A human as multiple persons

In this article Dan Polansky develops the thesis that it may be of advantage to model or imagine a human as multiple persons or subpersons, or multiple agencies with competing behavior styles or objectives. A related hypothesis is that these multiple persons are created and switched by a hidden 1-deep-overperson; on a more creative and increasingly less testable view, there is an even more hidden 2-deep-overperson controlling the 1-deep-overperson, etc. This may be one of the starting points or inputs into a theory of sincerity.

The organization of sections is rather haphazard.

This article contains multiple plot spoiler alerts; one may avoid reading certain sections if one wants to have full enjoyment of certain books or movies.

Since the ideas may appear to be rather unusual, at least to the popular mind, let us be inspired by Niels Bohr's adage: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

Multi-component vs. multi-person mind

To state that the mind is not an indivisible homogeneous object, meaning that it is not as if an accumulation of still water, seems almost tautological. Thus, there being some components or parts of the mind seems indisputable. What is here investigated is a stronger claim, namely that some entities within the mind can be likened to complete persons. These persons share memory, but do not completely share goals and manners of external self-expression.

Desire or urge vs. will

The disunited character of the mind and behavior is apparent in the contrast between 1) desire or urge and 2) will. Thus, one may have decided to stop smoking cigarettes and is trying to use one's will to ensure that abstinence, but a desire or urge to smoke is stronger and the human smokes despite the resolution/previous decision to stop smoking. Thus, the person as a whole appears to itself as multiple struggling agencies or subpersons. This contrast appears to be universal human experience, not something peculiar to some special types of personalities.

Poorly understand urge

A person may feel an urge to do something without knowing why, or without being able to state the larger goal to be achieved by the action. That is suggestive of there being a deliberative or decision-making entity in the mind producing the urge, whereas the foreground mind, or the conscious self, receives that urge as an unexplained input. This again points to multi-person or multi-agency model of a mind or self.

Commanding self-talk and self-control

Some people happen to say out loud things like, "Martin, stop now!", or "Paula, pay attention!", talking to themselves. It is not a usual social behavior, but seems not very rare either. It suggests a mapping to Berne's parent and child ego states: it is the parent component of the mind or the self that issues the command to the child component; what the role of Berne's adult ego state would be is unclear.

The commanding role play can go beyond the use of words. One can for instance clap hands as a reinforcement of a command. One can even issue a slap in the face as a kind of a negative (down-regulating) feedback to previously occurring behavior intended to be avoided. The entity being commanded can be thought of as a more spontaneous child self; some literature uses the metaphor of an "inner elephant".

The commanding self-talk or even clapping of hands and other stronger expressions of the will would seem to be able to lead to something like a self-control. One could use these kind of de facto theatrical performances (talk to oneself, clapping hands, directively pointing a finger) to affect the behavior of the component that can be likened to a child. One can use different emotional tones for talking to the putative child, such as pleading vs. threatening or commanding. Each person can try out to what extent this method achieves anything like a desirable result.

It seems that for the concept of self-control to have any meaning, the self has to be understood as consisting of at least two parts, the controlled and the controller. The degree of self-control can be examined by assigning oneself various nominally simple tasks and seeing how far one gets, such as select an object and keep staring at that object while counting from 1 to 100.

Humans as actors

It seems that most humans are as-if theatrical actors, good ones or less good ones. A human can take on slightly different personas if they try hard enough: at a minimum, many can switch languages, but also tone or pitch of the voice and posture. The persona taken on depends on the social role and who the other parties are. Thus, one talks different to a child and different to a spouse, as if taking on different personas. In this deliberation, the human occupies one particular role/persona/mask in any given point in time. A human can expressly choose to change the persona/mask, but this is liable to appear aberrant or deviant to those who know the human; they are liable to think something's wrong. When such a change occurs in a theatrical setting, the human has as if a special license to put on a different persona/mask, and the spectators have no need to suspect that something wrong is happening.

One can pick personas from movies and videos. Thus, one can notice peculiar manner or hand motion by a particular person on video and get into that skin or persona, as it were. (The terminology of "persona" still needs a clarification.) At the same time, some gestures can be innate and have an innate meaning.

The mask metaphor

The persona that a person behaviorally puts on the face, as it were, can be likened to a mask worn over a face, hiding the true emotion expression on the face. The mask metaphor was used in the Mask movie, starring Jim Carrey. In the movie, the main character, by putting a green mask on his face, got a whole new high-energy, self-confident personality, or what I refer here to as persona. The term "persona" refers to some concept in Wikipedia, but it is not clear whether this is the same idea.

The mask metaphor is to some extent captured in the Czech idiom "strhnout někomu masku".

