Personal Identity

Personal Identity

Few days back I have got en email from one of my friend where she wanted to explain the importance of having an object or behavior to identify someone. That email really let me feel the importance of defining personal identity, it also let me feel do we really need an object or behavior to identify us? As I always believe nature can give answer to any question, I started looking around for the answer, and below are my findings.

Best start could had been by observing the biggest and one of the most important entity of nature, yes you are correct I am talking about sun, what is the personal identity for sun? Is it the fact that we can see sun every morning in East direction and in the West direction before it disappears? My personal answer was no, as for me the personal identity of sun is, he is the father of our solar system, he is the father of complete mankind, to make it best sun never sun himself did not created this as his personal identity, it is his soul that made us understand what sun is and that is how we know who sun is.

After Sun I did tries getting the same answer from many different natural entities like trees, clouds, air, water etc. and strangely I got the same answer, now it’s the time to get this answer from us, the most intelligent natural species / entity. Below are my observations and examples.

People who know me, they remember me for my jokes, suggestions I give to them when they are in trouble, they associate quotes they can see on my T-shirts etc. I feel a person don’t any tangible object to be there to identify one person, for me if your soul can connect to soul of other person that makes the personal identity of any person. That actually raise a very basic question, how do our soul connect to other soul. To answer this one need to believe in the existence of soul, let me try with few examples.

1.       Does it ever happened, that you come across few strangers around and after have a first round of shake hands (without knowing anyone of those new people) you start believing that one of those can be a good friend of yours and you start talking to him or her?

2.       Does it ever happened, that you wanted to talk to one of your friend and to talk to him/her you pick up your phone and suddenly leave your phone aside and decide that you don’t want to talk anymore and you will talk to your friend after sometime?

3.       One peaceful morning just few minutes after you get off the bed, you get a wave of thought that something will happen bad today and as day progresses you come across something unusual and that make you unhappy?

With my personal experience answer to each of the above question is yes, so that raises next question, how that happens. I don’t know the answer so I let you think about it and let me have your thoughts. Also please do let me know if we really need an object to identify us? I would also be interested in knowing your personal identity.

Thanks