Welcome to Today's Presentation by Raymond Steding
The Brain and Identity: Breaking Down Barriers of Separateness by Teaching Children a New Perspective
I set out to find a method to mitigate social divisiveness and to locate research that supports a pedagogy based on a neurological perspective of who and what we are. In support of such a perspective, I found much reference material, and I found technological reasons for teaching kids neurology.
Thesis
According to Jacques Lacan, people first become aware of themselves as an object during the mirror phase from the age of 6-18 months. Identity further develops with friends, associates, and affiliations. Then come the mid-life crises and a search for deeper connections with experiences that are most suited to our personalities, even if and more often than not, because the experiences represent challenges never before confronted. Along the way, we are taught to embrace our language and culture through postcolonialism studies and various literary theories. These critical and valid theories used in politics and particularly in identity politics, now being exploited by political parties through media propaganda, divide one another along partisan lines. How can we maintain a stable psychological personality in all of this and be of benefit to those around us? I believe it is time that we begin to teach grade schoolers what it means from a neurological perspective to be human. An instilled neurological attitude may be relied upon during times of psychological stress, and keep projections of our non-integrated identities from falling into perils of political propaganda and collectivism. If we learn to understand what we are, and are not, at an early age, as we grow older, we will be prepared to accept the present and embrace the future.
The question that I ask is not whether identity can be perceived differently to oneself because of physical and mental characteristics that change over time, but rather whether or not a person considers themselves to be the same person over time and what that self that identity has neurologically in common with everyone else. Despite our differences, can equanimity arise naturally out of the realization of our neurological similarities and possibilities? I think so.
To conceive of the neurological perspective that I propose integrating into the current curriculum as part of science which is already taught as early as first grade, I’ve arranged a video that is more telling than I could do with words.
Outline of Video
We come from the stars
But, What Are We?
Are We Our Bodies?
Are We Our Senses?
Can Our Identities Be Recorded?
Will Our Identities Traverse the Internet?
Our bodies are not our identities but our identities may be and more often than not are what we identify with.
Our senses are not our identities because we can add new senses and some are born without some of the senses.
If our feelings, our thoughts (even those we are not conscious of yet), and our desires can be recorded, then our identities may be recorded and simulations of our identities may be reproduced in animated forms.
Identity seems to be what our connectome produces.
Conclusion
The brain is a nonlinear dynamical system that changes somewhat chaotically dependent on the input. Our concept of identity to ourselves and others is malleable. Even though people look different and act differently, others may not be who or what we think of them at the time we are making our judgments. And, they may be different (due to the brain's emergent property) now and in the future both from our perspective and from theirs. It is time to teach grade schoolers our neurological similarities because all of us are the results of our brain's activity.
A related Video that I didn't have time to include in the above presentation video. It contains the idea of what I would like children to learn so they may be prepared conceptually for the technology of their world. The video is 8 years old and a lot of what is in it has been proven.
Another video presentation by the Ray Steding
The video below has a paper that goes along with it. The paper and the video are on my blog at this address: http://raysteding.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-everything-and-nothing-of-simulacrum.html