I never really understood the concept of the individual i.e. an indivisible person. I always felt divisible, something like a Freudian superego/ego/id, but clearly when I face the dilemma of sticking to weight loss or eating a cake, it is not one indivisible person making a choice, but two agents arguing with each other inside me. It is more or less literally heard as an internal dialogue. Not for everybody?
I am fighting an ugly case of alcohol addiction. There is the Higher Self, the one with the low time preference, who wants to live in a healthy and a rational way until 75, and the Lower Self, who wants to indulge in every impulse now, and does not care if it dies at 50. I used to do what I guess is the common case, identify with the Higher Self, as it is far more respectable and feels good to identify with it, and consider the lower self an external demon. However, this means always having to fight the demon. And that is tiresome. So I turned it around, identified with the lower self, and basically accepted I am a pig with poor impulse control, and turned the Higher Self into an exterrnal entity I call The Boss. The advantage is that instead of fighting The Demon, it is now surrendering to The Boss. So it feels like I really want a drink, but cannot, because The Boss forbade it, and no use in fighting The Boss. Surrendering to an externalized internal agent is easier than fighting it. Later on I realized I basically reinvented half of AA’s 12-step program as they too build on a surrender to a higher being.
My point is to me the bicameral mind does not even feel weird, I am doing something like that on a daily basis, I just wonder why not everybody, and the only thing that feels weird about it is why only two? It is easy to have 3-4 conflicting ideas generating 3-4 conflicting sub-agents fighting it out. It is like in multithreaded programming, where every important function gets its own thread, every important idea gets an amount of selfhood, agency invested into it.
I never really understood the concept of the individual i.e. an indivisible person. I always felt divisible, something like a Freudian superego/ego/id, but clearly when I face the dilemma of sticking to weight loss or eating a cake, it is not one indivisible person making a choice, but two agents arguing with each other inside me. It is more or less literally heard as an internal dialogue. Not for everybody?
I am fighting an ugly case of alcohol addiction. There is the Higher Self, the one with the low time preference, who wants to live in a healthy and a rational way until 75, and the Lower Self, who wants to indulge in every impulse now, and does not care if it dies at 50. I used to do what I guess is the common case, identify with the Higher Self, as it is far more respectable and feels good to identify with it, and consider the lower self an external demon. However, this means always having to fight the demon. And that is tiresome. So I turned it around, identified with the lower self, and basically accepted I am a pig with poor impulse control, and turned the Higher Self into an exterrnal entity I call The Boss. The advantage is that instead of fighting The Demon, it is now surrendering to The Boss. So it feels like I really want a drink, but cannot, because The Boss forbade it, and no use in fighting The Boss. Surrendering to an externalized internal agent is easier than fighting it. Later on I realized I basically reinvented half of AA’s 12-step program as they too build on a surrender to a higher being.
My point is to me the bicameral mind does not even feel weird, I am doing something like that on a daily basis, I just wonder why not everybody, and the only thing that feels weird about it is why only two? It is easy to have 3-4 conflicting ideas generating 3-4 conflicting sub-agents fighting it out. It is like in multithreaded programming, where every important function gets its own thread, every important idea gets an amount of selfhood, agency invested into it.