Tags / 10 quotes from 1 source
#multiple-selves
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Multiple selves are possible in everyone
To put it in broader terms, the self is not a single thing, it is simply what the brain and body system does. If that’s so, then there is absolutely no reason in principle why the brain couldn’t do different things at different times. In that sense, as the philosopher Daniel…
From a singular I to a multiple we
The kind of extreme dissociation in DID may be rare, or even non-existent, but if the self lacks a fixed core and is flexible enough to in principle be multiple, then should we think of ourselves in ordinary life as having significant dimensions of multiplicity? Once the idea…
I contain multitudes
Although most people find the idea of multiple-personality disorder strange and alien, many, perhaps the majority, buy into a weaker idea of multiplicity. For instance, there is a reason why these lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ have become so widely quoted: Do I…
Postmodernism and the fragmented self
One of the most fashionable drivers behind the idea that we should all think of ourselves as multiple rather than singular is postmodernism. The nature of ‘postmodernism’ is hard to pin down, not least because it is in part a denial of the apparently old-fashioned idea that any…
Multiplicity is a spectrum
Could it not rather be the case that the extent to which we perceive ourselves as one or many is in fact highly variable? That’s what the science writer Rita Carter came to believe after researching her book Multiplicity. ‘Multiplicity is a spectrum,’ she told me when I caught…
State-dependent memory
In support of this claim, Carter cites a very powerful weapon: empirical evidence. One of her biggest guns is state-dependent memory. ‘In different mind-states one does not have access to the same bag of memories, and that has been demonstrated in a lot of quite clever studies…
Facets of a gem with nothing in the centre
it is true that we could talk of multiple selves or multi-faceted selves, but the former is just more truthful than the latter. She illustrates this with the analogy of the self as a gemstone. ‘If you accept the intuitive model, that of a many-faceted gem, a cut diamond…
Multiplicity multiplies the mistake of reification
this is where I think talk of multiplicity repeats the error it is trying to correct. The problem with our intuitive sense of self is that it excessively ‘reifies’: it makes a singular thing out of it. Multiplicity does exactly the same, only at a lower level: making singular…
The singular self is still the better model
the singular self remains, for all its imperfections, a much better way of thinking about who we are than the hyperbolic claim that we are a multiplicity of selves. We are indeed less unified, coherent, consistent and enduring than we usually suppose, but we are still real and…
Integrated people are becoming dinosaurs
‘Everything’s exploded in the last twenty years. You will get people who, even if they still live in the same community and a very stable family situation, are subject to a thousand different cultures every time they walk out of the door. Every one of those impacts produces a…