Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m somewhere near the beginning of the journey and thinking about taking on more risk in what I chose to solve, so the data point of your experience is a valuable waypoint marker.
Essays are highly bandwidth constrained, and most advice is wrong, but maybe this framework helps even slightly:
I think, in a subtle way, your interpretation of IFS differs from mine. When there’s disagreement among the sub agents as to what to do, that causes confusion in me, or more often, months later, I realize I was acting totally bizarrely. But in that moment of disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with the subagents, they’re just disagreeing. No subagent needs to be convinced. Nothing needs to be enlightened. There’s no poisoned self. There is just the entire self, composed of agents, and right now, in this very moment, I notice that the agents disagree.
Even when you switch to the metaphor of healing the agent, it’s still a nicer way of saying that it’s broken, flawed, and there’s something wrong with it. Maybe, maybe not.
But I don’t think this is often a viable approach to it. I like what Venkatesh Rao wrote:
So can human beings change or not? I like to think about this question in terms of Lego blocks. We are, each of us, particular accidental constructions made up of a set of blocks. The whole thing can be torn down and rebuilt into a different design, but you can’t really do anything to change the building blocks. The building blocks of personality are abstract consequences of the more literal building blocks at the biological level, genes. They constrain, but do not define, who we are or can be.
Maybe your agents are what they are. Some part of you is very ambitious. Another part of you, maybe even the rest of the quorum of parts, hates all the stress and intensity. Maybe, in Rao’s metaphor, just as blocks can be reassembled into something new, you can negotiate a new agreement between the agents. But like the blocks, in my experience, I have never once been able to change any of my parts. So far, I have only been able to ask them what I should feel, to listen very closely, and to negotiate some new behavior to try instead when this behavior fails.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m somewhere near the beginning of the journey and thinking about taking on more risk in what I chose to solve, so the data point of your experience is a valuable waypoint marker.
Essays are highly bandwidth constrained, and most advice is wrong, but maybe this framework helps even slightly:
I think, in a subtle way, your interpretation of IFS differs from mine. When there’s disagreement among the sub agents as to what to do, that causes confusion in me, or more often, months later, I realize I was acting totally bizarrely. But in that moment of disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with the subagents, they’re just disagreeing. No subagent needs to be convinced. Nothing needs to be enlightened. There’s no poisoned self. There is just the entire self, composed of agents, and right now, in this very moment, I notice that the agents disagree.
Even when you switch to the metaphor of healing the agent, it’s still a nicer way of saying that it’s broken, flawed, and there’s something wrong with it. Maybe, maybe not.
But I don’t think this is often a viable approach to it. I like what Venkatesh Rao wrote:
Maybe your agents are what they are. Some part of you is very ambitious. Another part of you, maybe even the rest of the quorum of parts, hates all the stress and intensity. Maybe, in Rao’s metaphor, just as blocks can be reassembled into something new, you can negotiate a new agreement between the agents. But like the blocks, in my experience, I have never once been able to change any of my parts. So far, I have only been able to ask them what I should feel, to listen very closely, and to negotiate some new behavior to try instead when this behavior fails.