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Clarifying definitions of I, soul, ego, character

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LoBagola

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I understand the concepts denoted by "I", "soul", "ego", "self" to be exactly the same. That is:

"A man’s self is his mind—the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values."

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/self.html

I think ego and soul may often be used with additional meaning. Including sense of life or character. In the fountainhead Roark describes a man of "self-sufficient ego" and you've often heard people talk about "selling your soul".

Then a person's self or I is independent of his facial expressions, body language and moral character, since his ability to perceive reality, form judgements and choose values is volitional, no matter his history. Correct?

So to say "I've changed", "I'm no longer evil" is not strictly correct. The "I" is constant. What is meant by these statements is "I've changed my character".

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If you try to strip away everything said to be possessed by the "I" you are left with a contentless floating abstraction.

 

Be careful not to think of the "I" as some constant unchanging entity independent of reality.  It IS the reality.  It is the totality, the real/natural which "has" or exhibits, physical properties, psychological properties, volition, virtue, etc. 

 

Recall the law of identity, X is X means, if X has certain properties, attributes, qualities, etc., if any of these changes (e.g. no longer evil) then X MUST have changed.  Things CAN and do change in the universe, we do not like Heracles take change to be the same as creation and destruction.  We refer to things which change as having continuity which they do apart from the change.

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Relevant:http://edge.org/conversation/normal-well-tempered-mind

 

I know it's long, but the first section is good. There's no simple response to your ideas. Basically, though, you're talking about an ego which is central to everything and is guiding everything in your mind. But it's an error to say that there is a "command center" ego that operates apart from everything else about you. How would it even function if it's separate? Sort of like answering: "How does god interact with the world if he is immaterial?"  You can talk about volitional mental processes, that's fine, but who you are is a lot more than that.

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LB,

 

Rand conceived of minds as integral with their bodies and actions. Perception of reality is by bodily senses, by informed thought, including memory, and by further physical investigation. Conceptual faculty is integral with faculty of sensory perception.

 

Chosen values are integral with valences of pleasure and pain delivered by the senses. Integrity is a character trait praised in Rand’s ethics as integration of thought with action. Character and choice of values cannot be separated from action in this ethics.

 

History matters for Randian volition because this volition is informed by learning and does not occur in a value vacuum. One’s values and normative abstractions have a history back to childhood in Rand’s view, as in developmental psychology.

 

Interests of the self are interests of an embodied self, embodied agent and patient, in this ethics. Like other philosophers, Rand sometimes uses self to refer to this whole-person, embodied self. And like other philosophers, Rand sometimes isolates the core human self that is human mind and refers to that as the self. That isolation is useful for getting to certain important distinctions, such as subject/object, inner/outer, and mind/body, and for situating the mind in the person and his or her life.

 

Rand and her circle sometimes used soul to mean “a mind and its basic values,” which was a formula by Nathaniel Branden. No supposition of separability of mind or soul from body is implied and no supposition of immortality is implied by the uses of soul in this philosophy. Purely natural mind, values, and life in this perspective, all end at death, full stop.

 

Stephen*

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