What if Your Supposed Identity Is Nothing But a Story You’ve Constructed In Your Mind?

Here’s a little story.

You and your fellow astronauts land on a strange planet and make contact with an intelligent species. The aliens, in true Star Trek fashion, are basically human with some tiny differences: they have strange noses — some of them have three nostrils, some have four.

Based on your research, there is no discernable advantage to having four nostrils over three. The difference appears to have been based on a minor genetic mutation some millions of years hence and simply bred true over the millennia. The difference between having three and four nostrils appears to be cosmetic, nothing more.

And yet, the species informs you, their society is bitterly divided, precisely along nostril-quantity lines. The four-nostril variety exclusively breeds with their own “kind” not wishing to “pollute” their bloodlines with inferior three-nostril blood, and they accuse the three-nostril variety of evildoing and oppression against their kind. The three-nostril variety exclusively breed wi…