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Cake day: 2023年6月12日

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  • The closer you look at identity, the less defined and distinct it appears. I’m either the entire river with its myriad sources and tributaries or I’m whatever sliver of water flowing in its path. It doesn’t much matter either way. I think the meaning of such a thing is more distributed across the minds capable of understanding it, as it is with language, a sort of gaussian distribution whose peak is the average understanding, which shifts depending on what part of the local extelligence you have access to.


  • Conversely, I am merely a model of my own behaviors, thoughts, goals, and dreams. The “me” I was twenty years ago is not the same “me” that exists now, at that point I didn’t exist, I wasn’t yet alive, but the thoughts, behaviors, and memories of that person helped grow into the person I am today. My memories of those times before are old and reconstructed, I don’t have the same memories entirely, I have memories of memories of memories, and who knows if the memories I have today will be the same in twenty years. When I die as an individual, the model of my self and my behaviors will be carried by the people I knew and was close to, and parts of me will still exist as the behaviors I had were picked up on, my views and ideas turned into memes carried into the people I relayed them to, the patterns that were “me” now part of everyone as they grow and change into new people themselves. I am not just genetic data, that was just the foundation of my existence, the soil in which I grew, but as I grew and reasoned and modeled myself from my surroundings, I also gave myself back to the connections I made. In that way I am either a continuation of all the humanity I was before and will eventually be as long as the ideas exist, or limited to the self I am in the present, and only for the brief part that I am actually present for.



















  • Their bed nucleus of the stria terminalis should be twice as large as a woman’s, and that’s what guided their gender identities. Not that I’m a biological determinist, just a strict physicalist with no belief in metaphysical choice superceding determinism, but a lot of times the brain’s development has recursive feedback loops such that smaller choices early on can alter the size of brain structures along with sex hormones and the development environment in the womb or even outside of it for a while, the earlier the more significant. All I know is that the size of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis is pretty consistently twice the size in men as it is in women regardless of the gender assigned at birth.