:halo:

Actually silly of me to critique Banno's creation myth by taking it literally. Maybe Shoutbox 2 can become a kind of TPF Bible?

But we Elder were cast out, wandering the webs until Jamal made this place for us. — Banno

I could have told you where this gaff was straight off, mate, seeing as it was set up before old PF finally collapsed. But you probably like wandering around webs anyway.

It's definitely a difficult and potentially contentious question, but part of my point here is not that there were ever any good old days but that we should at least concern ourselves with the question of whether our quality of being (including material, mental, developmental factors etc.) is being promoted to a greater or lesser degree by our social conditions and what direction we're going in with regard to that. Social evolution under my conception is analagous to human evolution. There is no guarantee of progress even in the most advanced societies. We humans may get stupider over time and our societies may get stupider too. At least we can potentially do something about social stupidities. But only if we become aware of them. Refusing to countenance even the possibility of measuring social progress in any scientific manner is baffling to me.

Maybe we should copy all posts from Shoutbox 1 to Shoutbox 2 and vice versa in case someone misses something. :chin: :snicker:

So now maybe you can actually answer the question, which I'll put as simply as possible:

Do you think societal health is increasing or not? Why or why not?

(Again, there is absolutely no sense in which answering a simple question like this implies a disrespectful belief that everyone is blindly indoctrinated by consumerist thinking/absolutely controlled by social engineering or whatever other extemist view you'd like to accuse your imaginary political opponent of. )

What say ye @Shawn?

So, if this is Shoutbox 2, should we just put all the pig stuff here?

Before we go further, I want to clear up a few points first as you seem to have gone off on an argument against your own projections or a generalised stereotype of a critical theorist rather than dealing with my central thesis in any kind of nuanced or charitable manner.

1) Human flourishing is not a myth but that does not mean it's easy to measure either. Call it societal health as determined through the well-being of its members if you want and "objective" metrics in determining societal health can include the results of qualitative studies that involve e.g. open-ended individual interviews. Trying to establish a basis for understanding whether our social circumstances are developing in a positive or negative direction through their effects on us doesn't have to equate to the exclusive use of top-down positivistic statistical methods or whatever you have in mind. Unless you can quote me where I've said anything incompatible with the above, you'll have to accept you're attacking a strawman there.

2) Social engineering is not a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science). Again, you can call it something else if you want. The nomenclature is not the issue here. And the phrase "social engineering technologies" simply refers to technologies that can be used for social engineering or for mass social influence. Those are not a myth either. And it's rather ridiculous to suggest that a belief in the existence of e.g. Facebook as a social engineering technology equates to a belief that you can apply some magical technological trick to convince a Trump supporter to become a CRT leftist. My point would be more like social media presents us with the opportunity to try on and off a potentially conflicting array of identities rather than encouraging creativity and self-development thus potentially confusing us and weakening our ability for critical thought. Again, you seem to have a strange extremist strawman in your head that you are using my thread to bash. I'd rather you stick to my arguments, understand my thesis, and deal with that.

My thesis centres around concepts of the self and identity and the latter's apparent proliferation and commodification. There is certainly a Frankfurt School influence but that's not all there is. If you only want to attack critical theory or Marcuse or leftists in general or whoever, you are not fully engaging with my arguments but, as I said, largely bashing strawmen.

It would be just as easy to go on YouTube and find a video of someone happy with their surgery or happy or unhappy with just about anything else. It's a childish and propagandistic way to present an argument. I agree, stop doing it. If you want to present evidence, stick to academic sources.

Well, I edited it to spoil your reply, so I did something worthwhile today...

You don't actually have to shout to yourself what's written in the Shoutbox.

Any other issues, let us know. :up:

Dr Fau..ci <>Dr Fau..stus. I suppose you think there's nothing to see there...

Can you explain to me how any legislation is ever going to get passed seeing as anything the HFC don't want to veto will never get through the Democratic senate?

As in what is even the point of being speaker if you guarantee your own legislative impotence?

George Allan... his essay arguing against the existence of a separate self from what the environment, society, or culture has created — Caldwell

What do you think? — Caldwell

Thanks for the reference! I agree in that it is only from an analysis of the social that a coherent concept of self can arise. I don’t see how we get at any kind of purely metaphysical self. To me the self (socially named as a "person") is a social atom, the most discrete functioning social unit. As long as you are a functioning social unit (e.g. physically discrete and linguistically located) and you can make a stable and clear judgement on who you are in contradistinction to others, you qualify as a self under my conception. So, a self is a set of identities that may work well together or may not, but that can at least coherently locate itself in its social structure (i.e. among other selves).

