pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I have a theory and it goes a little something like this…..

People mostly think that they have an authentic self – this is a challengeable concept though. We can first ask as to where we find this authentic person? Is it in their own head space, the mind self, or is it in reality, in the interactive self? Or is it a mixture? Or is there more to it? What I mean particularly by the term interactive self is the self that presents itself to others, think of it as the end product, who you are as mediated by others. Now there has been work in this area in the great disciplines of both philosophy and psychology, and it is very detailed, I am not going to use it however. I am going to make a few quick and dirty points that illustrate whether this self we speak of is simply a facade (a Greek face mask, worn by an actor, to project a persona other than the self), or not. Some competing views of the self might look like this…

• We are an outward presentation of what we wish to be in the eyes of others, that is that the self is an internal, mind space, entity and that each presentation in each situation is tailored for its audience. The reality of this can be anecdotally asserted, you act much differently in your mother’s kitchen than you do in the pub with your mates or at home with your partner or at a PTA meeting at the school. I think we can all recognise these selves yes? Underlying this is an authentic self that is unrevealed.

• We are our outward selves, you are what you do and how you present yourself, there is no inside self. The theory underpinning this aspect is that what we believe to be important we act upon; if we do not act then we did not hold the object or objective as truth. The first criticism of this position is that we do not actually do this, but I might refute that by contending that it is forces of secondary preference or considerations such as fear that cause this misalignment, one that could be named weakness of will, and that if we were powerful we would act upon all our beliefs without reservation. The authentic self is then not real and we are merely reacting to stimulus.

• We have a self that we are unaware of, an inner self that is unreflected, a reflective self that we believe to be our authentic self and an outwardly presented self which we wish others to believe us to be. This would mean that what we want or desire is hidden even from ourselves and that some of our acts are as just as surprising to us as they are to others. Tokens, moving from the unreflected self to the reflective self may be in conflict with how we think we are, and this is very problematic, I often realize that I have dark desires that pop into my head and I have no idea where they came from. One example would be when crossing the road I sometimes feel a pull to step out in front of a lorry and be squished flat like a pancake (weird I know), but it is true and I cannot remove this desire by resolving it rationally into being a bad thing.

• None of these selves exists in a bubble, there is interaction between the physical world and the self, or the inner and outer selves, or the unreflected self and the reflected self (regardless of composition), and how that interaction occurs is anyone’s guess.

I propose that the digital self (or selves), is an ego creation that reflects either the view of the self as authentic (option 1), or it is a facade self designed to penetrate the limitations of existent reality (option 2). If we contend the first option then we have a problem that I will go on to detail later, if we contend the second option then this problem is not a problem because of the fact that the presented self is in fact due, and wants, no special consideration. What must be borne in mind when dealing with option two is the effect this self has on other selves, I am going to call this the others confusion effect.

The others confusion effect is where the self is confused because it may believe that the presented facade selves of others is in fact their authentic inner self being realised in digital form. Why is this a problem though? It is a problem in that the self, regardless of which representation we take from those I have detailed, is not insulated from influence. A self is built within its reality, it is subjected to the forces of ideology, culture, tradition and immediate relationships with other selves that it encounters. Also we may contend that the self is not fully aware of itself, it is not in full knowledge to what degree it is shaped by these effects. This being so, and combined with the conjecture that we know ourselves through a series of comparisons with others (we know to what degree we are aligned or in contradiction with them), causes a major modern problem, one where ours is a false comparison (apples and oranges). If everyone else’s online viewable representation of their self presents a facade of continuous and unrelenting joy and achievement (which it tends to do) then what does that do to the reflective self of the viewer? In this false comparison the outcome, the data, indicates a less than average, in all or most areas, achieving, accumulating, or satisfied self. It is that self that then may fall victim to self-punishment and feelings of guilt at being somewhat of a disappointment, for not being perfect, and not only to others (those that we wish to hold beliefs about us) but to the person who is the self. It has the added effect of persuading the viewer to participate in this facade, thus making the problem worse by spreading it on to the next participant. What we have identified here is a practice, normative behaviour, and what normative behaviour does is reinforce a falsehood rather than challenge it.

