We’ve all read news headlines that go like “US says it will restore ties” or “China says it seeks peace” - and I’ve always wondered who exactly are they referring to here? Surely not all of the 300 million Americans or the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens. Their respective presidents, then? In some cases, it may be other parliamentary representatives or state ministries, though all part of the same government. But governments and leaders change, yet the term US somehow remains unchanged? Perhaps the constitutional bodies remain — except when even those are overturned! In the period when the Taliban was overtaking Afghanistan in 2021, what would “Afghanistan” even refer to?
The Ship of Theseus. Source
This framing begins to sound like the Ship of Theseus paradox - if you begin with a certain ship and replace all its parts - hull, deck, mast - one by one, does it still remain the Ship of Theseus? If not, at what point does its identity change?
I was faced with this problem when I started as a PhD student at the Center of Knowledge Graphs at University of Southern California. We were conducting research on large knowledge graphs (think Wikipedia) and I was blown away by the sheer amount of human knowledge stored in these large sets of interconnected pages. More so, I was surprised at people’s ability to agree on what should and should not be a page on Wikipedia! Pre-Taliban and Post-Taliban Afghanistan are not different pages, instead they are part of the same Wikipedia article, which goes so far as to suggest that “Afghanistan” is over 7000 years old!
The Ames Chair optical illusion. Source
Ames Chair viewed from above. Source
Attributing sameness to things is in fact an amazing quality of humans. Our brains are wired to look for whole objects (which we previously recognize from memory) even when there aren’t any. The Ames Chair aptly points this out, where a set of disconnected strings or tapes can be made to appear as a chair when viewed from a specific position and angle. Notice that seeing it from another angle still does not stop your eyes from falling prey to this optical illusion!
A related finding in behavioral psychology is that humans expect object permanence. Babies as young as eight months have demonstrated a surprise when objects — that they believed to be permanent, such as a ball behind a wall — happen to magically disappear.
A baby is surprised to see object permanence fail. Source
Let me club together these abilities of attributing object permanence (the ball behind the wall) as well as sameness across different things (Ames chair, Afghanistan) as the Myth of Identity. I call it a myth because these properties may not always hold - as with the disappearing ball or the Ship of Theseus paradox. However mythical though, to humans believing in the existence of identity of objects has been nothing less than a superpower!
The Myth of Identity enables chunking concepts and learning more about the world. It is well known that our working memory can process only five to nine concepts at a time. Imagine if whenever we saw a ship, we had to constantly attend to all of its distinct parts — the hull, the rudder, the deck, the masts, and so on. There would be hardly any space in our working memory to think of anything else! Instead, we identify a ship as a whole, and then quickly move on to simultaneously process the sea, the crew, the pier, and lots of other concepts, potentially making important deductions and inferences.
The Myth of Identity does not restrict itself to objects. When I say “the crew of a pirate ship,” your mind may immediately paint a picture of some vulgar, shabby-clothed, black-capped men. That was not very sensitive of you. What if there was a female pirate on board? Why couldn’t one of the pirates be wearing a tuxedo with a yellow hat? The answer is that overgeneralization helps your brain save a lot of precious time and energy. Brace yourself for a controversial statement: stereotyping is efficient.
When we stereotype human beings by race, gender, or their employment on a pirate ship, we can learn a lot more about the world and use that information elsewhere. Asians love rice, which one may find out after only a handful of encounters with Asians eating rice. Imagine, instead, if you were to never realize this pattern, you may have recklessly ruined your Tinder match with an Asian by declaring that rice dishes disgust you!
Disclaimer: while stereotyping is efficient, it marginalizes minorities and makes them feel unusual and unwelcome. With the world getting healthier, richer, and safer every decade, it makes sense to incorporate slightly inefficient behaviors, such as rethinking pronouns in language, to make the world a better place for those that don’t fit our (mythical) stereotypes.
We have often heard the argument that identities pit us against one another. The realization here is that just in the way “pirates” and “ship” are mythical concepts, so are the identities such as “Asian” or “Christian.” When you identify yourself with a religion, extremists try to incite your anger against another group, implying that an attack on one part or belief of the group is the same as an attack on you. Note, however, that the same principles have long allowed humans to outperform any other specie on Earth.
Many of the recent technological innovations were born out of the Second World War (e.g., computers) and the Cold War (e.g., satellites). Rivalry not only among humans but also with other species has benefitted humanity. Early humans hunted in large groups and coordinated to light fires that will kill prey much bigger than themselves. Later, we settled in civilizations, where the weak were taken care of, rather than left to die; and babies were raised in villages with the efforts of the entire community. Roles were specialized with the Division of Labor which led to massive productivity gains in farming, hunting, child-rearing, night watching, fruit-gathering, and even tool-making.
In short, identifying with a group is an evolutionary superpower. No wonder that identity, or aham/ahankara, is awarded a high place in the ancient Yogic view of the mind - it is one of the four parts alongside intellect, memory, and intuition. But let’s not stop here. Now that we have investigated the advantages of the Myth of Identity at a societal and a personal level, let us dive deeper, to the cellular level and see another myth of identity play out.
Parts of a Cell. Source
Who am I? This question has troubled priests and scientists alike for several centuries, if not millennia. Here’s a baffling biological finding that may help get to an answer: 56-90% of all cells in your body are bacteria. But do we identify as a bacterium? No, we’re homo sapiens — a fancy latin name for a mythical categorization of organisms which are otherwise on a long continuous spectrum of evolution! What if I was also an example of a mythical identity?
An Indian guru poses the following question: are you water? Well, over 60% of your body is just water. Even though you do not yet identify with the glass of water placed in front of you, you could drink it and the part of it that stays in your body will soon become you. Perhaps our body, then, is nothing more than an imagined collection — a tribe, if you will, of individual organisms including bacteria and “non-living” material such as water and air — which work towards a common purpose.
We have already seen that the myth of identity has an immense evolutionary advantage to whoever adopts it — whether it be nationalist scientists from the Cold War or ancient hunters who killed large animals. Perhaps similarly, cells and organisms somehow evolved into believing in this mythical identity of a body. As long as they all believe in it, they can cooperate with each other to become larger and more efficient, just as human societies but on a cellular scale, which helps all of them survive and create more progenies.