, 2004 10:45 AMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Newton at January 13, 2004 10:45 AM