What Fiction Teaches Us About Identity | Murray Smith

*Murray Smith argues that fiction and art can deepen our understanding of selfhood by exposing us to lives and experiences far beyond our own.* Is the self an enduring identity—or an evolving story shaped by change and experience?

This dialogue beautifully bridges the gap between analytic philosophy and the experiential depth of cinema. The distinction Murray makes between 'identity as an unchanging ego' and 'coherence through change' is exactly what we need to move past the traditional, rigid notions of selfhood. Listening to this provided the clarity I was missing for my own creative work; it was the final push I needed to start exploring these layers of consciousness and identity on my channel. Thank you for this exceptional exchange—it’s refreshing to see a space where the 'self' is treated not as a fixed entity, but as a dynamic, evolving process.

We all live in a fictitious world where we put on our fictitious self everyday until we forget who we really are, art for me is the only way to capture an illusion pretend it is reality but glad it is not real

And the change is in the experience in time and place where the creativity not just from experience but all around experiences for experience all the time is changing to happen and never happen again.😊

Oh creativity meets experience but it's the intent that separates the novel.😊

Self VS SOUL SELF@AL Ghazali

I would go to the movie "the mummy return". Rachel weiss plays the daughter of a pharoeh, who is reborn five thousand years later in England. To continue a "angels vs demons" battle with her nemesis. A bit dramatic for making it popular cinema. But a good representation of the concept of the soul (self) as a immortal being, with a timeless narrative. 👍

Why worry about "self" as noumena, but study why this seems to matter, and investigate this effort

There are two selves. The Ego which has been described as a Soul identified with an elemental body. Then there is the Self, a soul which is a spark of Divine Consciousness named God, whose definition is Existence; Consciousness; Bliss. We share in the first two, in our bodily states for Bliss we have cognition and sense perception to negotiate the dual system we find ourselves in as we are not in unity. Psychedelics are, risibly, now deprogramming, this Material Age programmed from the believe that elements in one dimension only, created from nothing and randomly evolved it all to non-existent prototypes. They have a primate as more or less the prototype for the human, instead of the Universe as Da Vinci understood; man as the microcosm of the macrocosm; in religious language “made in the image of God” or Universal Consciousness in which we share. Now Consciousness is “the hard problem” for atheist materialists, as their scientists peer into the physical brain to see what in it gave rise to consciousness. What next, look in a computer to see what in it gave rise to electricity? In a word, idiocy, as the anthropic looms on the horizon. What sort of imitation of life will it be at the Tech level if it is not understood what life is?

It's all creativities.😊