II. Multiplicities
Liminalism regards the concept of the unified, monolithic self as a useful fiction. It suggests that we are not singular entities but rather complex systems of interrelated parts. These parts exist inside the threshold of the self, and the role of the self is, partially, to route between them, translate between their specific coarse-grainings of the world, and integrate them into a cohesive self-narrative.
Games of Parts
Each Part is a "component of mind" -- a habit, pattern, or subagent -- that is playing its own game and coarse-graining the world in a way that helps it play its specific game.
TBD.
Moving Beyond the Intentional Stance
TBD.
The Law of Compositional Intelligence
TBD.
Interlude: Embrace the Healing Power of Both/and
Friends of mine are probably tired of this quip of mine, which I am quick to trot out whenever I’m asked to field a question that feels like a false choice. Too often, we are asked (or ask ourselves) “is it this or is it that?” ignoring the possibility that it is both. (We also ignore the possibility that it is neither, but this is usually less of a problem – the question is rarely asked when neither option applies – besides, “embrace the healing power of neither/nor” just doesn’t sound as good.)
A few days ago, a friend asked me, am I being funny or annoying? Embrace the healing power of both/and. A few weeks ago, my kids had to stay a couple extra days at their mom’s, was I sad that I wouldn’t see them for 9 days straight or relieved that I got a few more days off to myself? Embrace the healing power of both/and. Every day I wonder, is my latest project at work a grueling slog or an exciting intellectual challenge? Embrace the healing power of both/and.
People rarely respond well to the suggestion – they want an answer. (Of course, I keep making it anyway and sometimes actually manage to dodge the question.) Now, management consultants are famously over-attached to their MECE categories, but why are the rest of us so prone to this failure mode?
There is something neat and tidy and reassuring about deciding that something is A and not B (or vice versa). The consequences are clearer, decisions are easier to make, we feel more in control. But it seems to me that the issue arises most often when the valence of the categories are very different – where one is a “bad” thing and the other “good”. We turn a blind eye to the fact that there is no real reason for the options to be mutually exclusive, trading logic for confidence in how we are supposed to feel about it. I know how I feel about good things and how I feel about bad things – how am I supposed to feel about something that is both?
Should my friend regret what they did because it was annoying, or feel a warm glow because they were amusing? Should I feel guilty for wanting time off from my kids, or like a good father because I miss them when they’re gone even a few days? Should I whine about how grinding work has been, or effuse about the cool problems I’m getting to solve?
One thing I’ve learned over the trials of the last few years – and this is where the healing part comes in – is that there is rarely one way that I do (or should) feel about something that’s happened (or is happening) to me. And this is more true the bigger the stakes. Am I furious about what’s happened or incredibly sad? Or, dare I whisper it, am I even ecstatic about it?
Ambivalence can be confusing, but it is highly underrated. Yes, it makes it difficult to create a simple narrative for us to file away in our memory, and it can make it harder to reason about appropriate responses. But it also frees us from having to repress part of what we actually are feeling just so we can keep up the fiction of univalent clarity. And it can help us sidestep the false choices we might imagine we have simply because each option seems to dictate a different, or even opposite, emotional response. Ultimately, getting more comfortable with ambivalence can help us become more comfortable with ambiguity.
Part of making sense of the world involves striving to build a model of the world that describes it more faithfully than alternative models. If something is both A and B, I want to recognize that fact, not discount it out of hand to feel more comfortable. If I feel both good and bad about something that has happened to me, I am more in tune with myself (and for the big things, more able to move on) by accepting that fact and giving myself permission to feel both ways rather than going through contortions to convince myself otherwise.
So in the future, if I should dodge your question by responding with my signature quip, should you roll your eyes in annoyance at my refusal to answer, or consider how these wise words might actually apply to the situation at hand? Embrace the healing power of both/and….
Interlude: We Contain Multitudes
One of my heretical beliefs is that the integrated self is a fiction. By a fiction, I mean that the self, that unified thing that you think you are, is not real. It’s an invention of the only part of us with the power of the pen, the part that writes the narrative of what’s happened to us into our memory. In truth, I believe, rather than one self, we contain multitudes.
I don’t know how heretical this belief actually is, as some of the people I hang out with are probably more likely to say that it’s obvious than heretical, but it still feels like heresy. I say it, and, intellectually, I understand the evidence for it and the model I have in mind for how it works, but it still feels hard to really believe.
It’s hard to believe because my self feels very real to me, and most of the time quite integrated. It’s difficult to put any evidence or logical explanation above the overwhelming sense that I am me, that there is a me, and that the things that I remember happened to me. What else could possibly be true? If the self is an illusion, then who is the Observer who feels like he’s watching in my head, who is the Agent who feels like he’s making decisions? Who did all the these things happen to?
And if the model of a captain steering the ship is wrong, how do things actually work? Beyond just how it feels, how do we behave as if we are a unified self (most of the time). What’s going on to create the internal and external illusion?
And finally, if this model is true, how should I feel about my self? Should I change the way I approach the world in light of this fact? How I interact with others? What I believe? Should I reevaluate my ends? Would the loss of selfhood be an irrecoverable blow, if it turns out to be true?