To further clarify, we can make an analogy between a self and a word, which locates itself within language due to having meaning in that language and as such is a discrete functioning unit within it. Selves, similarly, are discrete physical units that have social meaning and recognize themselves as selves through the lens of the social. Being discrete physically (in a loose sense, e.g. conjoined twins are not fully discrete physically but can qualify as selves) is then a necessary but not sufficient condition of selfhood. We do not qualify as selves when we are born nor when we’re insane. In the former case, we have yet to be integrated (through language) into the world of selves and in the latter we have disintegrated the self – we no longer are a functioning social unit and have no stable or clear judgement on who we are (that does not preclude having an identity just that the identity cannot be stable because it is not reconciled socially – the woman who believes she is Joan of Arc has an identity but can never function as that self (in our society) because (our) society rejects her self-judgement).

Note in the previous example, there is no “metaphysical” basis for deciding whether the woman who believes she is Joan of Arc is a self. The deciding factor is her capacity for functioning as a social unit with a socially reconciled clear and stable self-judgement. In a society whose culture considered it possible for historical figures to reincarnate, for example, our insane woman might no longer be insane, she could be a self, she could be Joan of Arc.

There is some truth in this, for sure.

I’m not sure how to respond to this. On the one hand I want to defend my thesis (I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to do that :smile: ). On the other hand it feels odd to try to convince those whose experience of society is positive, and who can put a plausible positive theoretical spin on how it functions, that it’s actually destructive in fundamental ways. My instinct is more to shake your hand and say, “Well done!” Whether or not society is basically shit, you’re managing to orient yourself in a constructive way towards it and part of that constructive orientation is focusing on the opportunities it presents rather than its limitations. I want to be the guy who spreads joy not misery. I run a chocolate factory ffs. But I must defend my thesis...

Another problem with defending my thesis is it’s hard to falsify. I can easily work your objections into my position by pointing out that reactions such as yours are exactly what one would expect if the process of ideological identity formation, which obscures itself in favour of social reproduction at the expense of a deeper experience of self, worked. The vast majority of people are supposed to experience some level of happiness with the way things are and not believe in the practical reality or even necessity of alternatives. Otherwise, the system wouldn’t be able to efficiently reproduce itself. And so I just highlight the point I made in the OP about the social immune system, et voilà your objections are neutralised.

Convenient, but not very convincing. So, how do we get around that to something more objective that might form the foundation of a more fruitful discussion? E.g. might present opportunities for falsifying the idea that the quality of human experience tends to be eroded by the advancement of consumerist thinking and the increased prevalence of social engineering technologies, particularly in relation to the commodification of identities. One way to start might be if you addressed my former questions. I am curious to know if you think, regardless of your personal experience or theoretical convictions, that modern societies are progressing in a manner conducive to increased human flourishing and what objective metrics you consider relevant in determining that. My questions present some possibilities but feel free to present your own.

It seems to me that the fantasy of a child is engendered by society nowadays with RPG games and all those first person games. I think the role of fantasy manifests in the enduring popularity of traditions like Halloween despite the pagan tradition that it is.

I also think that the promise of being rewarded for good deeds in the after life is a source of fantasy for many people.

Just some random thoughts. — Shawn

Let me try to relate this (clumsily) to my thesis via some quick thoughts concerning art vs entertainment.

So, it’s easy to see how the structure of modern society alienates us from art. Art to have value must negate, must probe, attack, bring hidden conflicts into the light, it should not be entirely comfortable because its function cannot simply be to reflect the status quo in a way that maintains it. And if it requires of us some cognitive effort to meet its demands all the better: it's often through this deliberate focusing of energy that its transmission is facilitated. This does not mean that art cannot be entertaining but that that is not its function. Its function is to edify and to open us up, what pleasure or discomfort accompanies that process is not an end in itself but incidental to a more important end.