Links:

• Wikipedia: Persona

Labels for the putative persons or personas

One can think of the possible personas or inner persons using labels pointing to various roles or dispositions, e.g. crybaby, coward, inspector, reviewer, commander, slave, serf, lackey, inquisitor, comedian, etc. This provides a much richer metaphorical vocabulary than Berne's parent, child and adult.

Sailors struggling for the control of a ship

One metaphorical model is one of a human mind, or its unconscious part, featuring multiple sailors competing for the control of a ship. They are on the same ship and have to find a way of working together. They may as if struggle over the steering wheel.

When one knows multiple languages, one cannot use all of them at the same time. Moreover, one cannot think in all of them at the same time. One can imagine that learning the languages produced something like different persons, one per language, struggling to control the outward verbal interface and the internal self-talk language; however, this may be merely a wild philosophical imagination.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud identified in the mind a structure of three components, ego, superego, and id. Since I do not remember much about it, and do not feel like delving into it, I leave it here as a reminder or a placeholder. Superego could be something like an entity controlling or regulating the other entities.

Links:

• Wikipedia: Id, ego and super-ego

Eric Berne

In Eric Berne's transactional analysis involves the concepts of parent, child and adult. It is not wholly clear whether they are to be understood as different subpersons or rather as ego states from which a person interacts with another person.

It is not clear whether any mapping from Berne's three states to Freud's three components can meaningfully be attempted.

Links:

• Wikipedia: Transactional analysis

Carl G. Jung

The Jungian concepts of collective unconscious, perhaps demons, and anima and animus can have some bearing on a human being understood as multiple persons, or being in some way steered by person-like entities present somewhere in the background mind. This needs more research.

Links:

• Wikipedia: Collective unconscious
• Wikipedia: Anima and animus

Eugene Herrigel

In Eugene Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, there is the talk of "It aiming at and hitting the target" or similar. What, if anything, is "it"? It seems to be some kind of unontologized/undefined/unspecified entity in the mind or the brain, in some sense distinct from the main volitional person.

Dissociative disorder

Psychologists recognize conditions that they call dissociative disorders. They may involve something like a split personality. It is not clear how the experts determine whether this is a disorder or an adaptation, a feature to be used for the best outcome in relation to a chosen objective.

Links:

• Wikipedia: Dissociative disorder

ABBA

The idea that a human can be understood as multiple persons has penetrated the popular culture in a song by a hugely popular Swedish pop group ABBA. It was in the song Me and I. The lyrics brought together various items of culture. The lyrics is very suggestive overall.

Let us consider the following snippet:

Sometimes when I scream,

There's a voice in me that says,

"You shouldn't be so mean",

Taken literally, it means one agent or person screams and another agent or person tells them not to.

The following snippet suggests prevalence (being widespread):

I don't think I'm different or in any way unique,

Think about yourself for a minute

and you'll find the answer in it, everyone's a freak.

Of course, the author of the lyrics has the poetic license to suggest a thesis that is not thereby scientifically proven.

The items of culture brought together by the song:

• Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Sigmund Freud

Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a 1886 novella depicting a case of two personalities or persons in one human, one relatively nice and the other one nasty, acting at different times. However, this is a mere literary depiction, and has no force of a proof.

Links:

• Wikipedia: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Individual variation

This multi-person aspect may well be better developed in some people than others. Some kind of multi-person actor-like capability would well suit an agent of a secret service, e.g. Putin in Dresden in German Democratic Republic as a KGB agent.

Lawyers as multiple persons arguing with themselves

If there are people who are good at playing devil's advocate, as if arguing with themselves, they could make for good lawyers. What this may involve is even temporary emotional alignment with the opposing party, to facilitate argument discovery. A person who would be able as if to fork new personalities on the fly (as if a Unix-like operating system forking processes) could have an advantage; alternatively, the different personality type or philosophy types would already be latently there, merely waiting to be deployed in argument development. Thus, the person could have something like both an Aristotelian and Stoic in themselves. Possibly, these capacities could develop fully only after being exposed to different kinds of philosophy.

Stephen Covey mentions a notable, perhaps a Roman philosopher, who advises one to first develop arguments for the opposing party and only then for oneself.

Behaviorism

The idea of multiple persons coexisting, sometimes struggling to gain control of a human is generated without the tools available to the behaviorist methodology; it is largely based on imaginative speculation inspired by sources. It is therefore relevant to have a look at behaviorism and its merits.

Under the behaviorist psychological methodology (e.g. Skinner), one should limit statements in the field of psychology to things externally observable. Thus, one may observe that a human uttered "I am hungry" or that a human made a gesture, but one cannot observe that "P hopes for H at time T" since the propositional attitude of hope is not accessible directly by observation. Propositional attitudes like belief, knowledge and hope are one class of internal states of the mind that are not directly accessible by the external observer. Indeed, from the point of view of human autonomy and freedom, the idea that others should be able to read one's mind is disconcerting.

