Self and identity

“Supple, skillful selfing makes for satisfying, successful interactions. Firm and fluid othering enables us to play with the self/other boundary—whose interpenetrating nebulosity and pattern become a source of amusement. We can co-construct our lives as art projects in the shared space of meaningness, not inside or outside, but between and surrounding and pervading us.”
Here is a collage of frameworks for thinking about self and identity! Some of them are interoperable, and some may be mutually exclusive. This list isn’t exhaustive, and I don’t have a fully coherent and satisfying framework to present, and that’s not surprising. In trying to understand a system from within the system, while using the system—as Alan Watts said, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
I hope that this collage is useful on the object level, for disrupting stuck patterns of thought that are causing suffering. If you are experiencing tension around, “What kind of a self am I?” it may help to reconsider, “What kind of a thing even is a self?” I also hope it’s useful on the meta level, for exercising the muscle of flexible perspective-shifting.

Self as dynamic process

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”

– Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

One way of viewing the self focuses on the parts that don’t change. I was born at a particular place and time, and all my thoughts percolate through one specific brain, and I have a single unique identifying number that I put on official documents. Of course, everyone recognizes that aspects of ourselves change over time – we grow taller, we learn, we take on different roles in society throughout our lives.

There’s an interesting kind of shift that’s possible, which involves changing the focus from the static parts of self, to the dynamic processes of selfing. What would it mean to think of yourself as a verb?

It’s different than saying, “This is who I am, and this is what I do,” because that viewpoint puts my changing actions out there, while potentially still keeping an unchanging self inside here.

Do you identify more with one page of a flipbook, or the story it’s telling?

Do you identify more with a point on a graph, or the shape of the unfolding line?

It’s not either/or, because there are both static and dynamic aspects of self. It’s more a question of, what’s in the foreground, and what’s in the background? Can you shift your focus between them?

Self as pattern

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

– Norbert Wiener

This idea is related to the previous one, and also somewhat different. You could identify as static stuff, or stuff in motion, and then there’s another meta level shift that’s possible, to identifying with a pattern of movement, action, and change.

Self as interaction

Dan Siegel defines mind as “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us”. We shape our surrounding physical, cultural, and social environment, and are shaped by it in turn, or as Gregory Bateson wrote, “The river molds the banks and the banks guide the river.”

“I realized if someone asked me to define the shoreline but insisted, is it the water or the sand, I would have to say the shore is both sand and sea. You can’t limit our understanding of the coastline to insist it’s one or the other. I started thinking, maybe the mind is like the coastline—some inner and inter process. Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind.

– Dan Siegel

Try on different selves for size

Some people say that you should keep your identity small. Others recommend keeping it large.

Ken Simler suggests the possibility of reaching a Zen wraparound fusion of largeness and smallness of identities, and offers a model for varying your self-concept strategically. (Also check out his essay on “Boundaries of Your Body“.)

You may also want to try on Open Individualism, or the wide identification of self.

David Chapman considers the self to be “intermittently continuing“, which he describes as “An optimistic view of the self as incoherent, but not non-existent, and not necessarily problematic.”

While navigating this question, you may want to craft your identity carefully and strategically (Less Wrong links).

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