A Framework for Personal Identity Location -A Wholistic View
49 Pages Posted: 10 Dec 2024
Date Written: November 24, 2024
Abstract
Fractured identities contribute to social conflict, the worst outcomes being a thermonuclear war or environmental collapse. To address the problem requires accurate identity location, but assessment devices like personality "tests" fail. Identity location occurs by reductionism (such as neurocorrelation and DNA) or wholism (qualitative methods like phenomenology). Regardless, philosophy underpins finding and characterizing one's identity. Metaphysical barriers prevent "absolute" discovery, and we are forced to bootstrap (as do logicians and mathematicians), using ontology and epistemology to support our quests. Previous articles explained the Cartesian (reductionist/quantitative) method (one being neurogeometry), so the balance is achieved here by qualitative means, exemplified by Russell W. Belk, Donald Brown, and, overall, phenomenology. However, this paper is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of this area of study in philosophy but a representation of how it may be applied to identity location. Because of its foundations in philosophy, particularly phenomenology), Authentic Systems (Voris method) has been selected as a candidate identity probe. A further reason is based on the two-thousand-year-old (and Biblical) observation that one knows a person by what they do, similar to how physicists "know" what a particle is. Such is a premise in phenomenology, as well as in scientific methods, in general. Overall, both quantitative methods are needed, as one exists because of the other, thus obeying the most fundamental law, the unity of opposites. In the same vein, reductionism provides the "what", the wholism the "why."
Keywords: Personal Identity, Phenomenology, Identity Location, Wholism, Being and dasein, Voris Method, Identity and Order, Personality, Ontology and Epistemology, Authentic Self, Authentic System, Life Themes, Russell W. Belk, Experience
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