the two selfs

"Those glasses are not for you" says my best friend at the eye-glass store. He knows me better I know me. 

I'm sure you've had this experience. How's it possible? How could someone outside me know me more than me the one who lives with me 24/7, who knows all my secrets? 

'Cause he knows the me that everyone else sees that I can't ever quite see, since I'm hopelessly biased about me and hopelessly wishful about what I'd like to be. But they all see me just as I am.

We're all familiar with this two-person-in-one incongruity, the you-to-yourself, and the you that others perceive; two very different people in one body and they actually don't know each other all that well. 

So which is the real you? 

Most people, certainly in the West, answer, the me-to-myself, my inner me, the me that has my beliefs, my emotions, my decisions. I alone truly know me. The me to everyone else is partial in both senses of the word "partial": they get just a glimpse and it's biased by their own me-to-themselves. 

I want to argue that the you-to-others is the more important one, the more integral and consistent one, and the more real, and that the you-to-yourself isn't independent of others, isn't integral, isn't consistently one person, and isn't real. It's a fiction and a lying fiction since it's made up of many selves pretending to be one (when it obviously isn't one despite its insistence on being a united self), whereas the you-to-others is not at all a fiction. And it's valuable to many more people than you-to-yourself, which actually isn't very useful and is mostly an obstruction (this relates to the post on unconscious mind is rational, the conscious mind is not). 

Some of this you already know well enough. 

In the first place, identity belongs to others, not to oneself. Every day you dress up in symbols that others interpret in the language of the local culture. You wear a skirt, you're stuck sending a gender identity message. You have the choice to wear it or some other symbol, but no control over its interpretation, which belongs to everyone around you. No doubt there are actions that are your own and not signaling, and maybe moms are more authentic because they've got commitments beyond themselves, but that's sort of my point in the post. It's that the relations to others rule, whether it's signals or commitments. 

In the post on activism, opera and the Gita, I argued that we in the West tend to ignore the importance of our social role and the collective interactive cooperation involved in identity creation. We all want to be our own "authentic" self. I put it in scare quotes because authenticity -- free will -- is probably a fantasy, and even if it were real, we probably have little access to it. There is another way, respecting others' view of us and live by and for it. 

Second place: the multiplicity of inconsistent and even contrary identities are obvious to us whenever we try to discipline ourselves (the post on the unconscious is rational, the conscious mind is not). Have to get out of bed? In a sec. Desperately want to lose weight? One last ice cream, just for tonight. 

There's more. Third: your identity is a fiction, a story that you wish were true, full of excuses, self-praise or self punishments, designed to satisfy some need that you can't even identify, and if you try to identify, you are almost surely to fall into a probability failure of selective memory (the spark bird) choosing the evidence you're looking for rather than observing the oblivious obvious of the base rate of your past. And who knows better whether you'll in fact, in the end, choose the ice cream? Your friends. 

So you don't know yourself, you're just a loop replaying yourself, even if there were self-recognition. You can't eliminate your bias -- it's constitutive of you (fool's errand attachment -- political bias -- propaganda persuades no one). That's a fourth problematic. 

And if that were'n't enough -- if Wittgenstein was right about this -- your inner self is the one thing you can't really know. Knowledge pertains to phenomena out there in the world, not the inner world reporting itself

The you-to-yourself, in other words, is a big waste of your time. Instead of dwelling on oneself, dwell out there (where is the mind and what's thought). For actions: play your social role. For thoughts: contemplate the universe and all its systems. Understanding is the gift of human evolution. Don't waste it on an inner loop.

That's my contribution to the gnomiad : )