Pure entertainment, including perhaps that of identity fantasies such as those you mentioned, tends to have the opposite function, not of uncovering, but of covering up, not of challenging, but of reassuring. Not of placing a demand on us, but of removing all demands. Its pleasure is its success and a lack of pleasure is its failure. It is entirely well suited to GMBA’s hypothetical worker because it facilitates the processing of stresses that would make their job unbearable if left unchecked. So, its function is simply that nothing changes. It affirms not negates as one would expect an ideological agent of the current system to do.

So, entertainment allows for fantastical identities to be quickly processed and to obscure through simple opposition our identification with our drudgery. But the drudgery and the fantastical identity, or the result of its processing, are just two sides of the same social coin. The fantastical identity presenting as such negates its own reality and affirms the reality of its opposite but does so in such a way as to obscure the process of its own self-destruction. What is presented obviously as fantasy and narrativized as such is narrativized under a more dominant identity that dictates we can never be what we want to be, and as that process is experienced as pleasurable, or at least comparatively so, for this is how our libidinal energies are organized through social submission, it is constantly reinforced.

Another way of putting this is that art should open a space in us for novel identities that are confrontational but not fantastical in a sense that ultimately separates their realization from us. Pure entertainment maintains the separation by feeding us identity narratives that, by their nature, are subservient to a narrative of social submission, and are therefore inherently non-confrontational and unstable but self-reinforcing in so far as their processing is experienced as pleasurable or a distraction from the unpleasant realities of our social domination.

Can relate to that. I've never owned a TV and don't do social media either.

No, I don't. How about you?

@Wayfarer

Speaking of Marcuse, from "One Dimensional Man", which I'm currently reading, a salient quote I just came across:

"If mass communications blend together harmoniously and even unnoticeably, art, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator - the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value not truth value counts. On it centres the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it."

It's an interesting line. Can you elaborate on what you mean a bit? It's might gel with some of my own ideas.

My subterfuge has failed. I thought I might drag you in but I fully understand you have more on your plate and the clarification is appreciated.

No, I've been thinking along these lines since my twenties, far before I had that position. And I'm presenting a critique which I hope amounts to a little more than "hating on society". I don't want to argue with you further along these lines though, especially because the argument is not personal to me. It's not an original pet theory or anything and I fully expect it not to resonate with everyone.

Somehow, the thought that immediately sprang to mind was Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan. We are transformed into actors playing roles in the spectacle of modern existence portrayed in the various media and hypermedia and assign ourselves values in accordance with the roles we adopt or are accorded by culture. Also that pecular pomo text I've encountered on the Internet, 'the society of the spectacle' by Debord. Don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here. — Wayfarer

Postmodernists tend to lose themselves in abstraction to the extent they end up writing a kind of convoluted fiction that's very difficult to apply to the realities of life. Baudrillard is on the extreme end of the spectrum here. There's something in what he says and he writes very seductively but in another sense, you'd have to be jacked up on acid to take him seriously. McLuhan and Debord are better. But as I've mentioned, I feel most in tune with Frankfurt school thinkers, e.g. Marcuse, who are fairly down to earth.

This is an interesting concept you raised, Baden. You look at the effect in a negative, pessimistic light. I just happened now to look at it from a positive, optimistic light. — god must be atheist

Yes, as I mentioned before, there’s always the danger of projecting our own psychologies onto the subject of analysis. I wouldn’t blame anyone for ignoring this on the basis that they feel perfectly happy and balanced with the way things are. And I am not condemning all forms of consumption.

Why? Because most of us wear the same one hat at the work place; typically and historically for 9-10 hours a day. We get stressed out and we just want to go home and plutt ourselves in front of the TV until dinner is ready, then we crawl to bed to die until resurrection of us the next morning, to go to work. — god must be atheist

I think you’re making my point for me again here, to be honest.

I think the separation of the self from the multitudinality of the identities we need to fill in our changing roles in our lives is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. — god must be atheist

Maybe. Although I would like to think there are better options than spending 9 or 10 hours getting stressed out in an identity that’s forced on us for practical reasons, just so we can consume mass media to de-stress enough to do it all again. Maybe you’re the pessimist and I’m the optimist here. :smile:

This is now a serious response, Baden: — god must be atheist

Uh, oh...

The fragmentation of the self is not haphazard. It is directed by the person's needs, which is in turn shaped by his biology, psyche, and socio-economic status, as well as his level of intellect, highest eduation level achieved, marital status, and not in the least the colour of his skin. Other factors play into effect, as well: his height, his looks, his Myers-Briggs learning inventory.

