Just Rambling
Fake Identities
"It is clear now.
If WE ARE NOT ABLE TO CHOOSE WHO TO BE BORN TO, what are we able to choose?
Having to raise two kids, I was always intrigued about what makes us who we are. Why does some people like some type of food while others don´t? Why does some like Rock music while others hate it?
What makes us who we are?
If you watch a child having to make their first decisions whether to like or not an apple or a soup. The results of that decision has nothing to do with the "refined" taste of the child but with the momentary mental state. It includes the feelings towards the person that is feeding them, the stage of development, the level of acceptance and the mood that they are in.
If that momentary mental state is positive then this child will most probably like apples for all, or at least most, of his life. He will instantaneously become the apple loving child. It becomes part of his identity.
However if that momentary mental state was negative then he will not like apples. That is worse than liking apples, because from now on every conversation around that child will have the "but he doesn't eat apples" sentence in it making it very hard to start eating apples again.
Personally I do not "seem to like" mushrooms. I remember after getting married, my wife, knowing that I don´t like mushrooms, never made meals with mushrooms. Immediately I became that person that doesn't eat mushrooms. Not liking mushroom is not only a preference it became part of my identity.
Another example is preference in music.
In a book called Contagious by Jonah Berger he talks about an experiment where they created 2 identical music sites and sent them to similar tipography groups. The people would be free to vote their most preferred songs.
The results showed that the top charts on one site were totally different than the other. They saw that as soon as the voting started the most voted were even more and more voted as top songs while the low voted songs stayed low.
This reminds of a time when I hated Rock music and a very cool friend of mine was a great fan of rock and, since I liked that friend, I decided that I want to like Rock music and have been listening to rock ever since.
What if everything we choose, everything we like or dislike, every single thing that makes us who we are today, everything that defines us was established in the same way.
Our choices were not based on what we were genetically programmed to choose, but is directly dependant on a series momentary mental states that we were in when we had to make the decisions.
Does this mean that our identity is not ours? Is it FAKE?"
