Rational Romantic Mystic Cynical Idealist

[kiya]

In other conversations about gender identity . . .

A day or two ago, montrealais wrote this post on the SDMB. It's worth reading. Presuming the hamsters are willing to give anyone access.

Somewhere in my head is something about mindfulness and identity. It comes out in strands of light, like a cat's cradle of meaning, and I don't know how to get it quite into words right. So I sketch, and see if it exists in the negative space.

Again I say: existence is dialogue. Before there were two things, is the phrase in some of the myths. And I said once or twice, if we were all the same, who would speak our Names?

That which is other, which is different, that brings out an ability to be aware of related things in myself. The context of the post that inspired this was a discussion about where gender identity comes from, and whether it's 'really' real, and a bunch of other stuff. And I see him saying that look, this is something that at least might lead people to think about this stuff, think about what it means.

Mindfulness. It's hard to be mindful of traits, of differences, of realities, that haven't been shown to differ. Things which are just the way things are become invisible, glossed over, they vanish. Difference -- creates the possibility of mindfulness. Mindfulness -- creates the possibility of dialogue. Dialogue -- reinforces existence.

If we were all the same, who would give us names?

Hello. I'm a writer. I'm a pagan; beyond pagan, I'm a recon; beyond recon, I'm Kemetic. I'm a woman. I'm a wife. I'm a partner. I'm in my twenties. I'm polyamorous. I'm heterosexual. I'm a one-of-each bisomethingal. I'm a submissive. I'm plural -- median, to be exact. I'm a mystic. I'm depressive. I'm a dropout. I'm a Yankee. I'm a sculptor. I'm a snarky, wiseass bitch. I'm a gamer. I'm a musician. I'm a singer. I'm a baseball fan. I'm a brewer. I'm a Discordian. I don't think in words most of the time. I hold in my mind gateways to whole universes. And many other things besides.

I am other. I am like you.

Let us be mindful together.

Comments

A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[redbird]

At one point in The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly suggests that Gethenians might be less dualistic than most other peoples, because they don't experience gender as something that puts them permanently into one of two boxes, and Estraven says that zie thinks that duality doesn't depend on gender, because there is always self and other, I and thou.

I think I understand what you mean by plural, at least as much as I can understand it without experiencing it, but what does "median" mean in this context? (If you can explain it, or point to somewhere that would be helpful.)

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[kiya]

I think Estraven's right. And I should reread that again, it's a good book for this mood.


zaphkiel's Layman's Guide to Multiplicity has some stuff on medians.

The term is a . . . hnr. A while ago there was a theory put forth by a group called, I believe, 'The Vickis'. This was based on the 'dissociative continuum' model of some aspects of cognition -- that everyone dissociates, some more than others.

A fair number of people dislike the term 'midcontinuum' because they feel that it's rooted in a theory that pathologises plurality inappropriately; the preferred term is 'median'. I tend to use both, in part because more people are familiar with midcont. netdancer used the term 'singtuple' on alt.callahans a while back, which was what provoked my reconceptualisation of myself.

Basically, the easiest way to explain it is that I'm a hydra. I have a number of distinct 'heads', cognition processes. A couple of them have noticeably distinct rest-points that have traits that others don't -- for example, one of me has berserker potential, probably not full-bore, but the whole hunter-vision trembling with the effort of not breaking things rage -- and if who's dominant in front changes all of that biochemistry just . . . doesn't hook up anymore. It carries no meaning. But we're all the same creature -- we're all me, heads of the same hydra.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[brooksmoses]

I'll also toss in my thoughts on what "median" means as far as it applies to lilairen (now that she's confirmed that it's referring to what I thought it was), since a perspective from the outside probably sees different things that the perspective from the inside sees.

It's, as she said, a place very much in the middle between complete single-personality (which I see as "there's just me in here, and while I have different perspectives and moods, they're all of a continuum and my state flows freely over that continuum") to complete multiple-personality (which, at the extreme case is "there's a lot of people in here, and I have no memory of what happens when I'm not the one driving"), in a way that combines aspects of both.

(Notation bit: I'll call the various personalities "facets", mostly for lack of a better word than that it's a particularly good one. Like most, it's right in some ways and all wrong in others. Also, I use "front" to mean the facet that is currently speaking insofar as the words can be attributed to a single facet.)

