Identity

Sum of all organic processes, i.e., organism; aggregate energies participating in an emerging unity; interactive conduit connecting an immutable past, via the dynamic determining present, into a projected, imminent, future; past manifesting as presence - experienced as appearance - choosing - via judgment calls - among probabilities in an expanding field of time/space possibilities; organization of organs in a hierarchical structure determining organic essence; a space/time - dimensional - separation, i.e., segregation, imperfect and porous, distinguishing and differentiating I from other.
Whatever linguistic form you want to give identity it remains part of causality.
Actor - referred to as willful if it is intentional, viz., is guided by impulses that are adjusted or even contradicted, to move towards an objective - as active agency, participating in existence, is the ground zero of its own actions, i.e., it is the agency that must suffer or endure, or enjoy, or benefit, from the consequences of his own acts.

This is the psychological foundation of nihilism's attempt to escape culpability, or to evenly redistribute negative consequences - sometimes begrudgingly sacrificing positive consequences to remain consistent with its own self-deceiving, self-protective, escapist ideologies.
The modern actor desires to escape responsibility by claiming innocence, or by denying his very existence (self-abnegation), or by denying his own agency (free-will) as active participant, preferring to sacrifice his agency, surrendering it to an external hypothetical agency, or by restricting his culpability to his ego, i.e., the lucid, consciously intentional part of himself, denying the unconscious impulses of the physical, his own body, or his own subconscious spontaneous reactions - self-deciet - claiming that they are not his own since they were not explicit and lucid....schizophrenia separates mind from body - genetics from memetics, reason from instinct, awareness from intuition, the organism from society.
Idealization of life.
The organism converted to pure noumenon - with arbitrary phenomenological presence; human converted to a concept, an abstraction, an idea/ideal, i.e., spiritualized in the Abrahamic sense.
Ergo, it is possible that a "spirit" may be "trapped" in the "wrong physical form", i.e., transsexualism, transhumanism; the hypothesis that the essence of an individual can be transported, transmitted - metaphorically - into another body, such as a mechanical form. An allusion to immortality.
Mind becomes an ambiguous monad that transcends the tangible, the physical, the empirical; it is mystified, via obscurantism, retained as pure idea/ideal abstraction.
Abstraction = simplification, generalization, dimensional reduction of phenomena to noumena, e.g., singularity.
It is the noumneon, as a one, that can survive phenomenal decay, i.e., mortality and the effects of interactive flux; survive it as symbol, as word - logos, in the Christian corruption of the Hellenic term.

An entity like Darth Vader would not be human.
The self is into only the mind, but every organ and how they inter-relate - creating a personae.
A brain in a vat would be a surgically amputated part of a human.
All organs participate in creating an identity - the brain only regulates their interactions and focuses their aggregate energies - will.

Identity
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Simpler life forms lack the ability to use language. Their identity is simplified to genetics and the outward expression of thee genetics as behaviours. Many species have rudimentary forms of exchanging data - the roots of human language.

Human identity is built on the temporal sequence of Past<>Present<>Future. A continuum connected by memory, i.e., interactions simplified/generalized into chemical sequences = past informing the present in an ongoing interactivity we call existence.
Plato converted it to Reason<>Will<>Pathos , corresponding to Mind<>Nervous System<>Body.

The body's 4-code genotype simplified/generalized - abstracted - into the mind's binary - 2-code - memotype gradually evolving more complex semiotics.
Mind simplifies the body's memories directing the organism's behaviour in the present via the nervous system.
The outward projection of semiotics comes from the nervous system - will - externalizing the mind's abstractions.

Racial and tribal identity is a triadastic synthesis.
Body = physical appearance - phenotype exposing genotype.
Mind =  training, education, abstractions relation body to existence.
Nervous System = behaviour, attitude, actions, choices etc., the outwards expression of the mind's knowledge/understanding of its own body.

It is possible for a dissonance to occur when an alien meme dominates the mind in antithesis to the body = nihilism. A state of identity confusion - madness.
So it is also possible for a genotype to be dominated by an alien memotype intervening to adjust behaviour, attitude, choosing etc.

