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In other conversations about gender identity . . .
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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.
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.
From:
Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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
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]
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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.)
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
"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.
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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
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.
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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.)
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
. . . 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.
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
And, yes, I can very much see why you'd find that deeply satisfying. :)
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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.
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
(This message brought to you by, among other things, Animal from the Muppets.)
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
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.