Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Personal Identity & Star Trek Pt. 2


In the fifth Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier there is a character, Sybock, who forces people around him to confront their greatest pain in their life experience.  By making the people around him confront their greatest pain he can then release them from it.  Once they are no longer under their pain, Sybock believes they can be who they truly are.  The only problem is he thinks everyone is essentially the same with no individuality once their pain is removed.  All the basic person wants is to be at peace with each other and know some sort of god.  Naturally, after his brainwashing, Sybock steps in as their leader to show them the way to god and peace. 
            However, Captain Kirk has a different take on what a person identity is:

As Kirk states in the clip, our individuality is our identity.  What we have done, what we have felt, the choices we have made, good and bad, is what defines our individuality and that in turn is what defines our identity.  In other words our individual life experiences are what make us who we are.  Without them we would end up looking like carbon copies of each other.  Our experiences are what set us apart from each other. 
              This brings up a distinction that needs to be made between two types of identity, individual and collective.  In light of what Kirk said I would say our individual identity should be defined not by a fixed list of attributes but by the differences between one another.  Based on what Sybock believed, collective identity is what a group has in common.  For example, Sybock thought that there was a collective desire for the same thing that made everyone a member of the universe.  A more general example would be the attributes that define us as humans, it is not individual but collective and within that collective we can have individual identity seeing the differences between us.  

2 comments:

  1. "In the fifth Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier there is a character, Sybock, who forces people around him to confront their greatest pain in their life experience. By making the people around him confront their greatest pain he can then release them from it. Once they are no longer under their pain, Sybock believes they can be who they truly are."--sounds like Batman Begins in a way--Batman faces his fears and comes to know himself in a way that was unexpected. Kirk's ideas come in here as well because every person has a different collection of experiences.
    You highlight really well Locke's idea of the Tabula Rosa--for Locke, we are simply a collection of our experiences. That idea is interesting when we look at Kant who believed that we have a prior categories like the perception of time and space in order to organize our perceptions.
    These ideas of collective and personal identity also bring up Bacon's idols as well.

    How would you connect the Borg from Star Trek (collective identity)?

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  2. Hmmmm, that's an interesting question, I would say that they really only have the collective identity. When they are assimilated, all aspects of their personal identity are erased and they are wired into the common collective to preform tasks for whatever the collective conscientiousness needed. Because there is no individual consciousness, no individual memory, and no individual emotions (assuming the Borg experience emotions), according to this view there is no personal identity.

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