my weird way of thinkin'

In philosophy, identity (also called sameness) is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a different type. Or, in layman's terms, identity is whatever makes something the same or different. This includes operational definition that either yields a yes or no value for whether a thing is present in a field of observation, or that distinguishes the thing from its background, allowing one to determine what is and what is not included in it.