Episode Details

Episode Notes: 

1. What do I, as a Christian, believe about Self-Identity, and are there limits?
2. Orders of Meaning (Johnson, Foundations of Soul Care, 2007).  

The Biological Order:  “...the platform for all higher psychological functioning” (Johnson, p. 336).  

• Genetic determinants (i.e., height, eye color, male/female)
• Pre-natal development
• Neuronal maturation
• Neuronal structures
• Brain-structures

The Psychosocial Order:  By psychosocial order, we are referring to the immaterial dynamic structures that originate in social interaction (Johnson, p. 337).  

• Sensations
• Perceptions 
• Stimulus-Responses
• Imaginations
• Concepts
• Schemas

Summary:

• It is these two strata that sociological and psychological research on human nature, identity, and self has exclusively focused. 
• Logical positivism dismisses anything that cannot be measured or empirically validated through the Scientific Method.  Therefore, the sciences of the self are limited to these two strata.
• The self becomes the ultimate reference point.

1. Limits to Self-Identity As I See Them (these 1st two strata are informative)
2. The Ontological Crisis—a crisis in my sense of being.  
3. If all that exists is the Biological and Psychosocial strata then there can be no claim of an actual self. Who you are and who I am are merely mental constructions formulated and organized through our neural networks as we engage in our social environments.  When I, Jeremy Lelek, was born, I did not possess a self.  I was simply a human with the potential to become a self.  There was no inner “I” to discover or an inner “I” knowable by God, rather, who I am today is a complete cognitive construction.  In other words, existence precedes essence.  If this sounds far-fetched, consider the conclusions of the experts.
4.  Dr. Daphna Oyserman, Kristen Elmore, and George Smith of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan wrote,  “Self and identity theories converge in asserting that self and identity are mental constructs, that is, something represented in memory” (p.75)...They also assert that the assumption of a stable self is “belied by the malleability, context-sensitivity, and dynamic construction of the self as a mental construct.  Identities are not fixed markers people assume them to be but are instead dynamically constructed in the moment” (p. 70).  
5. Sheldon Stryker, Indiana University, Bloomington writes, Identities are self-cognitions tied to roles and, through roles, to positions in organized social relationships.  
6. Steven Hitlin, University of Iowa writes, The self is a socially constructed product of symbolic actors interacting with social environments.
7. Bruce Hood, Professor of Developmental Psychology, the University of Bristol and former Research Fellow at Cambridge University writes, This core self, wandering down the path of development, enduring things that life throws at us is, however, the illusion.  Like every other aspect of human development, the emergence of the self is epigenetic—an interaction of the genes in the environment (p. 114). 

Summary:  If self is an illusion, then this leaves us all in a very uncertain predicament.  If, as the famed psychologist, William James has said, we have as many selves as the people with whom we interact, and if we are continually forced to reconstruct ourselves based on cultural or contextual situations, and if we are simply material beings driven by natural selection, then we exist in the reality that we are mere cogs in a machine genetically mot