[FRIAM] What makes you who you are?

[Jochen Fromm]

I was thinking about personalities and how they emerge. It is clear that we all have habits. Russell Poldrack says in his book, "Hard to Break" that the brain is a habit-building machine. If this habit-building is path dependent just like subjective experience, then habits over time make us who we are, right? Just as Aristotle used to say: we are what we repeatedly do.https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691194325/hard-to-break-J.
-------- Original message --------From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com Date: 4/28/21  18:46  (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What makes you who you are? Jochen, The idea that there is a “you” is an outsider’s view which you adopt as an “I”.  You know that your “I” is a confusion, a collage.  I have given up on “the will” altogether except as an expression of what my “you” is about to do.  Am I going to bend down and pick up my socks.  Let’s see, am I leaning that way.  Does my hand go out to brace me on the sink.  Why Gosh!  I guess I am. Nick ThompsonThompNickSon2 at gmail.comhttps://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen FrommSent: Wednesday, April 28, 2021 12:36 AMTo: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam at redfish.com>Subject: [FRIAM] What makes you who you are? I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.~ Jorge Luis BorgesI stumbled upon this Borges quote today in a social media post from Jessica Flack and started to wonder if one could say that each of us is a small creative masterpiece since building up a personality is a creative process. Our personality is created from all the people we have met, all the lessons we have been taught, all the words and ideas we have heard from others. From all these impressions we have selected bits and pieces of behavior that work for us. Just as our subjective experience is formed by the slice of the world we have experienced, our individual personality is formed by the particular actions we repeatedly do. Therefore the unique path which we choose to walk in this world is forming our personality just as much as the unique slice of the world which we perceive is molding our subjective experience. Would you agree?https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202004/what-makes-you-who-you-are-J. 
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