Identity and Pain

I presented my idea that pain is essential to identity in my philosophy group, during a discussion on identity and the internet, and it led to some stimulating conversation which I will attempt to recapture here. To put my argument in a nutshell, when I'm dreaming (or online, in some assumed identity) I can't pinch myself to sense if I'm real. Some people objected to the distinction between what is real and what is not. Others argued that identity is a social construct determined by our interactions with others. One person said that emotional pain is equivalent (or identical, in the mathematical sense) to physical pain, and somebody else took that further to argue that emotional pain experienced in online relationships can have the same function of binding one to one's identity as physical pain has in real life. These arguments helped me crystallize my idea as follows:

The term identity has many meanings. One of them is how I see myself. Another is how I present myself to others, which may take the form of several different identities or fictions. Yet another is how others see me - although I can assume different identities, I can't entirely control how others see me. How I see myself is then influenced by how others see me. It's as though I look in a mirror and make myself up a certain way, then I go out in the world and copies of me are created in other people's minds, none of which are exactly the way that I wanted them to be, and then I see myself as I am reflected in their minds have to go through the whole process again. The internet, chat and e-mail communications with people have been for me a very distorting mirror in which to see myself, and I hypothesize that is because it's much easier to lie online so people are used to others wearing masks and project a lot more of their own interpretations about what might be hidden behind the mask. So I end up being reflected in all these people's distortions, and having to endlessly recreate myself. Some people suggested that this is a bandwidth problem, that text communication online lacks the richness of interpersonal, non-verbal communication. I agree that is part of the problem, and it sets the ground for the bigger problem of the possibility of lying (false identity) and consequent distrust or suspiciousness. Anyway, this realm of identity seems to be all mirrors and smokescreens.

Another realm of identity is an attempt to answer the questions, who am I and how do I know? This is where pain comes in. Pain is different from the other senses because my pain is in some way unique to me. We can all see the same table, touch it, taste the same ice-cream - albeit our experience might differ somewhat. But only I feel the pain in my body, and you feel the pain in your body. I can feel your pain, but this is qualitatively different from feeling my own pain. Emotions, like the other senses, tend to have objects - and can therefore be stimulated by objects of the imagination. I can imagine or recollect or meet online something terrifying, and feel fear in my body, feel my heart beating, my palms sweating, etc. Equally I can imagine something that makes me cry or laugh, or feel sexually aroused. But I can't imagine something physically hurting me and feel the pain in the same way. I can't even 'remember' the sensation of having an attack of gallstones a few months ago and the pain in my abdomen, because I can't imagine the object associated with that. Unconsciously, I think there is a way we can experience pain (or its absence) by hypnotic suggestion, but not by conjuring up an object of the imagination like with the other senses and with feelings. This unquestionable experience of pain, together with its inevitably aversive nature - I can't feel pain and not want it to stop - prevents me from getting lost in the hall of mirrors described by the other realm of identity. It also impacts my choices regarding inflicting pain on other sentient beings, whereas while I'm stuck in the hall of mirrors of the internet I have little or no compunction to act morally in the sense that my transgressions will not result in somebody getting beaten up or bleeding to death. If they exist, they will simply come back in another form.

I wonder if emotional pain, and the feeling of another's pain, bear the same relationship to the experience of pain as does memory of one's own pain? Going back to the idea of a community of pain, and how when I was in pain different people looked at me and communicated with me non-verbally, I am reminded that the sharp, shooting pain of gallstones brought to mind the searing abdominal pain of puerperal fever, when I felt as though I was going to die.

There is an inherent contradiction in the questions who am I, and how do I know? Because at some level I invent who I am and then I know it's a fiction. How do I know pertains to the I that came before the invention and that is the I that is raw intention, and the I that comes after the fictions, the bodily sensations that I do not invent or wish into existence.