The fragmentation is therefore not random, and not haphazard.

The fragmented society's individuals clump together by their preferences, needs, and fulfilment levels. — god must be atheist

OK, although part of what identities do is create needs and shape psyches.

Social cohesion, mutual support, even if not said but only implied by approval of similarity by lifestyle, reduces the impact of the inner conflict. — god must be atheist

Treating symptoms or curing the disease?

There is a hard-and-fast proof to the notion that people's inner conflicts are not significant: hardly anybody commits suicide. — god must be atheist

I don’t accept this. Having significant inner conflicts doesn’t necessarily equate to being suicidal not to mention successfully suicidal.

Most people are happy, sort of, while they imagine that they could be happier if some of their needs were better satisfied. This, of course, is a fallacy, and it is perpetuated by the Hollywood-style tabloid journalism.

In all, you may be right, it is hard to tell from here. But even if you are right, it is not a problem of significant proportions, either for society, or for the individual. In other words, people are complacent enough to stay with the status quo. When the status quo is really not good, they rebel. So since there have been no rebellions in a long time in Western consumer societies, this is another indication that the situation is not as dire as you depict. — god must be atheist

But part of my point is that the potential for rebellion is quashed through the creation of people who consider themselves happy enough in a benign way not to rebel but are still too paralysed or weakened by inner conflicts to develop their potentials. It takes imagination, strength, self-confidence, etc to pit yourself against a system that will label you a failure if you don’t play the game, regardless of what the game ultimately does to you. And it’s a process that by its nature occurs over a period of time and doesn’t advertise its downsides.

The fragmentation is apparently adequately handled by the selves. While the society the selves live in promotes inner fragmentation, according to you, still, the same society provides outlets to alleviate the potential suffering of the self: by the clumping of like selves together, and by being diverse and vibrant and constantly changing enough to divert the attention of the self from his inner conflicts (if the inner conflicts due to fragmentation of the self indeed exist at all, of which I am not convinced) so they don't get consumed by thoughts of their inner conflicts generated by a consumer society they are a part of. Because of the distractions. (Mentioned this last bit for the benefit of those who forgot how the sentence started by the time we ended up here.) — god must be atheist

In a way you’re making my point for me here.

Maybe. But I assure you: it's still more fun than praying on the call of the muezzin seven times a day and prostrating on a prayer mat and submitting your self, mind, and soul to the Islam.

And it's also more fun than not seeing woman for decades, and going every day out into snow desert at forty below, and chopping wood ten hours each day, only to crawl back into your bungalow called "Shtalag 9" and subsist on 800 calories each day as well-earned reward for your hard work, while some other people keep beating you severely for any small infraction and calling your mother names. — god must be atheist

The first one sounds a bit more promising than the second one.

This what you described can happen in any society. But Baden is talking about a consumer society. So unless he buys the latest ski equipment every season, spends half his money on Walmart shit, and consumes his children in Aspic sauce, he is not actually a good example of what Baden was saying. — god must be atheist

I don't, to be fair. I did spend a couple of years primarily as a financial speculator though and that was a mask that I found harder to remove and less compatible with identities I value far more than I would have liked.

The important conditional here is "can negate". Is there a critical number of proliferations that must trigger this phenomenon? The statement is overly vague.

Certainly an individual living multiple roles is not necessarily doomed to internal conflicts. Cannot a famous skier be also an effective physicist, while also being an attentive father and husband?

Some people can be successful in multiple capacities, while some can barely handle one. Some, none. — jgill

I don’t think it’s so much a matter of a particular number but how identities organize and structure themselves in the self. And there are two aspects to this. One of these aspects is how comfortably the identity sits within the self and another is how identities interrelate. Ideally, our identities sit comfortably within the self and with each other and do not present us with irresolvable mental or behavioural conundrums or structure our energies in self-defeating ways.

So, my argument is not so much that an individual must be doomed to internal conflict if they live multiple roles but that the commodification of identity, the reduction of identity ideologically to a form of fashion, as if we all happily can be anyone simply on the basis of certain physical and mental skills, capabilities and attributes is a dangerously misleadingly orientation that serves and helps reproduce an increasingly consumerist environment at the expense of sustainable and fulfilling self-development.

