Hi Dan,
Interesting question you posed to this list, if we knew the answer of what makes you you ti would render collaborative filtering and profiling useless...hehe just joking!
You start with the hypothesis that we are all unique, so far we have some proof of genetic fingerprinting supporting this hypothesis.
The mechanism the Brain uses for storage and recollection is same for most humans.
But the later proof does not indicate socially visible uniqueness in memory management or processing.
Nonetheless human behavior analysis tells us that statistically humans under a specific environment share behavioral properties; hence by inputing known X we are expecting a known Y as to be a majority result.
Example 1
specific environment: British Society
Known Input X : Royal Wedding
Known Output Y: Mass gatherings and celebrations 70% anti-Royalist reaction 30%
Example 2
specific environment: Pub
Known input X : Fire
Known Output Y: majority Behavior Flight 93% people wanting to help 7%
If it where true that indeed we all were unique, this would mean that we all act as "n-outliers" in n-Dimensions and human behavior statistics would be impossible(or society as a whole), not being able to classify or predict any form of societal data.
Perhaps we could measure some form of uniqueness when an unknown unknown parameter is introduced, but thats far fetched :)
Perhaps there is flaw in my chain of thought here though since human perception is indeed unique and we rarely come across collective perception
(collective intelligence is another story) concepts at least form a psycoanalysis point of view. Everyone perceives colours, shapes sounds and smells differently and is conditioned to them in different ways. Example: it is known that Teddy bears cause affection to women in the western wold but if Teddy bears where a sanitary item or an evil pagan symbol then it would perhaps cause repulsion or fear.
Then again you can still cluster the individuals with similar perceptual properties together for deeper investigation in the sub-clusters, but it's impossible of extremely hard to reach absolute uniqueness.
"Birds of the same feather flock together" or the ancient greek saying "show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are" or even the materialist dialectic interpretation of what man is "A person is the sum of his social interactions " are not far off from the truth.
Perhaps uniqueness is just another dogma we take for granted, perhaps handed down from the old days of religion, where your uniqueness identifier was you "soul fingerprint" for God's judgement :-)
As hard as it is for my ego I find it hard to accept uniqueness as a fact, but there is some optimism in that meaning that the fundamental part of you that is you is most likely your output to your environment;hence your actions.
Friendly Regards from sunny Athens
P.S.
I am not trying to offend anyone beliefs, these are just views written on the fly and off the top of my head.
On 3 May 2011, at 01:15, Daniel wrote:
> After a discussion with some friends down the pub. I wondered what others felt about the question;
>
> what makes you, you.
>
> We are all unique, what is the fundamental part of you that is you. Obviously it's your brain that defines you but is that just the memories you store in it or something else?
>
> I suggest the mechanism by which memories are stored is just as important as the memories themselves. Also your emotional state must play a part.
>
> Love to know what others think.
>
> Dan.
>
>
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