Larger selves

This is another post that is an updated version of one previously published on my notebook.

In much the same way that I have a secret magical practice I’ve historically not talked about,¹ I’ve also got what… you might call religious beliefs. I’ve talked about them a bit more on and off, they’re not a secret or anything, but they’re much closer to philosophical beliefs than truly religious, which makes them hard to talk about in a way that conveys why they actually matter to me.

Whenever I try to explain it, it comes out sounding like either a joke or some very dry philosophy. Honestly it started out that way. But this matters to me, at quite a personal level, even if I don’t know how to show it.

The joke version goes thus: I believe in a supreme being, in that I think beinghood is closed under union, thus the set of all beings has a supremum (a maximal element).²

I didn’t say it was a funny joke.

The part of this that actually matters to me is that consciousness, and to some degree personhood, happens at every scale. As I write this, I am not having thoughts and recording them on the page.³ I am thinking by writing. The thought occurs not in my head, but in the combined head/hand/notebook system. Me plus a notebook behaves like a different, albeit very similar, entity to me without.

The same occurs in conversation. As you and I talk, the pair of us think together. Thoughts are had that we could not have had alone. There is an us above any beyond there being a you and separately also a me.

This is true with action as well as thought of course. I can do things with a knife that I cannot do without. You and I can do things together that we cannot do alone.

Less obviously, it is true of feeling too. Empathy is not feeling what another feels, but it is a sort of second-person form of feeling. As we synchronise there is a form of shared feeling that we have. This is particularly obvious in sex or dance, but also in e.g. games or pair programming. There is a shared feeling between us.

Something that thinks, acts, and feels seems to me to be a legitimate candidate for personhood. It’s certainly not a person in exactly the same way that a human is, but it still seems like a person to me.

You and I together form an us-person distinct from but overlapping with the I-person and the you-person. The same holds for me and my notebook (although I don’t think my notebook on its own counts as a person. I sometimes think it’s useful to think of personhood as continuous rather than binary. In this view, it is merely not much of a person).

If you like, you can substitute “conscious entity” for “person” here, but for me “person” carries more of the right moral and emotional undertones.

This extends further upwards of course. A team has personhood. A company. A country. The world.

I don’t think it requires a human in the mix to be a person. We’re not too far off having AI that I’d consider clearly warranted some degree of personhood. A dog seems clearly nearly or wholly a person to me. A forest is at least as much of a person as a dog.

This also extends downwards. Any reasonably careful degree of attention to yourself and your experience shows that you are made up of parts. You see this with mixed feelings (“part of me feels X while another part feels Y”). Internal family systems and other types of parts work recommend treating these parts of you as people. Maybe they are. Certainly they’re a lot more like a person than, say, a plant. They might be more like a person than a cat.

You can experience bits of this directly with things like aphasia. You can’t just recall. The best you can hope for is create a space for the part of you that knows the answer to put it when it’s done. Similarly, when you sleep on a problem and suddenly the next day it makes sense, it sure feels like some part of you has been working on it in the background, much like coming back to work and discovering one of your coworkers has solved a problem you were stuck on.

You are not a single unitary entity any more than the notebook and I are, or a team is. You, like us, are cooperating modules working together, constituting a conscious being out of individual parts that are themselves conscious beings.

They show many of the same patterns too. The way things come to be as they are is the same both within you and outside you.

This is not to say that the self is an illusion. The self is no more an illusion than a team is. A team is made up of individuals, but the team is created when those individuals work together. The team exists in the connections as well as in the parts, and there is a health and function of the team above and beyond that of the individual parts.

The self is real, and is situated pretty cleanly centred on your literal physical body, but you probably can’t count selves.

Much of why this matters to me is that I want to be a better person, and I want to participate in being a better person.

We as people confined to single bodies need to embrace that embodiment, and to learn to self better, but part of how we do that is by learning to participate in larger, better, selves that extend beyond us.

Some of this shows up in my interest in community, and helping each other solve problems. I genuinely think of the communities we build as entities in and of themselves, which we both participate in the broader self and are also in a reciprocal relationship with. Not that these are exactly distinct experiences - the reciprocity is what constitutes the larger self - but it’s important in understanding the ways in which you do and don’t blend with the larger selves you participate in.

Another way this shows up is that a lot of what I think of as spellcraft can usefully be thought of as constructing a larger self specific to the task at hand. e.g. the day plan system basically consists of extending yourself into an entity with more working memory dedicated to executive function. This is, perhaps, unsurprising: One way to think of historical magical traditions is that they are the application of religion to practical ends.⁴ It’s not surprising that I do the same.

There is an idea I have from the book Ritual and its Consequences, who in turn cite this as a confucian idea: The ultimate goal of rituals and rules of behaviour is to become a sage, one who will behave as if their actions are guided by a suitable ritual even when no such ritual exists. Learning to be the sort of person who behaves rightly even when nobody has told you what rightness is.

I think of these very explicit sorts of extension of self, where there’s a codified spell for doing so, as having much the same function. Yes, they are useful in and of themselves, but they are also a way of learning to extend yourself out into the world, even when you have no formal spell to hand to do so.

They help you learn how to look at the world around you and say to it “Hello. Can we be me for a bit?”

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