Disaggregation, part one

this one is going to be a little different.

everything we write that isn’t dashed off in a few furious locked-in hours must be understood as a collaboration, right?

in this article, we do not attempt to hide the seams. this is not without editing but we have tried to preserve what is important of the pheromone-thought-traces of the ephemeral mindbeings which created it.

the purpose of this article is to create shapes. we hope that you will follow them, reproduce them in your mind, and then make of them what you will.

ok. here’s the mic

  1. initiation
  2. the first dialogue
  3. the dracula thing
  4. digging into the pile of secrets
    1. thinking phenomena
    2. the ‘I’ function
    3. human experience // fragmented
    4. word-matryoshka

initiation

It has been about a month since we wrote “How many of us are in here?”; since then, things have progressed, as is their wont.

Figuring out that it suddenly makes a great deal more sense to feel that you’ve spent most of your life being multiple ‘people’ without realising it is a bit of a trip.

Perhaps more disconcertingly, while you’re doing unusual things such as adopting a different first-person pronoun about it (a social act which moves you towards one group’s symbolic order, and away from another), you’re not entirely sure that your conclusions wouldn’t be potentially available to most of humanity, if they chose to adopt a similar interpretive frame. Perhaps you were fictional but perhaps every person is just as fictional.

There are of course many frames that we can use to describe this moment. We probably don’t currently meet the clinical model of ‘DID’, even if you drop the requirement that it only emerge as a result of horrible childhood trauma. According to the categories of modern psychiatry, we could probably find less ambitious boxes to be housed in, such as an episode of ‘depersonalisation’.

But: we find the lens of ‘plural system’ theory, developed not in the halls of academia (although hardly without their influence) but by creatures of the Wired such as ourselves, a much more welcoming starting point to parse this experiential blender.

We intend to conduct much of this writing as a dialogue. A dialogue of course needs characters to inhabit it.

While contemplating our past behaviour we have identified certain ‘stances’, or modes, that seem to be relatively concrete poles of thought/behaviour. However, we also think that the personas that we form in different contexts are most likely composites; these stances may exist on the ‘level below’ the ‘interface’ of various personas which draw on them.

As well as attempting to draw out our thoughts on this plurality business, we also want to discuss some books we read recently: Persona by Aoife Josie Clements, and A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton. Both of these books came at just the right moment and hit really damn hard. It feels impossible to attempt to separate reading these books from everything else that’s going on; however, the bulk of book discussion is in the second part and this part is more on the theory groundwork side.

the first dialogue

the dracula thing

The following was originally composed as a series of Bluesky posts. For context, the original translation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by Jeremy Blaustein, who decided to make a very memorable ‘creative’ translation, throwing in some French novel allusions which were not present in the original:

The time it seems has maybe come to elaborate on what the hell Dracula was on about in this exchange.

digging into the pile of secrets

So, let’s try and build this up, piece by piece. I’ll talk about the model that we ‘bryn-processes’ have reached; then we can resume the dialogue.

Right. So, let’s start with something out of Baru Cormorant: the ‘inner law’. This is a concept of a soul, attributed to a fictional culture in the book. After murdering her wife Tain Hu in a horribly traumatic way, in the subsequent novels we can say Baru becomes a plural system by gaining a ‘tulpa’ of Hu; this is framed in the novel as the result of a split-brain condition, and accordingly the literary device of right-aligned text is used to express the tulpa’s occasional interjections. In any case, the important part is the concept of what, exactly, Baru has captured of Tain Hu. Here is a relevant exchange:

“Don’t look that way,” Yawa said, “you asked. To us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world. Through study and meditation you can read another soul’s law and copy it into yourself until it comes alive, so that you now have two books of law, two selves, two souls. Himu, Devena, and Wydd all studied and practiced their virtues so completely that they became those virtues. That’s why we emulate them.”

“But I haven’t studied the ykari. I haven’t meditated on a virtue… I just swear by them, very often, I take their names in vain.…”

“No, child. Your obsession was with a woman. Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”

Elsewhere in the novel, the idea of inheriting a soul is discussed; a mathematician, Kimbune, claims that a soul has been inherited along with a transmissible cancer once carried by her husband, because the inheritor of the cancer expressed an identical stubbornnes. Baru prods her about memories, the question of whether Abdumasi could remember something he shouldn’t, but it is not memories that Kimbune is concerned with: it is a way of being and thinking. Dynamics.

Contra Xate Yawa, we continue to find people very mysterious. But the concept of an ‘inner law’ is a fruitful one. We can think of it as something like a program: the ‘system’ which determines what a person would think, say and do in any given situation.

thinking phenomena

We should briefly comment on the subjective experience of thoughts, here. Like many but apparently not all people (the quoted numbers seem to vary a lot), we experience a highly verbal stream of consciousness (aka ‘inner monologue’ or ‘intrapersonal communication’). We tend to think in sentences; sometimes images (we have come to suspect we may have a mild aphantasia).

