IDENTITY

Personal Identity: One basic concept of personal persistence over time is simply to have continuous bodily existence. However, even for inanimate objects there are difficulties in determining whether one physical body at one time is the same thing as a physical body at another time. With humans, over time our bodies age and grow, losing and gaining matter, and over sufficient years will not consist of most of the matter they once consisted of. It is thus problematic to ground persistence of personal identity over time in the continuous existence of our bodies.

The New Real You: In this digital age in which Internet and online activities are part of the daily routine for most people, the construction of online identities becomes an extremely relevant issue. Over the years, with the implementation of more and more new types of Internet communities, such as blogs, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, it has become a much easier process to construct new identities for ones self. As such, many people have developed concerns as to whether people are anything at all like the projections that they have created for themselves through various online media. Or put simply, they wonder—and worry about—the validity of such projections, and it almost becomes natural instinct to wonder what someone is really like on the other side of the Internet connection.

The Split Self: So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union. In other words, look at the number of people we know who are terrified of silence, and who have to have something going all the time, some noise streaming into their ears. They're doing that because of their intense sense of loneliness. And so when they feel silent, they feel lonely and they want to escape from it. Or people who just want to get together. As we say, they want to escape from themselves. More people spend more time running away from themselves. Isn't that wretched? What a definition.
Alan Watts

Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. A new form of identification has emerged which breaks down the understanding of the individual as a coherent whole subject into a collection of various cultural identifiers. These cultural identifiers may be the result of various conditions including: location, gender, race, history, nationality, language, sexuality, religious beliefs, ethnicity, aesthetics, and even food.

IDENTITY

The Fiction of Self

Split Self

The Empathetic Civilization

Exercise in Empathy?