In the sense in which it's single-personality: I can tell lilairen something, and I don't have to worry about her remembering it when a different facet is front; as far as I can see from here, it's a shared-memory setup. I expect that breaks down at the edges where things are linked to strong emotions, but I also suspect that's no more the case than it is for people who are not multiple at all.

There is also, to some extent, a sense of an overall "self"; my image of her is largely of a single person, and it generally fits. It's sort of like a musical note being played on various instruments -- there are harmonics, and different instruments have different harmonics, but mostly what happens is that the different instruments have the same harmonics combined with different amplitudes, so it all comes out as the same note. Her different facets are all mostly recognizably "her", and made from the same harmonics, but they differ greatly in which ones are present most strongly.

In the sense in which it's multiple-personality: Her range of perspectives and moods clusters around a set of different "points" (aka the facets), each of which emphasizes a distinctly different set of "harmonics" from the others. Beyond this clustering of her overall state, it seems that often when she's in some sort of intermediate state (as is usually the case, I think), her reactions to things oven consist of a multitude of different thoughts, and these can generally be identified as coming from different facets. And so, from my perspective, things make significantly more sense if I sort them out into separate piles based on which personality facet they came from. Sometimes they come pre-sorted, she'll send me emails occasionally that include comments like "Stormy wants to say thus-and-so".

All of that, though (aside from the explicit commentary) isn't -- from the outside, at least -- notably different from single-personalityness; it's more a difference in amount than in kind. One of the more distinct places where it's different is that she sometimes switches between facets rather abruptly. For example (and one that took me a while to understand) -- sometimes the personality that's "front" is one that's upset with me; that facet is to some extent acting as a shield to hide a facet that's hurt and needs to cry, because she's afraid to show the hurt. And so, when I do things that reassure her and can lessen the being afraid, suddenly things change and the facet that's feeling hurt starts crying -- and I used to wonder what I'd just done wrong to cause her to cry, which was completely misreading things. It's much easier to understand that sort of thing when I look at it as a change of which facet is front, and presume that there were more emotions present before than the ones I could see. And sometimes there are notable sudden facet-front changes that happen without external reasons that I can see; again, it's easier for me to understand it as a facet change rather than trying to follow the perspective shift as if it were a continuous path from one to the other.

[continued]

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[kiya]

It's worth noting that losing time is considered among a fair number of the plurals I hang out with not a function of strength of plurality but of communications within the system.

Where memory breaks down is . . . probably most often with Stormy, but Stormy has the most biochemistry involved in her selfness, so a shift from one bugger-what's-the-word-for-the-stable-point-dip-in-a-curve-where-things-don't-move-from-unless-nudged in my biochem gets lossy for her. The more common issue is an articulation problem, where some particular emotion, sensation, or state of mind is specific to a facet, and that facet isn't equipped with a good skillset for expressing it. (Silver has this issue most often that you've seen, I think.)


Normally I have . . . tsst, I generally figure about three aspects combining for front, plus or minus one. The synthesis is in fairly constant flux; it depends on moment-by-moment situations a great deal. Single-self frontage is usually a response to stress; it feels . . . mmmmoderately imbalanced at best, less likely to respond to moderating voices. (For honesty's sake, I should remind that this is filtered through the aspect referred to as a control freak, though it just seems reasonable to me.)

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[brooksmoses]

Hmm. I guess it would make sense that the measures of intensity of pluralness that make most sense from the outside (e.g., losing time) aren't always the ones that make the most sense from the inside.... I don't think that I understand what it's like on the inside well enough to disentangle intensity of plurality from a weakness of communications between.

"Local equilibrium" is the word you're looking for, or possibly just "equilibrium".

I remember reading somewhere about studies that indicated that people remembered stuff they'd studied for a test better if they were in a similar emotional state as when they were studying it; my guess is that that would have something to do with some of the memory breakdowns. But, yes, I had somewhat left the articulation stuff out of that, and that's definitely a complication on things. (And now I'm pondering the sorts of wind instruments where one gets different notes by changing how one blows so as to modulate the relative amplitudes of the set of harmonics it produces; the articulation issue could arguably be mapped to having something that needs a particular harmonic to express, but in that facet the harmonic in question is at such a low amplitude that there's not enough to work with.)