The sequence of Body (foundation, past), connected to Mind (extension, future) by the Nervous System (dynamic presence) is crucial in determining identity.
For instance in Abrahamism Body<>Nervous system<>Mind becomes Mind (god)<>Nervous System (holy ghost, god's will)<>Body (son) - narratives describe the sacrifice of the "son" to the god-fahter, describing the sacrifice of "body" to the mind, or to the mind's dogma/ideology (idea/ideal) etc.
In nihilistic dogmas/ideologies, the body is sometimes denied completely - or relegated to a status of superficial insignificance or a shell to be left behind, abandoned, to attain freedom, salvation.
Messianism always implies liberation from the tangible, the physical, i.e., the determined, immutable, past, manifesting the body.
In the crucifix narrative the "son" - body - is punished, crucified, sacrificed, to be reborn as purified mind, i.e., "spirit" void of substantiality, pure noumenon, idea/ideal, with only semiotics to make it present - Christian "logos".
Presence with no past, and only a future forever imminent but never present - eternity; fatalism, unending source of hope...
We see this clearly in the current identity crisis of transsexuality.

We can differentiate the different ways of self-identification.
A continuum connecting Body/Mind via Nervous System, or Past/Future via the dynamic Present, or Real/Ideal via Semiotics.

Racial identity is built no the triad.
Nihilistic dogmas/ideologies begin with logos or the idea/ideal represented by words/symbols, and then either completely negate the physical or they selectively incorporate it into their already established Ideology/Dogma.

Language is magical, mystical, because it makes present what is incomprehensible, unreal, supernatural, unprecedented - the divine is made real via the mediating proxy of mind, projecting abstractions of the theoretical idea/ideal.
The divine necessitates language a a organism ab le to use semiotics.

Objectively, of in the Indo-Euroepan traditions, body is the foundation of identity, as the past made present, interpreted as appearance.
Next mind projects, extends this inherited identity via semiotics, into, towards the future.
The continuum is a movement form past, through the present, towards the future - held together with memories - DNA being the body's memories of past interactions - naturally selected. Memories that survive and manage to reproduce are preserved, those that do not are forgotten, i.e., Lethe.

So, tribal identity is the body extended culturally and linguistically in the present towards a yet to be determined future.
It is in this middle present where the disease of nihilism takes over and corrupts the continuum - preventing it from surviving or form reproducing.
Corrupting language is its symptom.....mystifying semiotics, and making them occult meaningless symbols with no reference to anything experienced - entirely of the mind, for the mind, by the mind - people of the book, by the book, for the book.
Logos ceases to be a connector of noumena with phenomena - the ideal with the real, and is converted to an pre-existing will, using the mind as a mediator to direct it towards a future with no supportive past.
Ideological abstractions with no precedent and no referent existing only in the mind - its only range of effect being in the mind - spirit - and through mind using body as its proxy to then attempt to extent its ideals into the real, i.e., art with no limits, no external referents, no tangible restrictions - fantasy - projecting the individuals reactions, feelings, emotions, expunging its fears and anxieties, projecting its unsubstantiated, often irrational, hopes and dreams - faith.

In short...How would we define and identify a European?

As belonging to a specific race - with a particular range of appearances.
As behaving and thinking within a specific range of actions - judging, choosing.
As having been trained/educated in specific ways of thinking and engaging the world, producing a specific range of world-views and attitudes - paideia.

Each founded on what precedes it.
The preceding dominating the proceeding.
All three in alignment - i.e., harmony, consistent.

Language representing nervous energies spontaneously emerging from the body connect and relate to a dynamic fluctuating reality where mind intervenes to control and guide/focus it.

Plants lack a brain so they cannot guide and focus their aggregate energies they can only relate with environment in the ongoing present - always moving towards an objective - intentionally, willfully- along paths-of-least resistance.
Non-living energies only flow along-paths-of-least-resistance, with no intent at all - no telos, no objective, no will.
Organisms with a central nervous system evolve willful intent that may develop the ability to project in time, so as to move towards paths-of-more-resistance as a method of gaining an advantage - a potentially costly advantage.

One can be trained - or train himself - to behave in a certain way, but if it isn't innate - part of his/her organic symmetry/proportionality, then it will be "second nature" or unreliable, always demanding a conscious willful act, or stringent self-cultivaiton, i.e., training over long periods of time.
In some ways this is more admirable than an individual who innately behaves in a specific way.

For example, if an individual must be coerced or seduced or bribed to behave in a manner in accordance with his adopted dogma/ideology then it isn't natural to him. He is constantly self-censiring, self-cotrolling, and if he loses this control he returns to his innate behaviour.

I've used the terms persona, character in my own way.

Personae = personality - a product of inherited organ symmetries/proportionalities determining a attitude a manner, a spirit of being - body.
Character = caricature - a product of mental interventions upon the previous to direct behaviour to accord with external socioeconomic standards, or ideals - memetic i.e., cultural, moral.
Private self/Public self.
Impulse/Act/Intent

Here judgments/choices, language, art, acts as a exposition of the relationship between the two.