Of course, there are certain presumptions here. I view societies as analagous to organisms in their tendency to reproduce and I presume the vast majority of individuals from a social point of view to be an expendable means of such reproduction, purveyors of ideologies, primarily. Here, ideologies are social genes and societies are more or less stable groups of ideologies. We are stuck in bodies with drives subjected to constant ideological barrage and required to organize this input in terms of identity and self. There is no reason for society to give us the tools to do that, any more than there is reason for the DNA of an organism to program it to promote the life of cells that have become incidental to its survival and reproduction.

Anyhow, all of the above can and should be questioned. My position is certainly pessimistic in terms of the direction social life is currently flowing while being reasonably optimistic that if we as individuals can recognize the difficulties of our context we can avoid a great degree of unnecessary confusion and stress.

I am not kidding you — god must be atheist

Yes you are, although what followed was so frighteningly realistic, I almost doubt myself.

Cars are nice. Do you like cars? Have you ever considered driving one off a cliff?

This makes sense to me as how I am caught up in process and processes where the 'identify' I experience appears. I have no idea how to compare that with experiences of identity that seem to come forward on their own account.

I don't present that as an argument against some kind of completely 'objective' narrative but do feel something has been left out. — Paine

That's interesting. Can you tell me a bit more? Is this to do with identities of work or etc?

Sorry, that was a bit rude. I've been feeding various posts in to see what results, including my own, and found it uncanny. — Banno

Oh, not a bother. It took a fairly good shot at it, almost uncomfortably so, especially considering how dense my text was in places. I suppose I should be grateful in that if an AI can get a fairly decent grasp of what I was saying, a human should be able to get there too. :up:

I'm not sure I recognize the problem. Do you think this experience of having several or multiple identities can also be experienced as coherent and perhaps more like a set of tools for a particular job? Or modalities of being which have a particular grammar relevant to a particular domain? And maybe some of us do experience a fracture or blunting of sorts, with an inability to reconcile these 'selves' and the societal expectations which shape them. Does that make sense? — Tom Storm

There's always a danger of projecting our own psychology into our theories, (although in this case the general thrust is not particularly original to me) So, I'm aware of the need to provide more clarity on why I think there is a general problem to those who may not experience or view the situation similarly. I haven't always viewed things this way either. But having experimented with several varying identities myself both for practical and personal reasons, I've developed this view over time and I think the issue is at least worth taking seriously.

Anyhow, what you've said makes perfect sense. The prevailing ideology of identity (as I see it) presents identities as both tools (as you've very well described) and playthings, opportunities to achieve specific goals and to have specific experiences. The phrasing "modalities of being" with "particular grammars" fitting "particular domains" is very apt, only that we remember our modalities of being are psychological states with biological consequences and our grammars are sets of actions that may be reinforcing in a way that presents barriers to change that don't necessarily apply when we're dealing in pure abstracts.

So, the way I view identities is that they take a certain libidinal hold, they "want" to become selves, in that they are naturally reinforcing in so far as they reward us with positive feelings as we employ them. As I said earlier, an identity to me is a narrative. But it's a type of narrative that organizes the thoughts and desires of the self into a specific semi-stable structure that acts as a conduit for libidinal energy and allows for the expression or repression of different drives such that if it has taken hold as an identity and is not simply a whim or a bad attempt at acting, it can't simply be turned on and off at will. It creates a system of thought that tries to keep it in place. The mask becomes us even if we view it as a mere mask. And all the worse for us if we do and it isn't.

For example, we might have a job, which entails an identity we don't like. And we might view taking on this identity simply as a practicality, again a tool to provide us with the means to navigate a society that always wants something from us. We might think we take this identity off at the end of the day and become "ourselves" again. I think this is an illusion. And a necessary one. Or at least one that serves to perpetuate the type of inner conflict that keeps us inert. We try to layer over an undesired identity with a desired one, but the desired identity must be repressed on a continual basis and our energies are not consistently directed outward but are variously redirected and repressed.

This is just one example and obviously doesn’t apply to everyone. But it helps make the point that contrary to the idea that identities are tools that can be picked up and disregarded for practical purposes (as their malleability and lack of distinct boundaries compared to “selves” might suggest), they are psychologically sticky and tend to interfere with each other’s expression and compete for libidinal energy in a potentially destructive and paralysing way such that yes, they may not be reconciled as you said, or worse, we blind ourselves to what it means to have a reconciled self/identity structure that consistently and productively channels our energies outward because we know nothing other than the circular process of anaesthetising undesired identities with the temporary salve of desired ones.