The "splat" model also has an interesting linkage to the connection between stability (and lack of stress) and multiple aspects combining for front. Supposing a sort of quantum superposition for the "state-cloud", an attractor that's relatively mild and not too far away from the surface is likely to get bits of cloud in multiple lobes, but if you dial up the strength of attractor or move it a distance off-center, the cloud gets pulled into just one lobe.

And, now that I ponder that, I see part of what you mean by stability (and see places where I've seen lack of it happen) -- in the multiple-lobe situation, a moving attractor will cause the amount of cloud in some lobes to increase and in others to decrease, and even though the bits of cloud go through distinct jumps, the overall superposition changes smoothly. But, in the single-lobe "stressed" situation, the whole cloud moves suddenly, and that's why (for example) I find myself talking with Silver when I was talking with Stormy a moment before. When you're more stable, that sort of sudden change in front is unlikely to happen, or at least not happen as abruptly -- or so I'd guess, anyhow.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[kiya]

I'd suspect that the strong association of 'plural' and 'losing time' probably comes out of pathological multiplicity.

I think where the difference comes down is whether or not the otherness of the other is stronger than the selfness. And that gets rather nicely back to montrealais's writings about gender and thinking about it and the huge variety of self-reportage and what it winds up meaning to people.

I've never lost time; all of us can, at best, share our skills freely, at worst usually get whoever has necessary skills to contribute; these contribute to the sense of single identity which can be considered either as white light or broken by a prism. I know full-bore plurals who can skill-share and who never lost time, too, and it doesn't lead to that sort of experience for them.

"Local equilibrium" is probably close enough to what I'm looking for to pass. Noun. Thingy.

When I stress-switch, it's . . . flicking a supercooled fluid. That's how the experience is -- it's stable in one mode, and then slightly perturbed, and snap! somewhere else. Normal flow has . . . say there are three, one's dominant; one drifts down into the wings or backstage, someone from the wings drifts in to replace; the other one who was sharing drifts up to take front from the formerly dominant, and so on.



I also find myself quite satisfied that the thread that grew out of this post has been addressing the dialogue that comes from addressing the other.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[brooksmoses]

I'd suspect that the strong association of 'plural' and 'losing time' probably comes out of pathological multiplicity.

Mmm. Could be; could just be that that's what I see as the extreme "separate" case; could be that looking at the extreme case amounts to considering the pathological case. I suspect part of it's that the sense of "otherness" vs. "self" is something that's really hard for me to see from outside, and so continuity of thought and memory is what I'm left with to measure by.

I am somewhat amused with the comment on supercooled liquid -- that's exactly the same mathematics that I was trying to get across with the lobes. (There's a fair section on it in your Mathematics of Humor book, incidentally; see the section on "catastrophes"....) And the bit about normal flow also sounds very much like what I was trying to explain as my guess from the simplistic splat-theory.

I conclude that mathematics is weird, but mathematics is _really_ weird when it works.

And I also conclude that it's late and I am brainfuzzy and so I'm not completely following your last paragraph. Expand, please? (Mostly on specifying which dialogue from what other, I think is where I'm lost.)

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[kiya]

Creating mindfulness through awareness of the difference between how one person is/functions and how another person functions/is, as generated by consciousness of the dialogue that grows out of the recognition of otherness.

. . . I'm not sure that that's a clarification. I try again: it would be much harder to formulate such a discussion about the meaning of identity without the knowledge that my self-sense is constructed differently from yours.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[brooksmoses]

Ok, that's weird. I understood both of those, I think. And, on inspection, they both seem to be saying the same thing. They feel like they're saying very different things, though.

