(no subject)

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

"The style of resolution of inner conflicts is one of the strongest features of personality.

It is a common myth that each person is a unity, a kind of unitary organization with a will of its own. Quite the contrary, a person is an amalgamation of many subpersons, all with wills of their own. The "subpeople" are considerably less complex than the overall person, and consequently they have much less of a problem with internal discipline. If they are themselves split, probably their component parts are so simple that they are of a single mind-- and if not, you can continue down the line. This hierarchical organization of personality is something that does not much please our sense of dignity, but there is much evidence for it."

-from Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, specifically in a section written by Douglas Hofstadter (physicist, and professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, History, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology)

(x-posted)

Comments

[kasiya-system.livejournal.com]

subpeople?

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

It is a rather silly term for us, isn't it? Then again, he could have just as well used "personality" or "persona", but I suppose what he's getting at are each separate will is a person, not just a personality or a persona, but he needed a simple term to designate it as different from the sum of all the people in an entire body. Perhaps instead of person and subperson, it could have been system and person, but considering the entire book has this one paragraph expounding on Hofstadter's theory, and the rest is on general about the various theories concerning the mind, I doubt he couldn't really go into it.

[kasiya-system.livejournal.com]

It does make it sound as if he's saying there is one person who is the "totality" of everyone, as one. And while not as one, the others who are not this "totality" are lesser people.

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

Though he seems pretty resolute with his idea that no human being is unitary, I generally disagree. He can't possible assume everyone is multiple to some extent, just like one can't assume everyone is unitary. However, I find his description to be surprisingly close to how I describe my system, with its voluntary integrations and separations, kind of like a mental and psychological version of Voltron, heh.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Well, keep in mind this is supposed to apply to singlets.

Multiples, presumably, are people whose "subpeople" are much more complex and independent. This could be how natural multiplicity gets started.

[kasiya-system.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yes, could be. That's true.

[echoesnspectres.livejournal.com]

Multiples, presumably, are people whose "subpeople" are much more complex and independent. This could be how natural multiplicity gets started.

Is pretty much what we think. Walk-ins and such aside, human minds are fundamentally plural, and in some this is more pronounced than in others. We don't really believe there's any such thing as a "pure singleton". It's like with autistic traits; everyone has them, they're human.

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

This seems to be a rehash of the person as a gestalt entity, and not a direct reference to multiplicity except for systems in which the members consist of the separate sections that make up that whole.

There are also systems which are comprised multiple top-level gestalt entities. While the article may be of interest to the individuals, it may not be relevant to their multiplicity.

--Me/Us

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

A rehash? I was unaware that this theory was discussed prior to the late 1970's, and early 1980's. Where can I find more information on "the person as a gestalt entity"? Perhaps I was wrong, and I'm not multiple after all. Hrmmm.

Gestalt Entities

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

The idea that a person consists of a gestalt is an idea that's been present in Jungs ideas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung), such as the Shadow Self (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung#The_shadow) and the Anima & Animus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung#Anima_and_Animus). It is also present in Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego). You can also find this idea in some religious systems. The christian god is a gestalt entity consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They are all, however, supposed to be the same person. A lot of these theories only sometimes acknowledge the concept of liminal communication between these pieces, at least, without extensive work.

That should be differentiated from a system in which the persons in a body aren't conflicting subpersons in a gestalt person's collective "self". As he points out, there is a simplification, and down the line the people become more and more simplified, perhaps to a single emotion or motivation. Some systems don't operate this way, and the members are as complex as anyone in a single body. They are separate beings, in a single location. Although these terms are subjective, the differences can be very real in a practical sense. Of course, since people are content to allow themselves to be shaped by the limitations placed upon them, by society, and the psychiatric profession, it doesn't always happen. In other systems, fragments, or subpersons are allowed to grow and develop themselves so they are no longer simplified "parts" of some nebulous "whole". Still other systems, however, may operate within this paradigm, even while considering themselves entirely separate beings, for reasons all their own.

There's a lot of room for movement.

I wouldn't know whether or not you guys are multiple. Even if I had the secret to all multiplicity, I could only work from the information that you present, which is, by the very nature of our communication, grossly inadequate.

--Me

Re: Gestalt Entities

[echoesnspectres.livejournal.com]

The christian god is a gestalt entity consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They are all, however, supposed to be the same person.

The same being (or "substance", in a non-physics-related sense), not the same person; three persons, one being. It's odd, and ironic, that many christians are opposed to, or uncomfortable with, the idea of natural or healthy plurality, while their own theologians wrote up that gloriously impossible affirmation (http://www.ccel.org/creeds/athanasian.creed.html) of something beyond the paradigm of one person per being.

(I'm not saying this in any theological capacity, but merely to clear up the terminology.)

Re: Gestalt Entities

[echoesnspectres.livejournal.com]

Hm, to reply to our last comment, of course plenty of multiples interpret themselves in terms of "more than one being per body", which may go further than that.