Here I may have stumbled upon another issue accidentally, and if you will pardon a tangent (but I feel a relevant one) I will briefly explain…. the “False” or “Fake” news phenomenon, the real that is made challengeable. what I mean by this is that if we now find ourselves within a world where we are surrounded by facade, and that facade is recognisable by each of us as just that, yet we act as though the facade is the reality, which sort of makes it the reality in social terms. We of course have been primed to do this by years of television advertising, nursery rhymes, primary education and religious impossibilities that conflict with science and realities that we can know and take for granted. So then we are very well positioned, problematically so, to do the exact opposite as well. We are, through certain processes that now go on in our brains (this bit is probably better explained by a neuroscientist but I’ll try) and that we now have the necessary wiring for, (I’m speculating that behaviour becomes nature by making pathways in the brain) because of what we are collectively seeing as the truth of things, and reinforcing as such by our shared behaviour, able to detach from the idea that anything is fixed as a truth even if it happens to be our best reference for the truth of a thing or an object. President Trump (2017-2021) labels climate science as Fake News because it serves his economic plan to do so, in this he stands against the scientific community, but the scientific community is not without it’s motivations either, previous administrations pursued the climate change agenda because they had monetised it and had themselves in turn influenced the scientific community through funding imbalances toward proving what was profitable (a far too common occurrence I feel).

So how do we know the truth if the lens through which the subject is mediated is adjusted for our eyes by motivations and power? The quick answer is that we don’t. Can you see where it becomes hard to trust anything that we receive, and how useful that aspect then becomes if the goal is to change a society? I am reminded of John Locke’s descriptions of a table and how the essence of the table changes with the nature of the observations of it, or Karl Popper’s refutations of the solidity of scientific facts, or Descartes Cogito… All of which is interesting but of no real use to the psychological grounding of the self, it is merely the phenomenological grounding for pursuing science with an open mind.

Let’s get back to personal identity though for now. If we now consider two characters, A and B, and we say they have joined an online community, let’s call it fakespace, we can then draw out in a series of examples what I have written so far…

• A believes of B that he is happy, successful, photogenic, outgoing and in a stable relationship. A has, on the face of it and in the narrow space of fakespace, no reason to believe otherwise. This is inductive reasoning; A is working backward from the presented material towards a theory of B. because of her acceptance of B’s status. We tend to allow people to be experts on themselves and we also are easily fooled into thinking, correctly or not, that a person is the right person online. I would propose one exception to that norm though, I happen to be British and from Northern Ireland, people I meet insist, even after I have explained to them the reason why I am not, that I am in fact Irish.

• A believes of herself that she is living a less than perfect life, she is not universally happy, some of her photos are for the bin, she stays in and does chores a lot of the time and her relationship with her partner could be better etc… this is because A has a mostly complete set of data on herself that she did not get from viewing fakespace. We can say correctly that A is somewhat of an expert when it comes to A’s life, experiences and inner feelings. That is not to contend that persons are not capable of being a bit generous about themselves naturally or coming to believe their own lies, I would contend that this is in fact a necessary thing to do in reality especially for those that may fall to the idea that all is futile in the end, but that is another matter.

• A feels, because she believes that everyone else is happy, that she is complicit in her own unhappiness, she seeks to change her life based on what she both believes to be true and what she thinks of as reasonable expectation, based on an anecdotally revealed average of the worth of other people’s existences. You see the problem here? And in a liberal democracy this aspect is heightened further by that ideology that positions us all as the problem to our own woes by saying we are free to be just as successful as everyone who has had success (negative liberty – you are unconstrained but not enabled).

Now A’s life would not be problematic in this way if she believed that other people’s lives were similar to hers, and that’s the point. An inequality is problematic for the psyche that has been raised being told that their society is a meritocracy, that they are an equal entity to all other entities and share the same rights with them.