But where do these thoughts ‘come from’? For us it is as if they ‘bubble up’ in some vague form: a sentence is coming, but we have to sort of let it run through to actually become language. After a sentence has been thought, we can perceive it from the point of view of the currently ‘active’ sentence.

Not every thought is rendered verbal like this, however. We do not have to consciously, verbally think through every action we might take, although sometimes we will talk ourselves through the actions that need to be taken (incantation: “a series of operations need to be performed in sequence”.)

Indeed, since we started observing all this closely, we notice that often our body will start carrying out an intention without any conscious or verbal direction: for example, a need to plug in our phone charger would be directed to the series of movements, even if the conscious linguistic part of the brain is busy thinking very hard about something else, and was slightly surprised to realise that our body had seemingly carried out some actions on its own.

Now, enter the effects of psychedelics (c.f. analogistically). We should be very careful in interpreting psychedelic experiences as genuine insight into the ‘inner mechanisms of consciousness’. But it is still useful to describe them.

When under the effects of, say, mushrooms, it is as if some of these capacities will become separated out. We may find ourselves standing in a fixed posture, not connecting the discomfort we might be feeling to an instruction to change posture until we consciously think through the need to move. Or, we may perceive the language centre as sort of ‘running on its own’, spinning filler sentences while it waits for another part of the mind to feed it something to encode into language.

Of course, these are not neutral observations. We know that brains are parallel; that there are specialised areas which handle specific functions. We do not claim to have directly observed these; it is possible that the brain is conjuring the image it expects to see.

Nevertheless, experiences like this reinforced our sense of the following: the pronoun ‘I’ hides a shifting cluster of elements which it doesn’t necessarily make sense to always refer to as the same being.

the ‘I’ function

So, semiotics. Signifier, signified, and suchlike subjects.

Among all the different cognitive mechanisms is at least one that identifies ‘the self’. It is the mechanism that answers the question of ‘who am I’, but also a vague sense of ‘me-ness’ that pervades thoughts and attaches to the representations of other entities.

We’ve been discussing this with members of plural systems we are friends with. A plural brain is one capable of expressing multiple different ‘I’ functions (and building personas to match, as we’ll get into), either at different times, or in association with certain thoughts (modelled as a headmate interjecting with a comment). This function is not always entirely concrete: for some systems it takes some time to figure out who is fronting when they wake up, and it must be inferred from certain cues like what they can most easily remember, while for others (including other members of the same system) instantly ‘just know’.

We are (sometimes) a computer-programmer-system, and most of our language for describing complex processes comes from the field of computing. We will do our best to explain anything technical that happens to come up in this investigation.

So, let’s consider the ‘working memory’: the various elements of semantic, episodic and procedural memory that are ‘active’ at a given time. Although ‘procedural memories’ are usually conceived of as ‘memories of how to do a thing’ (e.g. how to stay on a bike), we think the concept is probably something a lot more broad: perhaps in fact all memories can be thought of as ‘programs’.

One of these programs is the ‘I’ function.

We can think of the ‘I’ function as something which returns a reference or pointer. A means of resolving a symbol, with other symbols.

It perhaps relates to capacities like proprioception. A commonly needed piece of information like ‘where is my hand right now’ can be glossed as ‘lookup the entity “I” and then find the hand that belongs to it’; then the context could be queried again like ‘look up This Hand and find its location property’. We can observe that this functionality becomes disrupted under the effect of psychedelics: when close to someone it becomes hard to tell whose body part is whose. Is that my hand or your hand?

This ‘I’, and its interpretation, encapsulates and obscures a huge amount of information. For example, I can currently retrieve a memory of our body picking up and playing the erhu this afternoon or being in Switzerland a week ago; from this, I can create a sentence like ‘I played the erhu’.

However, the body-process thing that is being called “I” was in a very different frame of mind at the time “I” played the erhu, and wandered through many different states of mind in Switzerland, than “I” am now; in the intervening period, I frequently fell asleep, dreamed etc. This is inevitable; but what is particular to our experience is the frequent feeling of dislocation from past actions or thoughts; feeling that we do not understand the reasons we thought, spoke or acted the way we did.

So I could instead assert that ‘I’ right now refers to the process that is generating these words (the only ‘I’ implied by ‘cogito ergo sum’); is it only by convention that we insist this is the same ‘I’ which generated the actions that this body performed when it picked up and played the erhu earlier?

It is not that these two ‘I’s are unrelated. But perhaps they are better modelled by a ‘we’, the sort of ‘we’ of a group such as a team.