[pengke.livejournal.com]

They're not talking about multiplicity. They're talking about the different aspects of someone's personality and how they can be in conflict. This guy is just taking it a step further and theorizing that everyone makes committee decisions with themselves.

I don't get why multiples always jump on these things. It's like pointing to inner child work as an example of multiplicity. They're not the same things. Even when the psychologists and philosophers are talking about multiplicity, they always get it wrong and turn it back into everyone in the system really being part of a whole which reflects to people having many aspects of their personality.

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Yes. I often find that I am not 'of a single mind' - that my will and my desires conflict; that my judgement of people and circumstances varies according to my mood or perspective; that it is difficult to determine a course of action and hold to it without wavering. But this has nothing to do with my Kin, who have their own inner conflicts to resolve.

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

The paragraph also suggests that even the various people in a system can also have their own inner conflicts, which may or may not split them, and divide they themselves into multiplies-- at least, that's how I interpreted. If I'm sincerely wrong and have read too much into this paragraph, then I can simply delete it.

You're missing the import of what he's saying

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

He saying he isn't split off, or a part of a gestalt whole. He's saying he is his own gestalt whole. He's saying he isn't a subperson to a person, but a person himself.

You don't have to believe him, or delete anything, but try to understand what he and others have been communicating. This paragraph works for you, great. It doesn't work for him, or others, also great. You thought some people might find it relevant, and some might. It looks like at least one median has found it semi-relevant. There's no need to delete it.

--Me

Re: You're missing the import of what he's saying

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Kír says thank you; that that's exactly what he meant.

I can say this: there's many times when all three of us are solidly in agreement, and at such times we're still three distinct persons - as much as any three people in separate bodies would be. There's times we have to work out a compromise, like any three people in separate bodies. And there's times when compromise doesn't happen, so one, two, or all three of us don't get what we want, and we have to hash it out and make up later.... like any three people in separate bodies.

Yeah, I've got subroutines, subpersons, the traditional Id/Ego/Superego thing or the Transactional Analysis Child/Parent/Adult thing, or the Jungian Anima/Animus thing, and archetypes, literary muses, fictional characters of my own devising that sometimes do things I didn't expect... all that. But none of that has anything to do with my 'brothers', who've got 'all that' of their own.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Remind me one of these days to write up my rantlet on my personal experience being a very complex singlet and being misinterpreted (miscast?) as multiple.

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

Hrmm, I didn't get that from that paragraph. He didn't say anything about "aspects" of personality, he specifically referred to "people" with "wills of their own".

Though I disagree with his generalization that ALL people work in this gestalt formation, I do believe there's more than one type of multiple system out there, just like there are various type of unitary personalities. Or are you suggesting perhaps there is only one true form of multiplicity? If so, what is it?

[kiya]

For what it's worth, we'd consider the quoted bit a decent, if a touch pejorative, description of our (median-type) system. We're probably a touch more distinct, complex, and individual than Hofstadter would expect, but as a model it's not wrong, just a touch on the "insufficiently correct" side.

I strongly suspect that each of us is slightly more . . . focused? than we'd be independently; whether this is our nature or simply because others handle things we'd otherwise have to do individually I don't know. I suspect some of both; I mean, if Silver didn't have the rest of us she'd need to learn to talk.

I thought as much

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

However, I didn't want to say, because I'm far from an expert. It did seem to have a similar gist to it, as the experience medians have described.

--Me

[pengke.livejournal.com]

He's quite clearly talking about subsets of a whole person. He's not talking about actual people. The wills of their own is not referring to people with a consciousness of their own but instead is referring back to his comment about conflict. It is similar to the idea of the subconscious mind being able to act and coordinate complex behavior without involving conscious thought.

[thehumangame.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge Hofstadter never actually talks about multiplicity (though he does come quite a bit closer than this in some of his other books). Daniel Dennett (the other author of The Mind's I) does talk about multiplicity elsewhere, in Speaking for Ourselves (http://pp.kpnet.fi/seirioa/cdenn/speaking.htm) and also in the 13th chapter of Consciousness Explained. The chapter in Consciousness Explained is probably worth reading: it's a lot better than the earlier Speaking, and to my mind it's one of the few acceptable philosophical considerations of multiplicity from a materialist viewpoint (i.e. not involving souls).

Cognitive scientists in general are probably going to have the view of the mind as recursively decomposable from modules into submodules into subsubmodules, because the field is greatly influenced by computer science and that is how computer programs look. This is even more true of artificial intelligence researchers like Hofstadter.

[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

On the whole, I believe this post has generated the type of discussion I was seeking on the topic concerning multiplicity and medians. I apologize to anyone this may have annoyed, but I did find the quote relevant to my situation, and I am fairly new at my situation, since I've only begun openly identifying and researching multiplicity for a little less than two years. I picked up Hofstadter's book at a friend's place and was intrigued with the ideas he presented. Thank you for the helpful responses.