When I started talking about this idea with my children, somebody (it may have been me) brought up the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Meanings of Identity

I was thinking that identity is related to pain, in the sense that when I hurt I know that I'm real, and that I'm really me. Now, reading Dorothy Wall's book Encounters with the Invisible, on her experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I think of a different meaning of identity. She writes about 'passing' for a healthy person, when really she is ill - both in her own mind, for many years, and then when her body denied her that pretense at least during those times when she went out into the world. Experiencing her pain internally, she refused to identify externally with an image of pain and illness. Her picture on the dust jacket, taken perhaps during this illness, shows a friendly, lively woman smiling engagingly at the camera from behind her large glasses. Yet she was exhausted, in pain, and had to rest for weeks after a walk in the park or a visit to the acupuncturist. This brings to mind at least two meanings of identity, how I see myself, and how I present myself to others. Then also, is it how I see myself (implying a mirror or a camera, a disembodied eye) or how I feel myself to be from the inside?

My experience is that there is a secret community of those in pain. When I twisted my knee dancing and then took a bus along Mission Street, a black homeless woman saw me standing and offered me her seat as she was getting off at the next stop. I don't know how she knew I was in pain because my sprain bandage was hidden under my pants and I was trying to look and feel normal. Another time, I was suffering from the pain of gallstones while shopping at the Farmers' Market, and the vendors at the fish stall looked right through me as though I wasn't there, moving on to the next person in the line. When there was nobody else waiting, I finally caught their attention, and they sold me a piece of fish without ever making eye-contact. On the other hand, the man in a wheelchair looked up at me and smiled, and the saxophone player playing blues on his saxophone held my gaze for a moment and nodded. I felt like one of the dead, in the story Where the Dead Live by Will Self. In this story, the author suddenly notices that his mother who has been dead for many years is actually still walking the streets and she tells him that when you die you simply go to live in another part of London. But maybe I'm not as good at hiding my pain as those who experience this more of the time.

So identity is how I present myself to the world, how I see myself, and how I feel on the inside. In math, identity means more than just equality. It is symbolized by equal with an extra, third parallel line, and signifies two quantities which are always equal, not just arbitrarily so in the present context. There are many circumstances in which how I see myself is not identical to how I present myself to the world, and then there is also how the world sees me, that can cause a re-interpretation of me to myself. I am thinking of my friend who had a Lithium atom tattooed on his wrist, expressing his identity as a nuclear physicist, only to discover it contains a star of David which has a whole different set of meanings, and is used as a symbol of identity by people with bipolar disorder because Lithium is often used as a medication in that condition. I might have my identity indelibly carved on my body, only to find out that other people see it differently from my intention. Bodily sensations such as pain, even the sensation of having a tattoo or piercing, are unquestionable, unlike all these images and how they are seen. Maybe I mean something deeper than identity is bound up with pain, a felt sense of who I really am.

Why is it so easy to spend 40 minutes fussing around on facebook as I just did, before I started writing this? Probably because of the limitless play around identity and its representation or misrepresentation. I listed myself as no longer single and a couple of friends sent me their cheery regards. When really I am still single, just no longer listed as such, taking a break from dating. And for some reason, I felt a need to take the trouble to correct them... Plus I invited my friend to play chess. Maybe he will ignore my request, that would probably be best for both of us.

Sleepless in Berkeley II

Another sleepless night in Berkeley - maybe it's something in the air, the full moon - who knows? At least this time I rode my bike through without having to stop for the busy traffic, and the pedestrians I encountered were on the whole friendly, saying hello as they stuffed guitars and other instruments into their truck. Some were yelling, but only at each other not at me.

Reading about identity and the internet for the next philosophy group brought to mind my readings on pain, and a conversation I had earlier in the day while hiking down from Las Trampas. Pain is what brings us back to the self, establishing the reality of both self and world as in pinching yourself to make sure you're not dreaming. Pain means that the world is real and not all in my imagination, and also that I am really me, in my body, which is in the world. The boundary of the body, the skin, is what binds me to the world. In the world of words, on the internet, there is no real me. I was reading the history of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and I looked at some of their websites. Perhaps they need to specify whether killing other characters is allowed, because there is no possibility of causing bodily pain only social pain. I would be curious if players ever experienced bodily pain as a result of their characters' adventures online. I imagine that other sensations such as sexual ones are possible, even likely, but I wonder about pain. Perhaps the imperative 'do not kill' comes from the possibility of inflicting pain on a fellow sentient being, and when we know others are not sentient we just don't care in the same way. I am the intentional, willing I that can create my own identity in a world of words and also the sentient I that experiences unwilled pain.