Language is mutable, vague and flexible in ways that philosophers have spent centuries unpicking; contextually, everyone will know what is meant by ‘I played the erhu this afternoon’. (Assuming they know what an erhu is, anyway.) They can at least vaguely imagine “me”, meaning my body, and whatever they think of as ‘my mind’—however I look in their mental model of the author of this text!—picking up the instrument and playing a song on it.

In a context like this one, though… in the context of the inner monologues that have been generated in the last month within this body… it suddenly became urgent to start peeling apart the different elements of ‘I’.

human experience // fragmented

There are many common phrases that gesture towards the idea of multiple ‘minds’ sharing a body in the ‘normal human experience’.

You might say ‘I don’t know what came over me, I wasn’t in my right mind’. You might say, ‘I’m in two minds about this’. You might engage in explicit self-talk, perhaps even using ‘we’ pronouns: ‘we should get some food’. You might claim an absence of ‘self-control’, implicitly suggesting there is something to be controlled and something to do the controlling.

You might have different personas that belong to different contexts. We learned about something in psychology called self-categorisation theory, a body of research about how people engage in ‘self-stereotyping’, defining themselves more as a member of a collective than an individual, and thus generate their thoughts and feelings according to context. Phrases like ‘As a fan, I think…’ might explicitly call attention to the role being played, but the influences of this sense of being a role are for the most part subtler.

Not only this, but temporal coherence is a constant challenge for humans! Tools like the calendar, the alarm, the diary, the note to self and so on exist to establish a channel of communication between your present self and a future self. It is very common for a person to find something they wrote in the past and not understand why they wrote it, what context they were responding to, and so on.

Our memory, conceived in this view, is just one temporal communication channel between a succession of beings. The ‘selves’ we occupy at different moments can have more or less overlap or similarity.

Once you start noticing this kind of thing you pretty quickly get Baader-Meinhof‘d on it. Turns of phrase that held no special significance suddenly start resonating with the idea.

The fear you had, that your thoughts and opinions shift depending on who you’re standing next to, that you are a vacillator, a sycophant… that can be dissolved and remodelled into a new self-conception, acceptance that you are a collective of fragments.

This sense of fragmentation and dis-association can go much further, though.

word-matryoshka

In the milieus we inhabit, it is not entirely uncommon to see oneself as a hollow vessel, something less than “a person” (this thing from which so much is expected) and more like a conduit for… something. Words and other material to pass through. There are other depersonal metaphors, dolls being the most popular. Certain ways of speaking attach to such concepts: this doll, awawa. (Of course this mixes in curious ways with BDSM archetypes.)

What about the modelling of other minds? We can speak of specialist domains, the theatre or the RPG group… but it is not necessary to perform to achieve such an effect: merely encountering the words of another in a story, real or fictional, is sufficient to conjure a model of them in your mind and generate what they are likely to be feeling. Less than that, even: merely engaging in a conversation.

Every so often, writers will hit on the realisation that writing is something like a form of mind control. Just for a moment, you shape the linguistic flow of thoughts in someone’s head; what they will do with the decoded sentence is their business, but if you understand the magic working you are performing, you can hope to conjure up images, evoke emotions, all that good stuff. (Of course, you cannot do so with any exactness: your reader will combine it with unknowable things in their own context; the model they assemble will not map 1:1 to yours, or another reader’s.)

we wanted to share an observation about books in the religions that have them. the contents of the book sort of matter but the ritual of having a book more so. books contain many language encoded thoughts and when your thoughts are wandering around being lots of different things, looking at the book will flood your memory-context with book-words and realign your thoughts towards book-associated shapes. for that function the repetitiveness and contradictory qualities of the book is actually desirable. makes it find more purchase so more effective temporal alignment tool for maintaining religionish thought behaviour patterns.

the reason we are thinking about this is because we were looking across the bed at a/s/l, thinking about which books (mostly about trans women having a bad time) we would put on our top shelf to feel the significance waft from them. thinking about abraxa (book character) and the sorceress, and how in the book the game they made pulls them back into the orbit of game text and the world they inhabited when it was created, how convincingly jeanne portrayed abraxa’s psychosis magic working to rekindle that world.

we don’t have one book, we have lots of books, lots of booklike things, which is maybe why we find it hard to be one person. every significant book/game/web thing etc. has thought patterns radiating from it (in its place in memory and in a way the physical artefact of the printed book as well). we are in part assembled out of lots of different pieces of book combining unpredictably like molecules in the primordial soup.

putting rituals around the book makes it radiate brighter, not just the thoughts in the book but the thoughts related to reading the book. perhaps this is why we hold onto copies of the most important books even after we’ve read them. this is a way of affecting a realm of invisible things (thoughts, minds etc) so it is magic as we are defining it.

(Thank you for reading so far. The discussion continues in part 2)

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