I think it depends on whether by ‘identity’ we mean something conscious and deliberate, or something mostly unconscious and automatic. My ‘identity’ as a Californian, as someone who owns lots of black socks, etc. is pretty slow-system, since those are inert discursive facts that happen to occur to me when I think about myself. On the other hand, lots of other generalizations about me are mostly implicit, intuitive, emotional, etc., and they can guide or encapsulate my behavior without my noticing them. Identities are like moods, personality traits, etc.; they tie together large-scale patterns of experience, and consciously recognizing or endorsing them can reify them more, but isn’t always necessary for them to be operational (or, as constructs, explanatory).
My fast system doesn’t like it when I sit and watch TV all day, because it doesn’t want to see itself as a slacker. Does that mean I consciously reasoned through that process, and it’s really a slow-system thing? No, because what I really mean is that there’s a whole bunch of tiny in-the-moment aversions (a sense of listlessness, a tendency for transient sadness to stick around more, a missing sense of novelty+exhilaration+accomplishment, a lack of ‘my interpersonal health bar is going up’ feeling) that start accruing in the background when I veg.
I think it depends on whether by ‘identity’ we mean something conscious and deliberate, or something mostly unconscious and automatic. My ‘identity’ as a Californian, as someone who owns lots of black socks, etc. is pretty slow-system, since those are inert discursive facts that happen to occur to me when I think about myself. On the other hand, lots of other generalizations about me are mostly implicit, intuitive, emotional, etc., and they can guide or encapsulate my behavior without my noticing them. Identities are like moods, personality traits, etc.; they tie together large-scale patterns of experience, and consciously recognizing or endorsing them can reify them more, but isn’t always necessary for them to be operational (or, as constructs, explanatory).
My fast system doesn’t like it when I sit and watch TV all day, because it doesn’t want to see itself as a slacker. Does that mean I consciously reasoned through that process, and it’s really a slow-system thing? No, because what I really mean is that there’s a whole bunch of tiny in-the-moment aversions (a sense of listlessness, a tendency for transient sadness to stick around more, a missing sense of novelty+exhilaration+accomplishment, a lack of ‘my interpersonal health bar is going up’ feeling) that start accruing in the background when I veg.