Even if the heresy is wrong and the hypothetical model isn’t accurate, all of these questions are interesting and I think worth engaging with.
But before we go there, let’s discuss what the model says is actually going on.
Basically, the model says that instead of one unified, integrated self, our minds are actually a collection of, for lack of a better word, components of mind: all going at once, in parallel, taking their own input, keeping and modifying their own state, generating their own output. Each focused on its own slice of the world, its own way of attending to it, its own mode of operation. Each mostly unaware of the others, communicating through a relatively tiny window of working memory that encodes the shared now.
These are the multitudes we contain. I’m calling them “components of mind”, but they go by many different names: agents, systems, pattern matchers, subroutines, instincts, emotions, impulses, fears, habits, learned responses, reactions, values, goals, archetypes. Even personalities.
Often, oversimplifying, we divide them into different camps, talking about left vs. right brain, or System I vs. System II, or monkey brain vs. lizard brain, angel vs. devil, id vs. ego, rational vs. emotional, or logic vs. instinct. But, in my view, we are not of two minds about the world, we are of many.
My mental image is of a trading floor, the clamoring traders monitoring their own tickers and news feeds, and calling out when they want to make a trade. The agents can operate at many levels of complexity, with agents made up of sub-agents, looking for information that will cause them to spring into action. But they tend to be single-minded and are often in conflict. Attempts to corner the market or squeeze short-sellers abound.
Or maybe it’s a legislature, with representatives vying for time on the floor or yielding it to others, or a contentious corporate board room, with directors debating the future of the company, each presenting their viewpoint and arguing for their preferred course of action.
But off to the side of this chaotic board room, the corporate secretary takes down the minutes, recording for posterity the discussions had and decisions made. But as anyone who has attended a board meeting (or been a corporate secretary) knows, there is power in deciding what makes it into the minutes, and discretion is exercised in deciding how to frame what happened. From the minutes, the board may seem to act unanimously, the heated discussion leading up to the decision elided for better optics, objections noted only when they rise to a certain level of concern, motions and rubber-stamp seconds recorded to show that the proceedings were orderly. This is not the verbatim transcript of a court reporter, but the output of a savvy author intent on making the whole look unified.
I think it is simply these minutes, the corporate record written into our memory, that is the self. Because, other than the flicker of sensation, that is all we have access to, all we are.
Sometimes the secretary tries too hard to present a unified front, omitting key debates and disagreements and recording a fabricated consensus. Sometimes memorializing the dominant position in one meeting only to switch to that of a different faction in the next, without acknowledging the shift. Sometimes taking liberties, inventing whole rationales, whole lines of argument, whole plot devices, just to make the narrative flow and keep the illusion going. For the secretary is not the self, it’s just another component with a single-minded focus on keeping up the pretense of unity with a good story.
I’ll return in a future post to why it might do that, what purpose that serves. But sometimes, it can lead to the ambivalence where embracing both/and can be healing. Other times it can lead to us to miss an important message from a part of us, like not noticing that we are grieving. If the stakes are higher, we can feel at war with ourselves. The ignored factions can get louder, more disruptive, trying to break through and force the record to acknowledge their position. In extreme cases, they can attempt a hostile takeover.
Various theories and movements try to bring about healing – of the individual or of society – by acknowledging this fact and prescribing a treatment.
Internal Family Systems, a type of psychotherapy, attempts to recognize these disruptive components, at least the high-level ones, as agents or internal systems, acknowledging their points of view, reconciling with them, and reintegrating them into the overarching narrative. The theory is that this can stave off the immiserating internal conflict that can cause anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues.
Other movements contend that our instincts are at war with our conscious, understanding brain, leading it to feel under attack and to resort to the selfish, maximizing behavior that plagues society. Still others believe that the emissary of the left brain has overthrown the master of the right brain, leading to an over-reliance on one way of attending to the world, and a culture that now demands it.
There are as many prescriptions for how to heal ourselves as there are descriptions of the main parties to the conflict.
But sometimes I think that the most important step is just a recognition of the fact that there are parties. And not just one. Not even just two camps, as the frameworks so often contend. Not even operating at a single level, and not even permanent: the citizens of our mind change over time, complicating our relationship with our past and future “selves”.
We face the challenge of being the fictitious parent to these often unruly children. We have no choice but to do our best to help them get along as harmoniously as possible, a task made infinitely more difficult by the fact that we are nothing more than a figment of those children’s imagination, a story they tell because it brings order to the chaos and helps them sleep at night.
I don’t have the answer – and as any parent can tell you, there is unlikely to be one answer any more than there is one parenting system that works for all families – but I do think an essential step for any parent is seeing that there are children.
This perspective has already wound its way through some of my posts and likely will continue to do so. And I’ll try to come back at some point to some of the questions I raise above. To poke at it from different angles. But in the meantime, heretical belief firmly ensconced, I do my best not to mourn the self I might have lost to it, so much as wonder at and try to understand the multitudes gained.