Choice is the act exposing intent/judgment, sometimes contrary to impulse.
Choice is will exposes, projecting in space/time.
It is free to the degree that it can contradict impulse and precedent.
Determined Past - Determining Present - Indeterminate Future.

Existence is in dynamic middle, i.e., fluctuating interactive = Flux.
Mind experiences it after-the-fact, as if it were another agency acting through it, despite its preferences, ideals, intentions.
This dissonance is most pronounced within minds that have adopted nihilistic ideologies/dogmas. Ergo, the individual is struggling with shame/guilt for never being able to abide by its own professed convictions. [See Christian sinfulness]
The infected mind feels ashamed for being unable to live in accordance with tis own beliefs - a perpetual state given that the beliefs are unprecedented and unrealistic.
Coping mechanism is this focus on the future, and a constant forgetting of the past - futurism. an individual abandons himself/herself to the fluctuating dynamic present, often convinced that he/she will be directed towards a desirable future - faith, fatalism - remaining innocent of the outcome one way or another.
Here a underlying belief in an Abrahamic benevolent, wise, good, one-god, is always a factor - optimism, a irrational belief that "all will turn out well" in the end.

Existence = dynamic interactivity - movement/momentum - with no beginning and end.
The Greeks described it as Ananke and then converted their description to eros, ushering in the age of their decline towards decadence.
Ananke =- necessity - need.
Need/Suffering is how life experienced existence - constant attrition, constant interactivity, constant agon.
The concept of whole, oneness is entirely noetic, relying no a projection of the abstraction outside space/time, otherwise there is no singularity only multiplicity, as experienced from inside, from within existence.

Heidegger described the human condition as "thrownness" - an awakening to movement/momentum, describing existence as dynamic. Man awakens - becomes conscious of his condition - as a movement towards and away....with no objective other than that characterizing all life, an objective to self-maintian and to propagate, due to the limitations of self-maintainace and the accumulated attrition of interactivity, over time.
Time measuring causality - change - or movement within space time possibilities/probabilities.
Will is movement/momentum given direction, i.e., intent. The power of the will determined by the aggregate energise available to an organic unity and its ability to focus them, i.e., control.
Non-living matter/energy has no intent.

The Greeks used the image of a cauldron to conceptualize existence, because the organic mind cannot conceptualize within absolutes of abstractions reduced to singularities - singularities that then necessitate nullification - ergo binaries are the foundation of organic judging/choosing - thinking.
A proverbial cauldron that was struck by the goddess Ananke, later replaced by the God Eros - who was promoted to a Primordial God.
The reverberations within the cauldron was existence - something modern cosmology agrees with.
We ought to conceptualize the same image without the boundaries a cauldron implies. There is no boundary because what is "outside existence" is non-existent. Only in the human mind can we defy space/time by obscuring and mystifying our abstractions - an abstraction is a reduction of a presence to a simplified/generalized form the mind can process - cutting away space/time dimensions to reduce it to something manageable.
This is why understanding abstractions -and the words/symbols used to represent them - literally, and not as what they are, viz., figurative representational, create paradoxes, or linguistic conundrums - dissonance.

We can redefine the same concept as Energy - ΕΝ-ΕΡΓΩ - at/in the midst of work/effort...process.
We are compelled to conceptualize it as a singularity, when in fact it is a multiplying/fragmenting multiplicity - expanding space/time. Our organic brains must reduce it to a level it can process and store in memory - reduce the multiplicity first to a four-code (body) and then to a bindary-code (mind).
Another way the Greeks conceptualized existence was through metaphors - they are known for using artistry, even prose, to philosophize.
The metaphor of "fire" is the most popular - still in use. Fire is a singularity representing a fluctuation of energies - dancing, as it consumes and is consumed - Flux, or as Schopenhauer described it "a symphony" where only order was represented.
Energies can be divided into two broad categories, in relation to man: Order/Chaos, Yin/Yang, patterned and non-patterned energies.

