Seeing the wood from the trees

The flag analogy is useful here for what we meant by looking in the early days. Ghost 2013

(Not a transcript but the jist of a conversation I had last night.)

Friend: So if theres no you, then what makes each of us so different? What makes the uniqueness of each of us?

Me: Well basically, our personalities are actually shaped by our experiences. Seeing as no one has an identical experience, that would account for the variety.

Friend: So what your saying is there is no set personality from birth?

Me: Well certain things are hard wired in to us. A good book to read would by Anthony Wilson's Prometheus rising. That is a great book on the subject. He basically explains the way in which a human has a default OS as it were. For instance when we are born we have a hard wired response to given stimulus that we can not be aware of. At this point we are a blank slate.

Friend: I've not read it, you sent it me a while ago

Me: Do you ever remember the story of the giraffe that thought that a jeep was its  mother. It was at an African reserve and because it mother died during birth and the ranger discovered it. Now at this point a critical circuit is hardwired in to us, a bond is made with the mother object. Why do you think feral children grow up in the way they do?
They basically have only the hardwired survival imprints triggered. The organism bonds with a mother. This has to be a hardwired instinct. A lump of meat that comes out of a womb doesn't know shit, it can't distinguish friend or foe. It has no experience so the pattern matching faculty picks the first object and makes this the mother figure. Usually this works a treat but as we've seen this goes wrong sometimes, as in this case!
Anyway I'm basically saying certain things are conditioned in to us and as further conditioning takes place this gets to be very complex.

Friend: So what your saying is the human experiment they have never managed to do, where you clone two people and if you put them in to seperate environments, see if they will turn out differently or not. From what your saying, you think they would be different?

Me: Certainly they would be different but they would have certain similarities. Its not like you actually choose to be good at drawing, this stuff is already in you I guess. I would be very interested to see how this experiment turned out. I would say it would be a mixture of genetic and enviromental factors but I would say they would turn out differently because it is in the early stages of life where you are conditioned to take on some certain personality traits, obviously if your family were religious nuts or alchoholics, you would get different results. Then after that the people at your school, if you get bullied by people, or you become a bully, there are so many different factors. From my experience conditioning has a big influence  but to say this caused me to have this personality, is probably not the full story, so I would have to conceed its likely a mixture of genetic and conditioning factors. There doesn't need to be a "you" for this to occur though, it just happens anyway.

Friend: This does sound crazy but its very deep shit!

Me: Basically all you have to do is look and you can prove it, for instance; take a look at that flag and tell me what you see.

Friend: I see the national flag, it stands for the nationalism of the country, the people....

Me: Hah, there you go, you weren't looking at the flag, you were telling me what it means. This is what I see... a metal pole and some material flapping in the wind

Friend: Ohh I understand you now, I've seen something like this before

Me: Now what you have to is apply it to the self, basically the illusion of self is constructed of thoughts, imagination, memories and projections. These are real and exist in reality however, the construction of "you" itself, is actually an illusion. If you tell me about what self means e.g I'm a journalist etc... your actually not looking at reality, you are being distracted by the meaning of it.

Friend: Ok

Me: I can tell you are open to this, I could use your help here, your writing style is very effective and as you have done sub editing before, your spelling and punctuation is loads better than mine. We are looking for people who can communicate effectively to kill this lie.

Friend: Right I'll take a look at what you say, I can help you with the writing aspect of it.

Me: Ok cool but you have to cultivate some honesty to do the looking. Thats all you really need; courage to see it through to the end and the honesty to look at reality non judgementally.

Friend: Ok do you want another beer?

Me: Errrr.... go on then