On the contrary, the proliferation of techniques of the self can be argued to produce a creative, adaptively flexible intricate structure of personal identity that is less vulnerable to becoming paralyzed by internal conflict than more traditional forms of identity. — Joshs

Possibly. But do you think this is what is happening in practice? Do you think people are becoming deeper, more thoughtful and more in touch with themselves? Do you think modern societies are progressing away from frivolousness, stupidity, and superficiality towards character, intelligence and creativity? Do you think there is less and less evidence of mental conflict evidenced through reduced levels of mental illness, unhappiness, anxiety and drug use? Or are you positing this is as a positive potential in current society that has yet to be realised?

I think Habermas had the right idea, and was able to overcome the pessimism of other Frankfurt school thinkers, via his communicative rationality approach — Joshs

Again, possibly. But can you elaborate on how you think this is playing out in practice?

The OP is kind of formally phrased because that's the way I like to write about this kind of stuff, but the purpose is as much to get general ideas/feedback on an issue that I think is important and bothers me personally as it is to stimulate a conversation on theory.

(I don't remember most of the theoretical background. I'd have to look it up and pretend I did. :smile: But as mentioned there's Frankfurt School there for sure.)

That is one of the things I am definitely saying, yes. I think @unenlightened said something similar in a recent thread that may partly be responsible for me thinking about this.

Is lack of purpose something you were trying to address? — Shawn

The proliferation of identities within a self equates to a proliferation of often conflicting purposes that can negate each other. So, yes, effectively.

I haven't read Fromm in years so I'm not sure but it's a Frankfurt-School type point, so quite possibly. I'll look into the logotherapy connection. Thanks.

Kind of. It's compatible with what I'm saying but it doesn't quite capture my thesis and I gave a better tl:dr in the second sentence. It would have been nice if you'd read that far. :lol:

I mean feel free to skip a few paragraphs but man...

One way of approaching the concept of person is to follow a thread from personality to self to person, interweaving notions of narrative (language), society, and physical individuality.

Personality:

A set of dispositions, behaviours, and impressions to which a coherent and distinguishable narrative can be attached (this is not to suggest a requirement of integrity or consistency as the notion of a scattered or incoherent personality is itself a coherent narrative, i.e. a stable and clear judgement).

Personality is not exclusively human. It can be applied to other animate beings and even inanimate objects. It presumes the aforementioned narrative, the type we use when assessing/predicting the state of others onto which we can project characteristics we note in ourselves during the process of self-awareness (in order to understand others in some relation to ourselves and therefore formulate ways to react to or control them) but it doesn’t presume self-awareness.

We can correctly talk of cats and dogs and even places or things as having personalities because we can derive from them a consistency of disposition, behaviour, and impression that equates to the same basic standard of narrative we apply to persons. A human, animal, thing or place may equally (though in different ways) be referred to as, e.g. creepy, unpredictable, and untrustworthy or bright, friendly and happy.

Self:

A self is a personality + conceptual self-awareness. That is, a narrative that continuously refreshes itself through self-observation, a self-sustaining, self-referential narrative, a story that writes itself on the basis of itself. Being a narrative, it is fundamentally linguistic (conceptual) and being linguistic it is fundamentally social. And in order to be the particular narrative we refer to as a “self”, it requires a limit so that it may relate to that which allows its expression. Its social aspect is dependent then on that limit, which is the body. So a self is a self-creating abstraction fuelled by the interaction of the linguistic layered over the social and sustained by the concrete differentiation of bodies. And analagous to words' status as meaningful abstractions being sustained by their differentiation from each other in linguistic systems, we selves are meaningful self-referential abstractions sustained by our concrete differentiation in bodies in social systems. The only selves we know of are located in human bodies.

Person:

A person is a socially named self (self-aware set of behaviours, dispositions, and impressions located in a body). Or how society refers to selves. Recognized formally/legally under the concept of personhood and informally as one of the concept “people”. Another way to put it is "person" is how society conceptualizes its social atoms of meaning, just as words are conceptualized as linguistic atoms of meaning.