Tag: selfhood

The Heuristic Self: On Persona, Identity, and Character

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, identity, language, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, prostitution, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
— Oscar Wilde

Identity is an illusion—but a necessary one. It’s a shortcut. A heuristic, evolved not for truth but for coherence. We reduce ourselves and others to fixed traits to preserve continuity—psychological, social, narrative.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (Direct)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0mMqpb8xblpQP6SK3qcJUD?si=CPv6HZGwToSiIO1JZtbEzw

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (Spotify)

But what if continuity is a lie?

In the latest post on RidleyPark.blog, we meet Sarah—a woman who survives by splintering. She has three names, three selves, three economies of interaction. Each persona—Sarah, Stacey, and Pink—fulfils a role. Each protects her in a system that punishes complexity.

And yet, this isn’t fiction. It’s reality intensified.

Identity Is Compression

Cognitive science suggests that we don’t possess a self—we perform one. Our so-called identity is assembled post-hoc from memory, context, and social cues. It’s recursive. It’s inferred.

We are not indivisible atoms of identity. We are bundled routines, personae adapted to setting and audience.

This is not pathology. It’s strategy.

From Performance to Survival

In Needle’s Edge, Sarah doesn’t use aliases to deceive. She uses them to survive contradictions:

  • Stacey is desirable, stable, and profitable—so long as she appears clean and composed.
  • Pink is a consumer, invisible, stripped of glamour but allowed access to the block.
  • Sarah is the residue, the name used by those who once knew her—or still believe they do.

Each persona comes with scripts, limitations, and permissions. Sarah isn’t being dishonest. She’s practicing domain-specific identity. This is no different from how professionals code-switch at work, or how people self-edit on social media.

It’s just more raw. More urgent. Less optional.

The Literary Echo

In character development, we often demand “depth,” by which we mean contradiction. We want to see a character laugh and break. Love and lie. But Sarah shows us that contradiction isn’t depth—it’s baseline reality. Any singular identity would be a narrative failure.

Characters like Sarah expose the poverty of reduction. They resist archetype. They remind us that fiction succeeds when it reflects the multiple, the shifting, the incompatible—which is to say, the real.

What Else Might We Say?

  • That authenticity is a myth: “Just be yourself” presumes you know which self to be.
  • That moral judgment often stems from a failure to see multiple selves in others.
  • That trauma survivors often fracture not because they’re broken, but because fracturing is adaptive.
  • That in a capitalist framework, the ability to fragment and role-play becomes a survival advantage.
  • That fiction is one of the few spaces where we can explore multiple selves without collapse.

The Missing Link

For a concrete, narrative reflection of these ideas, this post on RidleyPark.blog explores how one woman carries three selves to survive three worlds—and what it costs her.

Unwilling Steelman, Part IV

Posted in free will, identity, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the topic.

“It’s not just that you’re a hallucination of yourself.
It’s that everyone else is hallucinating you, too — through their own fog.”

The Feedback Loop of False Selves

You are being judged — by others who are also compromised

If you are a chemically modulated, state-dependent, narrativising automaton, then so is everyone who evaluates you. The moral courtroom — society, the law, the dinner table — is just a gathering of biased systems confidently misreading each other.

We are taught to believe in things like:

  • “Good character”
  • “Knowing someone”
  • “Getting a read on people”

But these are myths of stability, rituals of judgment, and cognitive vanity projects. There is no fixed you — and there is no fixed them to do the judging.

Judging the Snapshot, Not the Self

Let’s say you act irritable. Or generous. Or quiet.
An observer sees this and says:

“That’s who you are.”

But which version of you are they observing?

  • The you on two hours of sleep?
  • The you on SSRIs?
  • The you grieving, healing, adjusting, masking?

They don’t know. They don’t ask.
They just flatten the moment into character.

One gesture becomes identity.
One expression becomes essence.

This isn’t judgment.
It’s snapshot essentialism — moral conclusion by convenience.

The Observer Is No Less Biased

Here’s the darker truth: they’re compromised, too.

  • If they’re stressed, you’re rude.
  • If they’re lonely, you’re charming.
  • If they’re hungry, you’re annoying.

What they’re perceiving is not you — it’s their current chemistry’s reaction to your presentation, filtered through their history, memory, mood, and assumptions.

It’s not a moral lens.
It’s a funhouse mirror, polished with certainty.

Mutual Delusion in a Moral Marketplace

The tragedy is recursive:

  • You act based on internal constraints.
  • They judge based on theirs.
  • Then you interpret their reaction… and adjust accordingly.
  • And they, in turn, react to your adjustment…

And on it goes — chemical systems calibrating against each other, mistaking interaction for insight, familiarity for truth, coherence for character.

Identity isn’t formed.
It’s inferred, then reinforced.
By people who have no access to your internal states and no awareness of their own.

The Myth of the Moral Evaluator

This has massive implications:

  • Justice assumes objectivity.
  • Culture assumes shared moral standards.
  • Relationships assume “knowing” someone.

But all of these are built on the fantasy that moral evaluation is accurate, stable, and earned.

It is not.

It is probabilistic, state-sensitive, and mutually confabulatory.

You are being judged by the weather inside someone else’s skull.

TL;DR: Everyone’s Lying to Themselves About You

  • You behave according to contingent states.
  • Others judge you based on their own contingent states.
  • Both of you invent reasons to justify your interpretations.
  • Neither of you has access to the full picture.
  • The result is a hall of mirrors with no ground floor.

