Nice thing about the Dalai Lama example is that he probably gets strong social pressure to believe he is a continuation of his previous incarnation. I don’t know about the details of his office, but if I really believed in reincarnation, I would prepare a lot of notes for my future incarnation… something like what every reasonable person would prepare for themselves if they expected to have a sudden memory loss at some moment in the near future, assuming they would want to follow their original plans. (Perhaps how much of this Dalai Lama really does could be used as a measure of how much he literally believes in his reincarnation.)
There are also social pressures in the opposite direction, just smaller ones. People are supposed to “change” during various rituals, not necessarily religious ones: finishing a university and having a title added to your name is a secular example. In a work or in military, when you change your position in the hierarchy, it’s not only about what you do, but also how you behave towards others, and how the others behave towards you: so it’s like a minor surgery to your personality.
I am curious whether (as a part of a mad science experiment) it would be possible to create an opposite of the Dalai Lama effect; to create a Monday Man who would believe he is a different person that the Sunday Man, despite having the same body. More precisely, how far you could get, using only beliefs and social pressure on a neurotypical person.
To some degree this experiment was already done, by various cults. The cultists are supposed to believe they are someone more or less different than they were before; they even use “born again” to describe the change. But it seems like the old personality continues to exist—at least some descriptions of “deprogramming” claim that if a cultist is kidnapped, prevented contact with other cultists, and prevented from doing their mental rituals (e.g. if you remove all the external and internal pressure towards the cult) that is usually enough for the old personality to reappear. If this is true, I would consider this an unsuccessful change. A successful change would be where the new person is completely free to do whatever they want, and they still naturally remain the new person. Even better, if the Sunday Man could regularly become a Monday Man every week, and then regularly change back again, both personalities having their own lives.
One obvious problem is memory. It stays with the body. The Dalai Lama can partially copy it from the old body to the new body, using notes. But you cannot keep two separate instances for the Sunday Man and Monday Man. Could people believe (if this is what their culture would tell them) that they can have a memory of another person in their head, but it doesn’t make them identical with the person? Would the Monday Man accept that he has Sunday Man’s memories, but he is a different person? The environment could be different, e.g. the Monday Man would live in a different house, wear a different uniform, meet different people, and the people would behave differently...
In other words, if you are not insane, you are probably not experimenting enough.
Something like the Monday Man already exists. In African and Afro-American religions such as Voodoo and Candomblé, people who get possessed say that whatever was moving their body in that time was not them, but some other entity. They frequently claim amnesia about the event, saying their normal non-possessed selves were “not there” to even notice what was happening. I don’t know if anyone has done experiments to see whether they actually lack access to memories of that period, or whether they’re merely denying them.
Of course, these religions, and particularly possession states, often involve great amounts of strong alcohol, so maybe the amnesia thing isn’t so far-fetched.
A lot of the time the only language that really exists to talk about these things is the language of shamanism and occultists and ritual magic because psychology doesn’t really go there much in professional medicine, and I’m not sure that the concept of ‘genuine amnesia’ is terribly useful in this context. These things happen, it doesn’t matter that there’s ‘just’ a material human brain and nervous system doing it, people can and do come under the control and influence of what is experienced as agency that is not ‘their own’ under many circumstances. I know someone who is as reductionist/materialist as they get, but through various methods has been known to channel Carl Sagan (and have interesting conversations with him about how odd it is to speak with him that way) and has been repeatedly briefly possessed by Hindu gods. She knows it’s entirely coming from the operation of her own nervous system, but she thinks that if she has a complete enough identity to ‘invite in’ it is actually meaningful to say that something that comes from her mouth when she is in such an altered state comes ‘from’ that identity and not from her. To loosely quote her, “I’m pretty darn sure they’re a function of my nervous system weirdness, but it just doesn’t matter what the gods are when they come calling.”
Nice thing about the Dalai Lama example is that he probably gets strong social pressure to believe he is a continuation of his previous incarnation. I don’t know about the details of his office, but if I really believed in reincarnation, I would prepare a lot of notes for my future incarnation… something like what every reasonable person would prepare for themselves if they expected to have a sudden memory loss at some moment in the near future, assuming they would want to follow their original plans. (Perhaps how much of this Dalai Lama really does could be used as a measure of how much he literally believes in his reincarnation.)
There are also social pressures in the opposite direction, just smaller ones. People are supposed to “change” during various rituals, not necessarily religious ones: finishing a university and having a title added to your name is a secular example. In a work or in military, when you change your position in the hierarchy, it’s not only about what you do, but also how you behave towards others, and how the others behave towards you: so it’s like a minor surgery to your personality.
I am curious whether (as a part of a mad science experiment) it would be possible to create an opposite of the Dalai Lama effect; to create a Monday Man who would believe he is a different person that the Sunday Man, despite having the same body. More precisely, how far you could get, using only beliefs and social pressure on a neurotypical person.
To some degree this experiment was already done, by various cults. The cultists are supposed to believe they are someone more or less different than they were before; they even use “born again” to describe the change. But it seems like the old personality continues to exist—at least some descriptions of “deprogramming” claim that if a cultist is kidnapped, prevented contact with other cultists, and prevented from doing their mental rituals (e.g. if you remove all the external and internal pressure towards the cult) that is usually enough for the old personality to reappear. If this is true, I would consider this an unsuccessful change. A successful change would be where the new person is completely free to do whatever they want, and they still naturally remain the new person. Even better, if the Sunday Man could regularly become a Monday Man every week, and then regularly change back again, both personalities having their own lives.
One obvious problem is memory. It stays with the body. The Dalai Lama can partially copy it from the old body to the new body, using notes. But you cannot keep two separate instances for the Sunday Man and Monday Man. Could people believe (if this is what their culture would tell them) that they can have a memory of another person in their head, but it doesn’t make them identical with the person? Would the Monday Man accept that he has Sunday Man’s memories, but he is a different person? The environment could be different, e.g. the Monday Man would live in a different house, wear a different uniform, meet different people, and the people would behave differently...
In other words, if you are not insane, you are probably not experimenting enough.
Something like the Monday Man already exists. In African and Afro-American religions such as Voodoo and Candomblé, people who get possessed say that whatever was moving their body in that time was not them, but some other entity. They frequently claim amnesia about the event, saying their normal non-possessed selves were “not there” to even notice what was happening. I don’t know if anyone has done experiments to see whether they actually lack access to memories of that period, or whether they’re merely denying them.
Of course, these religions, and particularly possession states, often involve great amounts of strong alcohol, so maybe the amnesia thing isn’t so far-fetched.
A lot of the time the only language that really exists to talk about these things is the language of shamanism and occultists and ritual magic because psychology doesn’t really go there much in professional medicine, and I’m not sure that the concept of ‘genuine amnesia’ is terribly useful in this context. These things happen, it doesn’t matter that there’s ‘just’ a material human brain and nervous system doing it, people can and do come under the control and influence of what is experienced as agency that is not ‘their own’ under many circumstances. I know someone who is as reductionist/materialist as they get, but through various methods has been known to channel Carl Sagan (and have interesting conversations with him about how odd it is to speak with him that way) and has been repeatedly briefly possessed by Hindu gods. She knows it’s entirely coming from the operation of her own nervous system, but she thinks that if she has a complete enough identity to ‘invite in’ it is actually meaningful to say that something that comes from her mouth when she is in such an altered state comes ‘from’ that identity and not from her. To loosely quote her, “I’m pretty darn sure they’re a function of my nervous system weirdness, but it just doesn’t matter what the gods are when they come calling.”