The concept of "will" implies intent.
Only life can have intent because only life can inform its actins - choices judgements - by iteration.
Non-living unities have no intent, no motive, no objective, no telos - their unities are congruencies defines by superior attractive forces, relative to repulsive forces - harmony.
One wills what one does not possess, or possesses and is uncertain about maintaining possession.
To will willing is self-referrentyial and intentionally circular. It is nihilism.
One does not will what one is, one only wills what one is not. To will willing simply describes life's iteration as self-maitnainance striving to grow and propagate.
We can convert these self-referential concepts into many forms: life living, to describe life; value valuing; love loving; hate hating...
Self-referentiual linguistics is the hallmark of nihilism because it cannot refer to reality so it must refer back into itself, or to another mind, or to text externalizing another mind's abstractions - a cognitive loop that pretends to be saying something profound when it is saying nothing at all; it is simply stating the first and most basic principle of life, e.g., iteration.
To will life - Will to Life - describes life's ephemeral uncertainty, requiring constant re-affirmation. If affirmation stops, life stops....so it requires constant effort because it is uncertain - Will to Power describe something similar ...a will to power that one does not possess but only partially - never completely, never absolutely, never certainly, nee eternally, i.e., through all space/time.
One only wills what he does not have, such as a certainty of possession, necessitating (Ananke) constant agon, constant re-afirmaiton, constant self-maitnenance.
Non-life wills nothing; has no intent, no objective, no beginning and no end.
Life wills because will experience existence and its constant attritive energies, necessitating constant and consistent - intentional - replenishment.

As man becomes aware of himself and the world that encompasses him he begins to understand with what is most intimate - ergo he begins to conceptualize using binaries - 1/0; he begins with his own experience with existence - need/suffering; he begins with what he's experienced - fire, water; he begins with abstractions in his own mind - ideas/ideals; he begins with the subjective - primal.

Bottom<>Up.
It is much later when this process exposes him to new sources of suffering that he reacts defensively an inverts the process - Top<>Down - inventing nihilism as a method of coping with his own growing self-awarness, or movement towards higher forms of conceptualizing, i.e., objectivity - detachment by perceiving the third-person.
Self-Deciet - immersing itself in self-referential cognitive loops, e.g., paradoxes that are resolved through occultism, obscurantism and mystification.
An intentional - willful - reversion to an animal state of perceiving - manimal.

Now it's time to get into the nature of 'will' though we did touch upon it in the earlier posts.

We've said that will is of the nervous system - the dynamic, reactive, part of the body focusing tis aggregate energies, as these have been determined in the past - because the body is past made present, integrated as appearance.
The nervous system being a part of the body develops with it - so will develops along with the body's maturation.
But it is one of many organs in the human body - organism - so its development may be warped, corrupted by disease or by an external agency, while leaving the other organs unaffected - affecting personae.
The will is the synthesis of mind/body expressed via the nervous system. this is also where language develops - brain being a part of the nervous system.
Parent will usurps their children's, either helping it develop/mature or causing it to atrophy and not reach its full genetic potential. When the body and tis nervous system/willful control is still developing ti can easily be controlled. As it matures it becomes more difficult to dominate and usurp.

language is the projection, i.e., extension, of an organisms will in space/time. Therefore a dead man can dominate the living will's via his language - words representing his knowledge/understanding.
Traditions are pools of stored knowledge/understanding, and of the author's will preserved in code.
We've already said that technologies are extensions of internal process - externalization of the esoteric via a medium, therefore the written language is a technology externalizing and projecting through space/time the author's/artist's knowledge/understanding and his will.
It is possible for a will to be usurped and dominated by an external will which may not even be present.

This is why nihilists always place the will prior or the body. They are admitting that their won will has been dominated, placed under the control of another's will, during its immature phase - the will remains atrophied unable to fully develop and completely under the control of another - via semiotics.
A tribe's culture is the sum total of its encoded knowledge/understanding projected through space/time by its authorities - its priests, or leaders or thinkers etc.

Now we can understand what zombification is - specifically memetic parasitism.
What does zombification describe in nature?
It describes an organism - host - that has been infested by another organism - parasite - and tis will has been usurped, , i.e., corrupted, warped, by an alien will, making it contradict its own body's genetic programming or its past.
So, memetic parasitism is when an alien will - dead or alive - has corrupted, warped, the collective inheritance of a people, making it turn against itself, i.e., against its past.

The three pronged source of identity, according to Indo-Euroepan traditions, in order of importance - the sequence matters.
ΑΙΜΑ (Hema) - ΠΡΑΞΙΣ (Praxis) - ΔΟΞΑ (Doxa)  - corresponding to comic linear experience of past/present/future, and to biological Body (immutable, nature determined, past made present)/Act (will: choice-judgment - mutable fluctuating dynamic, subjective, education-training-cultivating, nurturing, determining)/Mind (projected objective, goal, guiding principle, ambition: idea/ideal - yet to be realized, undetermined)

Movement/Momentum is a process from past toward future, via presence/present, which is where "existence" is experienced and free-will is applied/expressed in the form of judgment/choice.