But why do I mention rights? Now we will highlight a further problem with this others confusion effect, in that it would simply be a problem for the self to resolve and could be successfully halted at this point if it were isolated to the person. It is however not isolated, it permeates society in a dangerous way since it identifies the now problematic effects of the way we see other people, and what we come or have been led to believe of them. Since our judgement of our selves is in a comparison between ourselves and a mass of other entities, and that comparison is a false one that we do not realise as false, it is then possible for persons to manipulate that perspective into holding preferences or moral beliefs pertaining to the wider group also. Though this would be a narrow group overall because fakespace would not hold a digital ego creation for all persons (yet), and it is likely that all participants in fakespace would not know all other participants. What I am referring to here is the problem of justly assigning rights to a group of digital ego selves, and this phenomenon is not one that it is easy to explain.

When a person comes to believe that a group of other persons are authentic, and authentically motivated, then it becomes easy to recognise the right of that group to have its needs met by society. Now if that group validates its wishes through fakespace, and these wishes are reflective of impossibilities in the physical world, implausible contentions, or they are simply manifestly unjustifiable in some cases, then we as a society have a difficulty in either meeting or refuting them by reasonable logical means, since we are dealing with a non-real entity or group. What is witnessed in effect here is the will of the person or the group being supported tacitly (without full knowledge or in the lack of meaningful resistance to it) by all participants of fakespace. We started this piece by saying that the self may be an ego reflection of the will of a person without constraining effects, let us contend then that some of those people who wish to present themselves on fakespace will do so as entities that are wildly exaggerated or physically impossible. Do these entities have the right to be assigned rights that change and manipulate society? I think not, but they will affect people and people are society, a bit of a bind then… More problematic is the further contention that the confusion between a person and their online digital ego self causes them to believe that not only does this ego self have a right to be treated as an existent reality entity but it also is them authentically, them without constraint; the implication of this becoming accepted is that others are then duty bound to morally act toward the digital person in the same way as they are to the real physical person. Why would that be a problem? It is a problem because a digital person inhabits a digital world, a world without boundaries; if we attempt to class this person as existent then we must question reality itself. I am going to give one example of this problem, a real one that I think I can successfully tie into the argument I am forming here, the transgendered individual. Here is the argument…

• Transsexual persons cross sexual norms, norms not being a value term in this case or a form of judgement. The right of a person to be transsexual is supportable since this is a subjective term. It is given its meaning in its use by those that wish to define themselves in a way that is not purely measurable in any other way than the way they act. Sexuality is psychological in nature and not bound by a rule of science where it is an objective description that is used by persons to codify the representation of an object so that others may understand and use it.

• Transgendered persons cross gender norms, again not a judgement. The right of a person to be transgendered is not in the same way supportable because the term gender is an objective artefact codified by a scientific discipline (biology) and used to signify what is measurable about a human entity, its cellular conformity to one, the other or both designations – Male, Female or Hermaphrodite. Of course all of this is by degrees and contentious, but the science will attempt to categorize the human entity without regard to its wishes. I may wish to be a Woman but if my DNA screams Man then I am a man. That would be nothing to do with how I live or how I conduct my sex life or fashion sense.

I am afraid that science pays no mind to the wishes of life’s participants. This is a necessity if science is to be an objective discipline that reveals usable truths (back to the fake news argument it would seem). If we look at the history of humanity’s achievements we see where the use of defined truths and shared codifications have allowed us to develop medicine using research, reach the moon using physics, differentiate between benefit and danger using observation and communication, confer and act upon reliable testimony and establish trust, in short we rely on what is scientifically reliable because we need to in order to live in a technologically developed society. Imagine the result of allowing a scientific truth, that which is objective, to become mediated as subjective. This is the issue when we represent a group of people by a designation which is psychological, and therefore subjective, but we also allow for the assertion of their right to be defined by objective means, as if that redefinition would change the scientific value in some way other than to render it useless as an objective value. If gender was to become a term that is subjective (a social construct it is being mooted as now) then it loses its usability as a scientific term, so we would then have to invent a new scientific term to replace it, and we would be back in the same conflict.

LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) contains either 3 psychological terms or 4 psychological terms, the T does not fit if it is a scientific term, but T as a psychological term does fit. The problem for those that are represented by the T is that they have confused what they wish with what they deserve. The reason behind this, its motivation in attempting to become objective, is that the token of objective power is much greater than that of the subjective; if something is measurable it is very much more foolish to argue about it. All around the world people argue about subjective issues, very few argue about gravity or the value of oxygen. I believe that fakespace and its ilk foster the sort of skewed thinking that leaves persons attempting to move subjects of a subjective nature into the realm of the objective so as they may gain a power that they do not merit without argument (objective arguments have the power of acceptance without enlightened argument, and necessarily so). The goal is dangerous but the spirit in which it is done is merely a mistake rather than a conspiracy, and this mistake may be one made by well meaning persons, this is a circle that feeds itself and is fuelled by digital ego selves who validate the reality of others, and in doing so perpetuate the falsehood of the others confusion effect. I believe it is an unnecessary attempt and it will garner greater conflict than it otherwise would to simply accept the scientific designation of Man or Woman whilst concentrating on the more easily justifiable attempt to establish a social acceptance for practiced behaviour as a right instead.

A further expansion of this theory that I have added to this piece as I have written it is that it has occurred to me that the phenomenon of digital self-creation may be bleeding back into reality in a way that is not immediately apparent. now stick with me here because this is a hurried theory that I have not yet had time to discuss with many people before writing it, and that’s not like me…. I think that people, particularly women as they have the most pressure on them to change their appearance and the most often revealing facial emotions, are getting surgery and injecting poisons for facial paralysis for a very different reasons than the socially accepted motivation of trying to look much younger than they happen to be, and I think this because nobody is fooled by a 50 year old woman with a puffy face like she’s been in a boxing ring and lost, or a 40+ year old European celebrity that has had their skin stretched so much they’re starting to look Asian (Katie Price is one example). I think that they are trying, very much without realising it on any conscious level, to alter their face so as not to cause a dissonance between the carefully scripted narrative they wish to project as their facade of their lives (my truth one might describe it as, just like Megan says), and the reality that their face might give away even in such a small way as a micro-expression (the theory is we read people in a non linguistic way). Like when your disgusted but don’t want to seem so because it would not be useful in a social setting, or when your scared but don’t want the thing or person that is scaring you to know that fact as it would make your danger and their power position stronger.

This is a form of self-empowerment and I think people realise it without realising it, they realise their power to define in reality the potential perception that others may have of them is manipulatable, just like on fakespace. It also prevents criticism in some measure as the person can be said to be consistent as long as they stick to the narrative. We can further contend that the social phenomenon of self creation moving into the reality sphere is useful in presenting the facade by taking a post that may exist on the user’s page and saying about it that it can be in support of a position taken, but not an affect of the person. Let’s say that the person wanted to project a deep care for something like the affliction of ALS or cancer, now in a social media setting all that is required is to say so with words or an emoji, but in reality the person would have to do something about what they cared about (if we contend that in reality they are what they do, see earlier), but in the social media world they need only make token gestures like pouring ice water on themselves or doing a dance. “But that is them doing that in reality” you might say, and you’d be right too, but how many of these tokens and this signalling and these memes are now becoming the fabric of society, where did they start, and what implications do these non-acts have? To take the knee is to do in actuality nothing to stand up to racism, better would be to actually seek out unfairness and meet it with action or argument, not to symbolise the awareness of it in a social media style hoping that that symbol affects change in others.

Like I said earlier, option 1 is less of a problem. The reason why is obvious, the self involved is realised as a fake by the owner of that self. This does not lead logically to believing that the digital versions of ourselves are anything other than who we would present, rather than who we are. This may be an older person’s perspective, someone who existed before the internet and the possibility of having a creatable representation of the self to stand in place of undistorted communication. I will grant that there are arguments against option 1, especially from the point of view of an author, and some of these arguments would be interesting, but we will go no further since option 1 is clearly unproblematic for the idea I wished to present.

Paul Simon Wilson