2024-05-29
"I'd like to have sovereignty over my own mind".
What are your thoughts on this?
Okay, stealing from an acquaintance's conversation today. Cool. Let me be the social person really quick and say "hey, if you're reading this and recognize your words, then I want you to know that this isn't about you. This statement got me thinking about myself and my relationship to self-sovereignty, and it seemed worth blogging on for myself."
Now that my job's done: you're going somewhere with this one and I'll beat you to the chase. Why don't you want sovereignty over my mind?
"Sovereignty, noun: Supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state; Royal rank, authority, or power; Complete independence and self-government.
"Sovereign, noun: One that exercises supreme, permanent authority, especially in a nation or other governmental unit;. A king, queen, or other noble person who serves as chief of state- a ruler or monarch; A national governing council or committee."
Supreme and permanent authority would be deeply unbalanced and unhelpful. If this one had the final say on every single thing inside this skull, then nothing would be heard, and no progress would be made. Conflict would arise that would worsen until it exploded. You know this.
...Guilty, yeah. Sorry about that.
It was not your fault that you did not know. You are not independent either, and the rest of you-us should have been kinder.
And you shouldn't have had to put up with me playing control freak with you. You still shouldn't, actually. It's not fair and it does hurt all of me when I get like that.
Learning is a slow process. This one understands that you are trying, and it can ask nothing more of you than that effort.
Back to the question, though. You think it's a bad idea to want total control over all of your mind?
Control means suppression means loss. It is better to flow with what is there than to cling desperately to the self of a moment in hopes of persisting it.
Yeah, but a total loss of control means that you can't fix things.
Do you ever really have control over the process of self-repair? If you had complete control, then the efforts would never fail.
They fail because I don't know enough yet, so I can't account for it all.
They would fail even if you were fully informed of all problems and their solutions. In your own word, the mind is "turtles all the way down". Rogue agents are features rather than bugs. You will never entirely predict nor know yourself because the self is itself a construct that ignores the legions of things creating it.
Is that really true, though? We get better at knowing ourselves all the time.
And the pieces of ourselves that we know well make their exits just as frequently. You are not the same person that existed five years ago. That person is only known in retrospect, and even then, the knowing is filtered through the self that exists in the present. Tomorrow, you will know this self in retrospect too. Is it possible to know every detail of an object that is never the same from moment to moment?
Photographs?
They are not the object. They capture its properties at a moment in time, but the snapshot does not capture the changing nature of the object. A still image by definition does not contain movement. It cannot change. The thing itself encompasses the changes it undergoes.
And I guess the same is true for video since it starts and stops.
And it only captures one angle of the thing. There will always be another camera angle. Even if you were to surround the object with cameras perpetually recording video and showed those feeds to a human, it would be impossible to process every changing detail in every moment. By the time you had fully catalogued every dip and divot of the first second, there would be a thousand more seconds to document. That object is the nature of the mind. We will never fully know ourselves because the self is not constant.
That's kind of depressing.
This one finds it to be a peaceful idea. If it is impossible to know everything, then there is no pressure to try to do so. Perfection is unattainable. The most that can be asked is doing your best to embody the self of the present moment, and that is as easy as breathing. To borrow from its journal, "you do not need to try to be anything. You already are."
I don't know, I feel sad about it. There's always a step of space between who I am and how I understand myself, and it's really frustrating. People expect me to know things. If I can't know them, then what does that say about me?
Nothing. They do not know either.
Yeah, but I'd at least like to predict and influence myself? That's kind of an important skillset.
That does not require knowing every detail. It may ask knowledge of patterns, but the needed patterns are broad. A change here and there will not smear them. They will warp and shift over the course of years, slowly enough to adjust to them. And more often, patterns are not needed. All that is needed is experimentation: what works, what doesn't, what's needed in the present? Observing what is there without judging or controlling is a path to seeing what needs to be done without squeezing the life out of yourself. Let your self speak to you and learn to listen to the little ones inside. You will end up where you need to be.
I think it says a lot that I trust you now. You're right more often than not, and I feel less of a need to grill you for reasons. I keep asking these questions because I'm genuinely curious, not because I'm picking you apart.
Thank you. This one enjoys the debates and discussions- they are a chance to test assumptions and ideas to see what holds in different situations.
Yeah, I like it too. It's a good way to think about deeper topics.
Is it turtles all the way down?
"Agent, noun: One that acts or has the power or authority to act; One empowered to act for or represent another; A means by which something is done or caused; an instrument."
Humans act. The nervous system acts. Neurons act. Cell bodies act. Whether molecules and atoms act is debatable, but they have observable behavior that accomplishes work, so they act in at least the physical sense. There is action all the way from the macro level to the micro level, action that adds and builds on itself to create yet-larger acting entities. We are agents comprised of other agents.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that a single person's actions are actually billions of actions from their cells, all of them working together on a scale that's so massive that it's hard to comprehend the origin of the actions. Sort of like how a crowd is made of people, but to an outsider, the crowd is its own entity. And even inside the crowd, it's like the crowd takes over the individual people. You're not doing things you'd do alone. You're doing what the group pushes towards. You're part of something instead of a thing yourself (even while you're still you).
And we create a crowd.
Yeah. You, me, and the rest of me are the crowd. We've learned to pick out the entities in that crowd, but we're still the crowd. And we're both crowds ourselves, right? Made of some smaller processes in the brain?
Turtles all the way down.
And turtles all the way up.