@episodic memories: I don't personally have any like that, but I hear many people do consider the subjective experience of pivotal events in their life as part of who they are.
@relationships: I'm talking the literal membership here, the thing that exists as a function of the entanglement between states in different brains.
To clarify, I'm not talking about "your identity" here as in the information about what you consider your identity, but rather the referent of that identity. To many people, their physical bodies are part of their identity in this sense. Even distant objects, or large organizations like nations, can be in extreme cases. Just because it's a trend here to only have information that resides in your own brain as part of your identity doesn't mean it's necessary, or even especially common in it's pre form in most places.
To clarify, I'm not talking about "your identity" here as in the information about what you consider your identity, but rather the referent of that identity.
Ah, it appears we're talking about different things. I'm referring to ideological identity ("I'm a rationalist" , "I'm a libertarian", "I'm pro-choice", "I'm an activist" ), which I think is distinct from "I'm my mind" identity. In particular, you can be primed psychologically and emotionally by the former more than the latter.
We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository. It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were. Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.
I'll start us off with one simple example: The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long. I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms. (And I went to a *good* high school.) Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?
There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction. Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.
Bad concepts don't have to be scientific. Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here. There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics. But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.