What is an Identity?

I've wondered about a dog's identity since there are so many different-looking breeds. How does a Chihuahua recognize a saint bernard as being another dog, for instance.

Another puzzling example is nest-parasitic birds. A European cuckoo, for instance, lays its eggs in the nest of another bird species. The bird is reared by another species, yet it retains its own identity. How?

It gets much more complicated in humans. People gain identities or have them foisted on them by inculcation usually in childhood. Often it is very difficult for people to extract themselves from that identity no matter how harmful it is to themselves or others. For instance, a person raised as a fundamental Christian will identify with an idea of good, and that identity depends on pointing out evil. For decades the object of evil was the communist state, especially the USSR. When that empire broke up the fundamentalists had a crisis, and they needed another object of evil lest there own identity vanish.

The fundamentalists found two convenient and safe objects of evil to hate, namely the abortionists and homosexuals. These two groups unified their identifies sufficiently to re-elect the president.

Identity as far as people go doesn't really serve to determine behavior per se. All identity means is that a person considers themselves to be a part of group x, and not to be a part of group y, and that person a is a part of group x, and person b isn't. And people can (and do) have multiple identities - you already have your race, your class, your general location, your gender, your religion if you have one, the clubs and organizations you're affilliated with - all of these things make up your identity, and how you choose to define yourself in relation to other people. Even if you are a fundamental Christian of some sort, you might not care about finding evil in the world, but you would just identify more strongly with other Christians rather than Jews, or Atheists. How identity actually works in reality is very dependant on the specific situation.

I've often wondered where I end and the rest of the world begins. When I shed a flake of skin, is it still a part of me when it is just beginning to fall? You could pick any cell of my body and I'd still be me without it. And if you take them all, I am gone.

And just where is my consciousness, anyway? Surely, we could say it is not in the part of my body below my head. But (my philosophy professor told me about this one) what if we took my brain cells and sent them to the ends of the earth in different directions, and then hooked up a radio device to each one to radio the chemical signals each sends to the others. And let's just say we get my brain to work in such a way. THEN where would my consciousness be? All over the world? Or just in those areas of space where my brain cells are? Or what? This is a key feature of my identity.

I think that I think all identities are arbitrary.

masonc2,

By setting the agenda of "undertanding behavior" you are already begging the question of "identity".

i.e. "Understanding" is about "prediction and control" which implies continuity of structure moving from state to state. Such continuity IS "identity".

I suspect from the way you have framed the question that you are aware of some of the major philosophical problems involved in "identity" and that these even extend to physics with its the celebrated "non-locality" problem. In general you will probably find that nondualistic (interactionist)arguments make the most sense in attempting to resolve the issue. In psychology itself Piaget's framework of genetic epistemology comes closest.