There is some merit in the on-the-safe-side approach of behaviorism; it reminds us that it is all too easy to invent a speculation and then defend it against all refutation. But for the purpose of all proto-scientific investigation, the stringency seems to go too far. Moreover, all thought, desire, will and dreams have to be excluded as out of scope, as well as hallucinations (but reports of them are verbal behavior); none of these entities are part of a properly scientific discourse. What remains is verbal behavior, facial expression, gestures, postures, other macroscopic behavior such as walking or running, etc. The language of behavior is preserved for rigorous scientific investigation.

However, in Popperian theory of science, a hypothesis trading in theoretical entities can still be scientific if it makes predictions in observational terms (here, behaviorist) that threaten a refutation of the hypothesis. Even if the posited multiple persons are not directly observable, behaviors suggestive of their being there are. However, to be properly scientific as much as possible, one should consider alternative explanations for the observed behaviors. For illustration, an example of a theoretical entity is the Mendelian gene, whose mapping to DNA sequences, as far as I know, is not established; but the Mendelian theory makes predictions concerning phenotypic signs of, say, peas, and there are observable, and if the behavior turns out different from what matches the Mendelian theory, there is a refutation.

Links:

• Wikipedia: Behaviorism

The Boss of it All

Warning: plot spoiler alert. The idea of humans acting toward people as actors is developed in the Danish film The Boss of It All directed by Lars von Trier. One of the main characters in the film is ostensively an actor, Christopher, but in fact he is not alone; arguably, the real boss Ravn is also an actor, and so is the Icelandic director e.g. with his claims of the alleged teaching of Edda about dealing with mere proxies.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia: The Boss of It All

Robert Pirsig

Warning: plot spoiler alert. In Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author develops the idea that, on his trip, there is not only himself in his brain but also something like a ghost called Phaedrus, his former self that was as if buried via electroconvulsive intervention. The ghost starts being awakened by Pirsig's visiting a place where Phaedrus used to live and work. In the end, the ghost seems to be reintegrated into the primary Pirsig's person during a crisis, leading to some kind of change of the tone of Pirsig's voice. However, this may be a novelist's license to some extent, to exaggerate and schematize. Be it as it may, the plot points to the idea that multiple persons can reside in a single human and struggle for control over that human. Pirsig had a schizophrenia diagnosis, and his being multiple persons would fit the popular understanding of that diagnosis as a split personality, although that does not match the technical use of the term.

Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen

The ability of an actor to switch to outwardly very different personality expressions including tone of voice is well exemplified in the spoken sketches of Rowan Atkinson, known around the world perhaps above all for his mostly silent role of Mr. Bean.

Another comic actor taking on very different personalities is Sacha Baron Cohen.

The hypothesis that theatrical and movie actors may develop psychological problems relating to their acting, including acting emotions, should be researched later. (There is no suggestion that this pertains to Rowan Atkinson; it bears on the subject of actors switching personalities as part of acting.)

Links:

• Rowan Atkinson: Toby the Devil - We Are Most Amused and Amazed, youtube.com
• Rowan Atkinson Live - Drunks in an Indian Restaurant, youtube.com
• Rowan Atkinson Live - Tom, Dick and Harry, youtube.com

Conversations with God

Religious people report to have something like a conversation with God. If so, there must be some person-like entity in the background mind (or psyche or unconscious) playing the role of God. Possibly, the person-like God entity is created or shaped by the 1-deep-overperson in response to external cultural stimuli.

Personal experience

Dan Polansky's experience since about 2003 is this (after reading Eric Berne): if I start talking to myself from a kind of parent role, say, father role, something like a child in me starts responding. I can praise the child, ask it why it did not do what it planned to do, scold it, etc. Whether this practice is safe is unclear. I do not do it often, but in rare occasions it can make a remarkable difference, e.g. when I need to find out why I am deferring a task for too long and failing to perform what I myself consider to be my duties. One technique is switching to different forms of address, depending on whether one wants to be a strict father or a kind mother. Is this some kind of theatrical play and nothing else? I don't know.

Evolutionary background

Taking evolutionary psychology as the starting point, one may ask whether a two-layered multi-person structure is too hard to discover in the design space for the Darwinian evolution by natural selection and whether there are tangible benefits, ultimately in terms of the reproduction of the Dawkinsian gene-selfish genes. At a minimum, a two-layer structure is better at creating a deception, a pretense. One may wonder whether there can be a spy-role-supporting biological adaptation, and why exactly do theatrical actors have their capability supported by the brain. And there is a counter-pretense: pretending that one believes the pretenses of others. There could even be something like an arms race of ever deeper pretenses, but this is a vague and poorly articulated idea.