Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by science, and have been successfully entertained on many occasions by science fiction. One work that I've enjoyed in recent years was the first season of Altered Carbon. For those not familiar, the series is about a future in which technology has been invented, to record a humans entire existence in the form of their brain/memories/thought process/personality, into an encoding called Digital Human Freight, or DHF. Everybody is implanted at a young age with a device called a Cortical Stack, which does this recording and encoding. This may sound sinister, but the idea started as, and generally is used for the purpose of, a simple backup mechanism. If your body dies, the contents of the cortical stack can be installed in a new body so that your personality may continue to live. If no such body is available, the personality can be "spun up" or brought to life in a simulated world in the mean time. Not so bad, right? And so with that premise, the series tells a story that examines things like, what it means to be human, who is the "real" you if you make a copy of your DHF, what would be the ramifications if human bodies could be bought and sold and traded, independently of the minds within, etc. It's a sort of interesting set of topics, and wasn't unfamiliar to me because back in the '90s I was on a mailing list on the early internet called Extropians, where all sorts of things like that were discussed. The subject area is generally referred to with the umbrella term Transhumanism.
And recently I've been doing a lot of work on my mental health, because that has been problematic my whole life, resulting in disability. And disability results in free time. And in my life as it currently is, the best use of my free time, in general, is to work on reducing the impact of my disability on myself and others through introspection, therapy, continuing education and self-improvement. Maybe at some point I could improve enough to be less disabled, although I also have significant physical obstacles to success in that area.
And in my recent work on my mental health, I've been examining the idea that maybe it is best to consider me-now a completely different person from me-some-years-ago, so that I can give myself a different set of standards for what is good behaviour and what is bad behaviour. Because, years ago I did things that were correct decisions at the time for the person I was then. And now I am am doing things that are correct decisions now for the person I am now. And it is difficult to come up with a consistent set of logical rules that would lead to both sets of decisions. (I am autistic, and consistent logical sets of rules are basically what I live for, heh).
And as I've thought about that idea more and more, I keep narrowing the time frames involved. Am I the same person as I was ten years ago? Eight? Five? One? Yesterday? Before lunch?
I think in the end that oftentimes, yes, I am the same person as I was at some-previous-time, but that the personalities are not continuous. It's more like, I have many personalities inside me, and which one is "driving" depends on the circumstances. If I'm at work, "work me" is in charge. If I'm with a romantic partner, "partner me" is in charge. If I'm playing a video game, "gamer me" is in charge and if I'm reading the news, "social justice me" is in charge. It's all very situational.
This may sound somewhat like what many people might call "Multiple Personalities" and I think the current medical term would for that thing would be Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID. I think the key feature of DID that I'm NOT talking about here is the dissociative part -- in myself, when we are in "work mode" we still feel like we are the same person as the "home mode" person, we are just playing a different role. We still share memories with the home person, there isn't any complete disconnect or inaccessability between the two people and we can switch back and forth voluntarily as appropriate. I also don't have separate names for the different people I carry inside me.
In addition to many selves for many roles, each of our selves also grows and changes over time. Sometimes this change is gradual, other times sudden.
So I was thinking more and more about that, and trying to tease out or winnow in my mind, how the various benefits of having multiple "roles" or "personalities" helps humans operate, versus when this kind of compartmentalization is maladaptive and troublesome, and I think that's mostly what the details of the formal definitions of DID are attempting, but I was approaching this from a more philosophical point of view.
And I realized, that while giving names to the compartments in our lives, something that if popular culture is to be believed people with DID commonly do, helps mitigate some of the difficulties caused by side effects of over-compartmentalization by clarifying who is in charge... that's just too much work to bother with for people who don't have serious memory compartmentalization problems. "Normies" don't have the need to name all of their various selves. A single name for all the people who inhabit a body generally suffices.
But... that doesn't mean that normies don't have multiples, in a way. It's just the normie multiples tend to have better cross-talk, I guess? Like in a normie, two different personalities might exist, but if they take the time to think about it, they can essentially read each others minds. It's super convenient and makes the "different personalities" "less different" than they are in people with serious operational hindrances.
Because of this convenience, and the fact that most people typically just have one name, and the fact that a person often looks the same, no matter which of their personalities is currently driving the body, it's all too easy to forget that the compartmentalization happens. When we see a friend, we think of the personality of the friend as we expect them to be, and it is too common for us to make assumptions based on that which might not result in the best interaction. An example: My friend comes over to talk, and I'm in a good mood, and I start talking about all this mental processing stuff I'm working on. She isn't uninterested, but she came over to talk about something else because she's feeling down, and changing the subject to what she needed was awkward until I understood the context.
And I think this kind of unfortunate miscommunication can be blamed for a lot of bad feelings, over time, if you count all the people inside every body and all the interactions they have, across the population. So as a thought experiment, I decided to imagine what it would be like if everybody was hyper-conscious of this compartmentalization and society was structured to accomodate it even better than we do now. It involved a silly amount of work and I'm not actually endorsing it, just stay with me.
Naming each individual personality would help, and wearing name tags then with the right name might be a thing because you wouldn't know which name to use for a given body. And then like, what if in courts of law, the personality under control was the one who was punished or restricted or chastized for a crime, and likewise in a court of public opinion? What if we took the time to educate each individual sub-personality, on every bit of knowledge we educate each other about?
And while at first it seemed like it would be really difficult, I suddenly thought about that science fiction series Altered Carbon, and how in the series, they couldn't ever be sure who was "wearing" a particular body. And it seemed very similar.
So, I am embarking upon an experiment. I am going to try some new ways of greeting people, which I hope will help clarify in social situations, which personality is active on each side of a conversation to reduce misunderstandings.
For example, I might greet my best friend in all the world by saying, "Hi, this is the Chris who is thinking about lunch, are you currently the Lashel who wants to join me for food?" The phrases are odd, at first, but I'm quickly getting used to them in my head, and it kind of delights me to develop a verbal habit that accomplishes three important goals:
1) Quick exchange of identity-and-emotional-context information at the beginning of communication.
2) Acknowledgement and explicit approval for multiple mental states in a single human body.
3) Development of protocols that will be helpful someday when we can upload and download our minds on a whim.
Ok, that third goal isn't very urgent, but it is important if the day ever arrives. :)
