You are ostensibly 'an existence', but your body is a composite - a collection of billions of separate elements or fundamental particles, each with its own individual properties. Each basic particle pre-existed your birth and will ultimately survive your demise. Each has a unique history, a separate location and physical domain. Logically this presents a conundrum. How can you be 'an existence' if that manifestation which you consider to be yourself is a composite? Indeed, every existence has its own unique identity and a collection of existences will have as many separate, individual identities as there are elements in the set.
There is a form of a hierarchy where each item is made up of parts ("containment hierarchy"), and where the item itself is a part for a larger entity. A cell in a human body is a part of a given organ like the liver, but when the cell is seen as a whole, it has organelles, like the nucleus and the mitochondria. And they contain molecules, etc. Looking the other way, the liver is a part of that person's body. This is an issue of where we 'place' the 'viewer.' Does the 'viewer' look inward from the boundary of the liver cell seeing its bits and pieces like that cell's mitochondra? Or, does the 'view' look outward and see all the other organs of this person, like the heart and lungs, that make up a greater whole (the body). Arthur Koestler wrote about this in his books "Ghost in the Machine" and "Janus" and described these things that follow this kind of hierarchical form as "holons" - he saw our way of looking at these (of holding them in our mind and 'moving' the 'viewer' about), as a natural representation of relationships in reality. In his understanding each whole was affected by its parts, and the parts were effected by the whole they belonged to and this, in a sense, is about the fact that reality is an interconnected whole. It also parallels, in a way, the process of conceptualization as Rand describes it in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology except that her process grants us the ability to form abstractions of abstractions which means we can create mental hierarchies that aren't simple replicas of physycal structures but instead represent a mental arrangement of properties or relationships between physical entities. What can remain is this Holon type of hierarchy - the containment has become abstract. There is some purpose, of course, in the creation or use of the mental structure, but what is of interest is that the Holon structure, when made explicit, can often serve to guide us in holding context. This is a discussion in which being careful to separate metaphysical identity from epistemological identity is important (while recognizing that epistemological identy always depends upon the validity of metaphysical identity). Now, turning to Jack's post, and the quote from there at the top of this post, I'd say there were two different topics being addressed. One is about how should metaphysical identity be understood when we are talking about a specific person, and this can't be done without also addressing the fact that we can recognize metaphysical existents in ways that validly 'assign' an epistemological identity. In other words, Steve exists which means he has an identity in the sense that he exists as something (In metaphysics: existence = identity, identity = existence). Epistemologically the identity of steve is context and purpose determined. I can be the fellow that lives in that house. Or someone could point at me and say, "That is Steve," or some other form of isolating me from all other's in the appropriate context for the discussion. Jack's post gives rise to a join between metaphysics and epistemology where my "persona" (as Jack is using the term) is isolated from all other "personae" - a joining of a yet to be discovered physical entity to the whole of me (as the creation of this entity). The second topic Jack's post raises is about evolution as a process. Not just evolution as a biological process of speciation and genes leveraging themselves from one generation to the next, but evolution as a process that begins with each new existence of a joined sperm and egg cell as it progresses through embryology and eventually forms primitive awareness but ends up years later as a thinking human being. Dawkins talked about evolution where the genes were the driving elements and used their created phenotypes for their purpose of making more copies of themselves. Jack appears to be positing the existence of something that would be using the genes to make the phenotype that clothes that self that is formed. I think the issue will be about whether it makes more sense to see a specific set of genetic combinations can create a body that has properties that give rise to an awareness that acquires our unique capacity of self-awareness and choice (choice is, I think, the heart of agency). Or, to posit a still unknown entity that uses sets of genes to make not just our physical being, but also our identity (identity in the normal sense as used in psychology). I think this view will have some problems that arise in establishing that the unknown particles are also, in some fashion, the identity of the person - that's a bit fuzzy right now in my mind.
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