Ten years or so ago, I used to have more distinct personas in my head than I do now. Back when I did, they roughly speaking exemplified distinct emotional stances. One was more compassionate, one more ruthless, one more frightened, one more loving, and so forth. This wasn’t quite the way Eliezer writes Harry, but shares some key elements.
My model of what’s going on, based on no reliable data, is that there’s a transition period between when a particular stance is altogether unacceptable to the ruling coalition in my head (aka “me”), and when that stance has more-or-less seamlessly joined that coalition (aka “I’ve changed”), during which it is acceptable but not fully internalized and I therefore tag it as “someone else”.
As I say, I don’t do this nearly so much anymore. That’s not to say I’m consistent; I’m not, especially. In particular, I often observe that the way I think and feel is modified by priming effects. I think about problems differently after spending a while reading LW, for example.
What’s changed is that there’s no sense of a separate identity along with that. To put it in MoR terms: my experience is not of having a Slytherin in my head distinct from me that sometimes thinks things, but rather of sometimes thinking things in a more Slytheriny sort of way.
That suggests to me that maybe the difference is in how rigidly I define the boundaries of “the sorts of things I think”.
Ten years or so ago, I used to have more distinct personas in my head than I do now.
Back when I did, they roughly speaking exemplified distinct emotional stances.
One was more compassionate, one more ruthless, one more frightened, one more loving, and so forth.
This wasn’t quite the way Eliezer writes Harry, but shares some key elements.
My model of what’s going on, based on no reliable data, is that there’s a transition period between when a particular stance is altogether unacceptable to the ruling coalition in my head (aka “me”), and when that stance has more-or-less seamlessly joined that coalition (aka “I’ve changed”), during which it is acceptable but not fully internalized and I therefore tag it as “someone else”.
As I say, I don’t do this nearly so much anymore. That’s not to say I’m consistent; I’m not, especially. In particular, I often observe that the way I think and feel is modified by priming effects. I think about problems differently after spending a while reading LW, for example.
What’s changed is that there’s no sense of a separate identity along with that. To put it in MoR terms: my experience is not of having a Slytherin in my head distinct from me that sometimes thinks things, but rather of sometimes thinking things in a more Slytheriny sort of way.
That suggests to me that maybe the difference is in how rigidly I define the boundaries of “the sorts of things I think”.