And, yes, I can very much see why you'd find that deeply satisfying. :)

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[kiya]

I believe para 1 was Weaver through Darkhawk, para 2 was Darkhawk more or less straight.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[brooksmoses]

A bit more on the math-stuff of stability that I was talking about, with a variation on the metaphor:

It's ... consider a quartic, say x^4 - x^2 + a*x, with initially a=0. Basically a parabola-like thing, except with two dips in the bottom, one on each side of the y axis; the bottom of each dip is an equilibrium point if you have a metaphorical marble rolling along the curve. Suppose the marble is in the right-hand dip, and you increase a. As you increase a, the right-hand dip goes up, and the left-hand dip goes down. As it goes up, the left-hand dip becomes more and more of a "preferred" equilibrium, but the marble stays in the right-hand equilibrium instead. Eventually, the right-hand dip will stop being a dip, and the marble will suddenly roll into the left-hand dip.

Or, alternately, you can adjust things so that the right-hand dip is still a dip, but just barely one, and then jostle the marble slightly -- and it will go over the bump and end up in the left-hand equilibrium.

This could be a representation of cold water -- one dip is "solid", the other "liquid". And what happens is that, at the freezing point, the two dips are equally low; they're both equally stable. But, as you chill the water, the "liquid" side becomes less and less of a dip, and it very quickly becomes a very tiny dip, although it takes a lot of chilling for it to disappear entirely. So, the water stays liquid, but give it a bit of jostling, and that causes the "marble" for a spot near the jostling to fall over into the "solid" side, and that jostles the ones near it, and so forth across the glass of water.

What I think is happening in your "normal" modes is something sort of like this: instead of a marble, you've got a quantum superposition of states. And so, when the two dips are equal, the quantum-marble is half in one and half in the other -- sort of like Schroedinger's cat, except this one doesn't collapse its wavefunction if you observe it. If you raise one dip, what happens is that the amount of quantum-marble in it decreases and the quantum-marble in the other increases in a smooth fashion; there's never a situation where this thing is in a state other than its preferred "best" equilibrium. And the marble, as a whole, is in the two dips -- never in the middle. So, the presence of quantum-marble in multiple dips corresponds to having multiple facets fronting, and the fraction of quantum-marble in each dip corresponds to the amount that the corresponding facet is front.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[kiya]

Quantum marble! Quantum marble! Aaaaaah!


(This message brought to you by, among other things, Animal from the Muppets.)

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[undauntra.livejournal.com]

For example (and one that took me a while to understand) -- sometimes the personality that's "front" is one that's upset with me; that facet is to some extent acting as a shield to hide a facet that's hurt and needs to cry, because she's afraid to show the hurt. And so, when I do things that reassure her and can lessen the being afraid, suddenly things change and the facet that's feeling hurt starts crying -- and I used to wonder what I'd just done wrong to cause her to cry, which was completely misreading things.

As a datapoint, I display the same behavior pattern, and I'm very much a single-personality. If I feel hurt by someone dear to me, I present anger initially. Once I feel that that person is safe again (that is, once I am convinced at a gut level that the person in question is not going to hurt me further), then the floodgates open and I start crying. I do not tend to display weakness (such as crying) in front of persons categorized as threats.

Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)

[brooksmoses]

[and, ironically considering its start, the next paragraph needed to be continued in a second comment. so, continuation....]

Anyhow, that's probably enough for a single comment, and LJ is likely to complain at me for it. It occurs to me, though, having written all this out, that in some sense what I see from the outside is a set of behaviors that look like they fit a model of having multiple distinct facets, and lilairen tells me of internal interactions between them, but from the outside I can't see anything that wouldn't equally fit a single-personality model with some quirks of fairly common moods and sudden shifts between them -- I treat them as real because she tells me that they are real, and because doing so produces sensible results, but from the outside I can't see their reality in any direct way.

I dunno; clearly I've rambled at it a bit, but I have no idea if it makes any more sense after having done so!

[brooksmoses]

Again I say: existence is dialogue. Before there were two things, is the phrase in some of the myths.

And, in other creation stories, the early parts of the Genesis story are all about God creating things and then dividing them into two parts -- dividing the light from the darkness (verse 4), and then dividing the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament (verse 7), and then dividing the water from the dry land (verse 9).

Hello. I'm a writer. [...] And many other things besides.

And you missed one: You are drawn to the place where the light and the shadow meet, as I remember you telling me years ago.

It's the same story; it's all the same story. (And, of course, it's all different stories too.)

[kiya]

Oh, that's another fine example.



