Is it completely alien to you, or just extreme? Do you never feel like you are being run by agents with different goal systems?
If not normally, have you ever been in an altered state (such as from drugs or alcohol) where you behaved in a way that doesn’t make sense to you at other times?
Looking at myself as separate individuals could be a bad idea because of a propensity to reinforce those divisions and cause internal dissonance, but it feels useful and productive to me. Moreover, I’m under the impression that most people feel this way some of the time, I just do so more often and more strongly. If you can’t even imagine what that would feel like, that’s useful information to me in how I should approach talking about it with other people.
EDIT: this is something that I haven’t actually talked to my psychiatrist or my close circle of friends and relatives about, partially because it’s minor among my other maintenance operations, but really because I’m afraid it would upset them. If this is too alien, I’m not sure I should try talking about it, and in some way, this post is testing the waters.
My guess is that the part that would concern your psychiatrist is the fact that you’re actually making a negotiation that involves increasing the odds of killing yourself so that you can decrease the odds of killing yourself. It makes sense to me and probably most people here, but I suspect it’d bother most people.
Most people can at least imagine having multiple personalities talking to each other, because it’s something that shows up in movies and tv shows. Most people, in my experience, can’t imagine acting counter-intuitively rational because they have literally no role model that portrays it realistically and positively.
I think most people have very strong defense mechanisms against noticing their conflicting subsystems, because it goes against the sense of having a central continuous identity. So it’s difficult to acknowledge the conflict unless you’ve experienced relatively extreme states of mind that are suicidal or homicidal or the like, that are so clearly not part of the ‘central’ agent that they can’t be written off as just a brief lapse of judgement.
I know that I am being run by agents with different goal systems. I’ve successfully fought my unconscious mind over the question of how many calories I ought to be eating. But I would never consider negotiating with that mind.
When intoxicated, I’m still me, but less capable of thinking. Same level of intelligence, but I can’t hold as many things in my head at one time. Like three-quarters of my registers have been disabled and I lose all my cycles to loads and stores. That, and euphoria, followed by nausea. So if I make a judgment error while intoxicated it is because I didn’t have the time to think it out.
One thing that I am better at in a hypomanic state is interacting with people. I’m exciting (because I’m excited) and interesting (because I’m interested), and generally fun, funny and friendly. Normally, I avoid meeting people, and find long social interactions emotionally draining.
I bring this up because I’ve often heard this as a reason people drink. Some people become “people people” when intoxicated. Their relative weighing of the utility of personal interaction goes up, while the emotional cost to them might even change sign. This is the kind of thing that I meant; not impaired choices, but alternate choices. Again, maybe that doesn’t happen to you, but I assume you’re aware of the phenomenon.
Note: some people use alcohol to abate shyness; this isn’t what I mean. I mean changing the desirability of something, not just reducing barriers to get to it.
It is hard to be aware of what is really going on… The conscious mind is more fragmented than it wants to admit. Recently I attempted to exhale and prevent myself from breathing until I lost consciousness. But my mind subsequently made the decision to inhale, while still conscious, each time I repeated the experiment. The odd thing was that it felt exactly like I had made a conscious decision to inhale. It sort of made me realize that the conscious mind precomitting to not inhale and the conscious mind that really wants to breathe are two separate agents.
Is it completely alien to you, or just extreme? Do you never feel like you are being run by agents with different goal systems?
If not normally, have you ever been in an altered state (such as from drugs or alcohol) where you behaved in a way that doesn’t make sense to you at other times?
Looking at myself as separate individuals could be a bad idea because of a propensity to reinforce those divisions and cause internal dissonance, but it feels useful and productive to me. Moreover, I’m under the impression that most people feel this way some of the time, I just do so more often and more strongly. If you can’t even imagine what that would feel like, that’s useful information to me in how I should approach talking about it with other people.
EDIT: this is something that I haven’t actually talked to my psychiatrist or my close circle of friends and relatives about, partially because it’s minor among my other maintenance operations, but really because I’m afraid it would upset them. If this is too alien, I’m not sure I should try talking about it, and in some way, this post is testing the waters.
My guess is that the part that would concern your psychiatrist is the fact that you’re actually making a negotiation that involves increasing the odds of killing yourself so that you can decrease the odds of killing yourself. It makes sense to me and probably most people here, but I suspect it’d bother most people.
Most people can at least imagine having multiple personalities talking to each other, because it’s something that shows up in movies and tv shows. Most people, in my experience, can’t imagine acting counter-intuitively rational because they have literally no role model that portrays it realistically and positively.
I think most people have very strong defense mechanisms against noticing their conflicting subsystems, because it goes against the sense of having a central continuous identity. So it’s difficult to acknowledge the conflict unless you’ve experienced relatively extreme states of mind that are suicidal or homicidal or the like, that are so clearly not part of the ‘central’ agent that they can’t be written off as just a brief lapse of judgement.
Also, I am not a psychiatrist, but I doubt that thinking in these terms is harmful, just non-standard.
Also, I don’t know how the average person would see their own mind, if they took the time to understand themselves. I only know me.
I know that I am being run by agents with different goal systems. I’ve successfully fought my unconscious mind over the question of how many calories I ought to be eating. But I would never consider negotiating with that mind.
When intoxicated, I’m still me, but less capable of thinking. Same level of intelligence, but I can’t hold as many things in my head at one time. Like three-quarters of my registers have been disabled and I lose all my cycles to loads and stores. That, and euphoria, followed by nausea. So if I make a judgment error while intoxicated it is because I didn’t have the time to think it out.
One thing that I am better at in a hypomanic state is interacting with people. I’m exciting (because I’m excited) and interesting (because I’m interested), and generally fun, funny and friendly. Normally, I avoid meeting people, and find long social interactions emotionally draining.
I bring this up because I’ve often heard this as a reason people drink. Some people become “people people” when intoxicated. Their relative weighing of the utility of personal interaction goes up, while the emotional cost to them might even change sign. This is the kind of thing that I meant; not impaired choices, but alternate choices. Again, maybe that doesn’t happen to you, but I assume you’re aware of the phenomenon.
Note: some people use alcohol to abate shyness; this isn’t what I mean. I mean changing the desirability of something, not just reducing barriers to get to it.
It is hard to be aware of what is really going on… The conscious mind is more fragmented than it wants to admit. Recently I attempted to exhale and prevent myself from breathing until I lost consciousness. But my mind subsequently made the decision to inhale, while still conscious, each time I repeated the experiment. The odd thing was that it felt exactly like I had made a conscious decision to inhale. It sort of made me realize that the conscious mind precomitting to not inhale and the conscious mind that really wants to breathe are two separate agents.