Where does identity come from in the view of a materialist?
How can materialistic identity be in place in such a young child?
Why would a materialist accept visions?
Identity comes from a particular intersection of material configurations: DNA not the least of which, but accidental churnings, variations in cell migrations, a subtle lack of increase of a particular chemical here and there causing a vaguely different initial weight which in turn causes patterns in the finished brain to ripple differently.
It's all rate dependent chemistry at a particular level and sometimes the rates vary slightly.
As to whether the identity was materialist... When I was a child I did not believe I was material as such. I believed in "libertarian dualism" then.
"When I was a child, I thought as a child..."
My identity
was still created by the material and the relationships it had with other changes and states in the material around me: the material around me carried moved in waves which had been concretely linked to certain shapes and ideas and relationships through repetition. Those ideas and shapes and relationships then get encoded in the shifting patterns that swirl and eddy though the neural graph structure, some finding fertile and ready ground (much of that in Wernicke's Area) for which empty links were greedily filled.
That is how my identity even as a young child was formed.
As to the acceptance of visions...
Well, that gets into understanding the rhythms of the human mind, and things we communicate outside of the effort to do so. In some ways it comes down to the way our stories lay tracks down in us, show us paths, and how we use metaphors and subtext to talk about those things in ways the conscious mind is generally blissfully ignorant of.
I have other thoughts on more, as to why it might seem and even be that the universe may have fates written into it, but again, I will put no weight on
that until I know
and prove the truth of it. I will come to the world with evidence in hand, if I were to make such claims.
When it comes to experiences of entities, I already laid out my positions in my contributions to this thread:
Hallucinations or spiritual experiences?
And this post:
I figured it out by chance, it's Left Hand Path people. I was browsing 4chan and stumbled upon a convo and realize there's this conflict between LOA (Law Of Attraction) people and LHP (Left Hand Path) people. Law of Attraction and LHP are working on different levels of reality. They aren't...
wizardforums.com
At any rate I do believe that taking the sum total of reports from all "outside of self" neural groups that are nonetheless "reportable to self" can give more comprehensive understanding than merely looking at direct rational observations. One can assemble a much more comprehensive idea of what is going on by looking at the whole of "the song of the mind". The issue is learning to read the "reports" that come from parts of the mind that can't direct their report through Wernicke's Area*, or which Wernicke's Area would hopelessly butcher, or which Wernicke's Area spews into strange poetry, or even the occasional single utterance.
One of those things is the result of when I do "pathwork" which for me comes layered with rich metaphors and sometimes with the aforementioned strange poetry.
All it means is that spirituality is material for me as well, created of stories and words and ideas that are exchanged by us, ultimately seeds of concept and thought that find fertile ground in the default structure of the human mind, evolved as it has been for so long specifically to hold and nurture such.
*Wernicke's Area: the part of the brain which translates emotions and concepts to and from word formats and raw visual, emotional, and auditory shapes