So no — you’re not “being seen.”
You’re being misread, reinterpreted, and categorised
— by people who are also misreading themselves.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

You Cannot Originate Yourself

The causa sui argument, and the final collapse of moral responsibility.

Unwilling Steelman, Part II

Posted in agency, fiction, free will, identity, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

Continuity Is Not Identity

You are not who you were — you are what you’ve become

“A river doesn’t remember yesterday’s curve. But we point to it and say: ‘Look, it’s still the same.’”

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The compatibilist move here is subtler — less grandiose than autonomy, more domesticated than sovereignty. It says:
Even if you didn’t choose your traits, your past, your preferences —
you’re still you.
That self has endured.
And moral responsibility flows from that continuity.

But this, too, is sleight of hand.

Because continuity is a pattern, not a person.
And a pattern that evolves without origin is not accountable.
It’s just happening.

A River Is Not a Moral Agent

Yes, you are still “you” — but only in the loosest, most cosmetic sense. The fact that your behaviour follows a recognisable pattern does not imply authorship. It merely confirms that systems tend toward stability, or path dependence, or neural canalisation.

You can be stable. You can even be consistent.
But that doesn’t mean you’re choosing anything.

Continuity is not control.
It’s inertia dressed up as identity.

Predictability Is Not Ownership

We mistake persistence for personhood. If someone acts one way for long enough, we assume that behaviour is theirs — that it reflects their values, their self. But all it really reflects is probability.

“You’re still you,” we say.
But which you?

  • The one shaped by sleep deprivation?
  • The one under hormonal flux?
  • The one shaped by language, trauma, and cultural myopia?

Every iteration of “you” is a snapshot — a chemical event disguised as character.

You’re Not Rebuilding — You’re Accreting

The recursive defence — “I can change who I am” — also crumbles here. Because you don’t change yourself from nowhere. You change because something changed you. And that change, too, emerges from your condition.

Growth, reflection, habit formation — these aren’t proofs of freedom. They’re signs that adaptive systems accumulate structure.

You are not shaping clay.
You are sediment, layered by time.

Character Is Compulsion in Costume

We love stories about people who “showed their true colours.”
But this is narrative bias — we flatten a life’s complexity into a myth of revelation.

Yet even our finest moments — courage, restraint, sacrifice — may be nothing more than compulsions coded as character. You didn’t choose to be brave. You just were.

The brave person says: “I had no choice.”
The coward says the same.

Who gets the medal is irrelevant to the question of freedom.

TL;DR: Continuity Doesn’t Mean You Own It

  • The self is a pattern of events, not a stable agent.
  • Continuity is not agency — it’s habit.
  • Predictability doesn’t prove ownership.
  • Even your finest moments might be involuntary.
  • And if you’re not choosing your changes, you’re just being changed.

So, no — you are not who you were.
You are what you’ve become.
And what you’ve become was never yours to shape freely.

📅 Coming Tomorrow:

Manipulability as Disproof

If your will can be altered without your knowledge, was it ever truly yours?

Unwilling Steelman, Part I

Posted in free will, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.

Constraint Is Not Freedom

The ergonomic cage of compatibilist comfort

“You are not playing the piano. You are the piano, playing itself — then applauding.”

Compatibilists — those philosophical locksmiths determined to keep the myth of free will intact — love to say that constraint doesn’t contradict freedom. That a system can still be “free” so long as it is coherent, self-reflective, and capable of recursive evaluation.

In this view, freedom doesn’t require being uncaused — it only requires being causally integrated. You don’t need to be sovereign. You just need to be responsive.

“The pianist may not have built the piano — but she still plays it.”

It sounds lovely.

It’s also false.

You Are the Piano

This analogy fails for a simple reason: there is no pianist. No ghost in the gears. No homunculus seated behind the cortex, pulling levers and composing virtue. There is only the piano — complex, self-modulating, exquisitely tuned — but self-playing nonetheless.

The illusion of choice is merely the instrument responding to its state: to its internal wiring, environmental inputs, and the accumulated sediment of prior events. What feels like deliberation is often delay. What feels like freedom is often latency.

Recursive ≠ Free

Ah, but what about reflection? Don’t we revise ourselves over time?

We do. But that revision is itself conditioned. You didn’t choose the capacity to reflect. You didn’t choose your threshold for introspection. If you resist a bias, it’s because you were predisposed — by some cocktail of education, temperament, or trauma — to resist it.

A thermostat that updates its own algorithm is still a thermostat.

It doesn’t become “free” by being self-correcting. It becomes better adapted. Likewise, human introspection is just adaptive determinism wearing a philosophical hat.

Constraint Isn’t Contradiction — It’s Redefinition

Compatibilists smuggle in a quieter, defanged version of freedom: not the ability to do otherwise, but the ability to behave “like yourself.”

But this is freedom in retrospect, not in action.
If all freedom means is “acting in accordance with one’s programming,” then Roombas have free will.

If we stretch the term that far, it breaks — not loudly, but with the sad elasticity of a word losing its shape.

TL;DR: The Pianist Was Always a Myth

  • You didn’t design your mental architecture.
  • You didn’t select your desires or dispositions.
  • You didn’t choose the you that chooses.

So no — you’re not playing the piano.
You are the piano — reverberating, perhaps beautifully, to stimuli you didn’t summon and cannot evade.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

Continuity Is Not Identity

What if you are not who you were — but simply what you’ve become?