The Story of the Self
Follow-up, growing out of some recent discussion on Tumblr.
Yeah now you’re just sniping me before I can even put up my identity post.
Though I’m curious how far you think you can get without people ascribing truth value to these propositions, as a mass phenomenon.
See…that gets tricky.
Because of course people will ascribe truth value to the model, once it exists, once they’re using it for other purposes anyway. And in fact, if they completely fail to do so, the identity-narrative project collapses. If people make a point of saying “yeah, we don’t really believe any of these things about you, it’s just a nice story that’s vaguely associated with you in some nebulous way”…well, all I can say is, that is not going to build up your identity. It is going to do the opposite.
There’s a strong temptation here to wave my hands and mystify, because the thing under discussion is in fact a bit mystical. “The narrative of your identity is true, it has to be, just…not in a really true true sort of way.” And then I use a phrase like “non-overlapping magisteria,” and @yudkowsky emerges from my computer screen and bites my face off.
But really, however mystical it may be in terms of its psychological underpinnings, it’s not hard to see how it works on a practical level. “We know that the real empirical you does not actually conform to this story in many particulars. Often it will fail to predict your behavior. When we are trying to model what you will do, and in some cases when we are judging you normatively, we will take the disparities into account. But we believe that your identity-relationship to this story is both real and meaningful. We will operate under a presumption, perhaps stronger than the concrete evidence warrants, that you will gravitate towards conformity with it. More importantly, when we are considering you in normatively or aesthetic way, our evaluation of the story will play a strong role.”
Or, to use your kind of language: we have faith that this is really you.