[MD] Probability

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt to Case]
When asked my name and occupation, I will respond with absolute truth.

[Case]
The best that you can do and all that the court expects you to do is answer to
the best of your ability.

[Arlo]
Your "name", as requested by the court, is your socially sanctioned "legal
name". It is "how the government knows you". But, is it always, "how you know
you"? Few people call me "Arlo". You all do, and a few colleagues, and it is my
"legal name". But it is often a name I do not identity with. When someone asks
me my name in any other setting, the answer they get is more "real", in that
what they hear is a name I consider "me". When the court asks this, they get a
legal answer, but not a name I consider "me".

Sherry Turkle wrote an interesting piece in Wired a while back. Called, "Who am
we?" (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/turkle.html), it looks at
identity as made salient by online interactions, but going back to James Carse
in Finite and Infinite Games, we see the idea of "role identity", a variety of
"us-es" (a plural of "us") fractured by the variety of roles we caste an
identity into.

If Pirsig, for example, answered "Phaedrus" to the courts, would he be in error?
Why? Because the "name" they want has nothing to do with the "name" you feel.
Just a tangent. Now, go talk amongst yourselves, I'm becoming verklempt.

Not-Arlo :-)