"imagine if" i can imagine anything. i can imagine that sometimes i'm a rock. i can believe it passionately. i can decide XYZ traits and behaviors are rock-like and act them out when i think i'm in rock phase. i can make a subreddit for other rock people. i can make a rock avatar on tiktok and call it my alter.
so what?
i'm still a human. everything i imagine is fantasy, and all those fantasies - interpretations - are based in language and arise from my fleshy brain. even the mere act of interpreting my inner world is fantasy, powered by a real-life brain.
in centuries past, these fantasies were flattened into stories or books. now, they're flattened into bundled avatars across a bunch of digital properties. just because other people can now interact with them in more complex ways doesn't change what they are - fantasies, anchored at the starting point by flesh-and-bones me.
physical reality mediates our subjective experiences, which themselves are mediated by language in our minds. the further you get from physical reality, the further you get into ideology or mental illness (which should be treated properly as mental illness, not an alternate reality that the rest of humanity has to accept).
and to wrap - i'm also an actor, and this looks and feels like method. mimetic roleplay with a lot of method, rationalized with computer-adjacent mental models.
>> in centuries past, these fantasies were flattened into stories or books. now, they're flattened into bundled avatars across a bunch of digital properties. just because other people can now interact with them in more complex ways doesn't change what they are - fantasies, anchored at the starting point by flesh-and-bones me.
There's the crux of it, and why I write! Our shifting media landscape.
As for imagining that one's brain would contain multiple consciousness, my immediate reaction was to think about the double consciousness of Du Bois and many others. Not exactly the same use of the word, but interesting nonetheless. I'm sure someone has written an essay connecting the oppression that generates the double consciousness to greater traumas that might induce the identities to become dissociated with each other.
I like the presentation of ideas in this post and it's clearly delineating some interesting areas of enquiry but I would say the schema of specific labels is a bit off-putting for me.
Naming things gives them a life, but it would be nice if labels were based on a structured and testable epistemology.
In psychology, psychiatry this is always going to be a challenge to produce given that we are talking about questions like what is consciousness and how does it relate to the self? I think when we face that we can all take a deep breath and gather our epistemic humility.
So I would preface all this with the qualifier 'sense of' - eg, do we have evidence for multiple dissociated identities or is it based on peoples reports of 'a sense of' disembodiment within their self experience.
It's plain that the internet creates a sense of disembodiment - that's a descriptive label that doesn't assume too much.
I think we need to pare our speculations back and use descriptive labelling rather than elaborate on theories. Most of all we shouldn't forget the importance of the narratives that we pick up from society, doctors, psychologists, sexologists that we use to describe our inner states.
Put simply, I think we underplay the role that culture has on our sense of, and descriptions of, our psychological states.
This blog points to so many interesting things in this regard.
>> Put simply, I think we underplay the role that culture has on our sense of, and descriptions of, our psychological states. <--- very much agree with this and I wish I could articulate this point better! This is exactly why I think "real vs. fake" isn't the greatest dichotomy.
We're long over due for a talk about this, would love to have you on because I completely resonate with your experience -- my fiction's characters are "me" in a sense, but "Katherine" is static, but! I am not MPD. I feel like I am truly a creature of the theater, which is why I love the internet!
this is a lot of hypotheticals.
"imagine if" i can imagine anything. i can imagine that sometimes i'm a rock. i can believe it passionately. i can decide XYZ traits and behaviors are rock-like and act them out when i think i'm in rock phase. i can make a subreddit for other rock people. i can make a rock avatar on tiktok and call it my alter.
so what?
i'm still a human. everything i imagine is fantasy, and all those fantasies - interpretations - are based in language and arise from my fleshy brain. even the mere act of interpreting my inner world is fantasy, powered by a real-life brain.
in centuries past, these fantasies were flattened into stories or books. now, they're flattened into bundled avatars across a bunch of digital properties. just because other people can now interact with them in more complex ways doesn't change what they are - fantasies, anchored at the starting point by flesh-and-bones me.
physical reality mediates our subjective experiences, which themselves are mediated by language in our minds. the further you get from physical reality, the further you get into ideology or mental illness (which should be treated properly as mental illness, not an alternate reality that the rest of humanity has to accept).
and to wrap - i'm also an actor, and this looks and feels like method. mimetic roleplay with a lot of method, rationalized with computer-adjacent mental models.
>> in centuries past, these fantasies were flattened into stories or books. now, they're flattened into bundled avatars across a bunch of digital properties. just because other people can now interact with them in more complex ways doesn't change what they are - fantasies, anchored at the starting point by flesh-and-bones me.
There's the crux of it, and why I write! Our shifting media landscape.
Be sure to read about how "Sybil" turned out to be a fraud. I'm assuming everyone knows about this book and case that popularized the concept of multiple personality disorders. Book was published in 1973. Before then there were only an incredibly small number of cases in the history of the world. https://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141514464/real-sybil-admits-multiple-personalities-were-fake https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/mesmerizing-story-sybil-exposed/ https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/magazine/a-girl-not-named-sybil.html
What's interesting is almost every pop psych memoir is fraudulent -- recently found out A Child Called It was completely fabricated
As for imagining that one's brain would contain multiple consciousness, my immediate reaction was to think about the double consciousness of Du Bois and many others. Not exactly the same use of the word, but interesting nonetheless. I'm sure someone has written an essay connecting the oppression that generates the double consciousness to greater traumas that might induce the identities to become dissociated with each other.
All of this is conceptually fathomable, is it actually occurring and possible?
I like the presentation of ideas in this post and it's clearly delineating some interesting areas of enquiry but I would say the schema of specific labels is a bit off-putting for me.
Naming things gives them a life, but it would be nice if labels were based on a structured and testable epistemology.
In psychology, psychiatry this is always going to be a challenge to produce given that we are talking about questions like what is consciousness and how does it relate to the self? I think when we face that we can all take a deep breath and gather our epistemic humility.
So I would preface all this with the qualifier 'sense of' - eg, do we have evidence for multiple dissociated identities or is it based on peoples reports of 'a sense of' disembodiment within their self experience.
It's plain that the internet creates a sense of disembodiment - that's a descriptive label that doesn't assume too much.
I think we need to pare our speculations back and use descriptive labelling rather than elaborate on theories. Most of all we shouldn't forget the importance of the narratives that we pick up from society, doctors, psychologists, sexologists that we use to describe our inner states.
Put simply, I think we underplay the role that culture has on our sense of, and descriptions of, our psychological states.
This blog points to so many interesting things in this regard.
>> Put simply, I think we underplay the role that culture has on our sense of, and descriptions of, our psychological states. <--- very much agree with this and I wish I could articulate this point better! This is exactly why I think "real vs. fake" isn't the greatest dichotomy.
I think so.
We're long over due for a talk about this, would love to have you on because I completely resonate with your experience -- my fiction's characters are "me" in a sense, but "Katherine" is static, but! I am not MPD. I feel like I am truly a creature of the theater, which is why I love the internet!