We are grey, we stand between the darkness and the light.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I'm essentially asking the same question as Redbird. (Though given the icon and the writing style, and the meaning of median, at least according to the dictionary... you're one of the central folks?)

(You guys-- if the term "you guys" fits with you-- seem to have a very different way of approaching plurality than my partner does.)

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Hm. Median means nothing like what I thought it did. Pardon.

[kiya]

Somewhere in the hazy space between singlet and plural, yes. Is my reply to redbird sensical?

(From the various plurals I've hung out with, I think most people and systems do it at least somewhat uniquely.)

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, very sensical, yes.

But we're all the same creature -- we're all me, heads of the same hydra.

This in particular -- Heather (um, my Heather) has said in the past that people who treat her as somehow breakable (you know, they have to treat her gently or she'll pop) when she's switched are, um, trying. It is, after all, all /her/.

(The rest-points aspect, the biochemistry not hooking up, also makes sense. Blah blah I'd go on but I don't want to ramble so I won't.)

[kiya]

It would likely be inappropriate to complain about rambling in our journal. ;)

[brooksmoses]

Ah, yes -- that was a bit of what I was trying to explain in the very long ramble above: lilairen definitely has multiple distinct rest points for her personality-state, in a way that's much less situation-linked than mine are (and that goes off to a separate thought, which I'll put in a footnote so's to avoid digressing too far [1]). And, in some cases -- say, where she's been heavily weighted towards one but is being pulled in some sense towards a different one, there's a point where her personality-state suddenly changes to something near the different state.

I somewhat conceptualize it as being like the surface of a logosplat (the sorts of logos that look like a bit of jelly went splat so there are multiple round lobes sticking out of a center but still connected to it) -- her personality-state is somewhere on that surface, and various things tend to pull it around. So, particularly in things where the pull is quite off-center, she's likely to end up in one of the lobes, and also to tend to jump from one to the other rather than moving gradually. And, extending the metaphor from a single state to a sort of cloud of many of them, it explains why some parts of the cloud are in one and some in another with few in the middle.

[1] Which raises an interesting point (and, at this point, it actually flows back into to the discussion again -- imagine that!): I've got several distinct rest-states for my personality as well, but I don't see them as multiple personalities, and I think that's because they're all driven by external things. There's a state that I'm in when talking about engineering stuff that I'm interested in, and a state where I'm snuggling with lilairen, and those are rather different -- but they're different as a direct function of what I'm doing, and there aren't bits of my "engineering" state (although there are engineering thoughts, but that's a different matter) when I'm mainly in the "snuggling" state, or vice-versa. I suspect this is explainable by postulating that my state-surface is rather more like a potato than a splat, and doesn't have notable lobes. And, so, my cloud doesn't tend to jump nearly so suddenly except when there's a sudden change in external pulls, and it doesn't tend to get separated into bits in different places.

(My guess is that this separability of personality-cloud probably has something to do with the fact that she multitasks all the time, and I am virtually always singletasking. But that doesn't really show up in the splat/potato model.)

Here, how about you go on and ramble some, so's I won't be the only one here doing it?

[mindways]

I don't have anything to add to this (interesting) conversation at the moment, except that I find the phrase "...the splat/potato model" vastly entertaining. :-)

Animal strikes again.

[kiya]

Model! Model! Splat potato! Splat potato! Aaaayayayayaya!

[redbird]

I think it's sensical, certainly. And the thread grown from that, between you and brooksmoses, is also sensical, and informative. Thank you.

[thastygliax.livejournal.com]

That which is other, which is different, that brings out an ability to be aware of related things in myself.

I seem to recall something from my single college philosophy class that even in the most rigidly existential worldview, the Other was essential to identity.

But in your case, you contain multitudes, so have acquired a legion of Others... ;-) Confuses the hell out of people at times, but we like you that way.

You forgot a few

[the-real-diana.livejournal.com]

You are beautiful, you are very kind to everyone, you helped a poor girl pass fizzics, you always listened when a friend needed you, you are loving and accepting of people the way they are, you are full of love, you have an independant spirit, you stand up for people in need and I am really happy that we found each other again!

Re: You forgot a few

[kiya]

Erble. *blushily*


Glad I found you again too.