Disclaimer: Follows a core dump of semi-formulated semi-beliefs, decidedly not intended to be taken as suggestions or advice. Caveat lector.

The core of one’s identity is a curious thing. A confusion. An geometry of inability. A plurality that fails to count the moments in time that define it and see the edges of causality that divide and subdivide it, and thus perceives itself as something single and whole.

You go through a lot of changes in life, but the real you never changes. It accumulates a bunch of experiences, beliefs, preferences. The real you has a bunch of things that comprise your life. Right?

But what if you removed from that picture the thing that accumulates, and just left all the components? The experiences and their relationships to each other and other things. The behaviours and the effects radiating outward from them. Memories, both accurate and confabulated. Intentions. Beliefs, including beliefs about what you are. The causal network impacting all of these, which extends well beyond your skull.

Given all of that, I anticipate that you would end up predicting precisely the same set of observations. If so, then the “true self” becomes an unnecessary hypothesis to describe an agent. It’s like thinking that an oxygen atom has eight protons and eight electrons (and a number of neutrons), when in fact it simply is eight protons and eight electrons (and a number of neutrons).

It’s not the case that if you dug deeply enough through your collection of memories, desires, patterns of thought, and personality test results, you’d discover the real you and thereby gain new and valuable information. No, you just are the memories, desires, patterns of thought, and personality test results. There’s nothing else to find.

It can be very uncomfortable to not know “who you are”, to not be in touch with your “true self”. Why? Perhaps because it’s very difficult to work out your relationship to the rest of the world when you don’t have a well defined, discrete node labelled “me” in your model, and the closest thing you have to such a node is the collection of all the things you’re trying to work out your relationship to. The prospect of navigating the world without such a “true self” node is daunting. Reifying the “real you” just makes everything easier. So you pick out the cluster of things you “identify as” and label it “me”.

Believing falsely that there is something else to find when you reflect on all your parts encourages us to account for fewer causal mechanisms driving actions, beliefs, emotions, etc.; incorrect weightings assigned to the variables affecting those actions and such; and cognitive dissonance at the border areas where your map doesn’t match the territory, because the reality turns out to be quite a bit more fuzzy and complex than “I go through the world and things happen to me”.

As such, I do not like the phrase “identify as X”. I think that’s partially a defense mechanism: “Don’t make me look at the evidence that I’m wrong! My map has a picture of X hooked right on to my true self, see? I don’t care if the truth is more complicated. Shut up and let me identify as X.” It’s as though “identifying as X” imbues us with the essence of X-ness, such that no contingent fact of mere reality could take that away. Believing (or alieving) in an essence of X-ness oversimplifies your model of the world, preventing finer distinctions and uncertainties at the borders of concepts, many of which are quite important.

This gets really obviously important when considering things like sexual orientation, political attitudes, occupation, and gender. But it’s non-obviously important also when considering day-to-day behaviours. “Should I donate to this charity?” can too easily become “Am I, fundamentally, a generous person?” You answer the wrong questions. You use imaginary criteria to make your decisions. You pay the “false belief tax” as you would with any other false belief.

I’m not saying “Keep your identity small”. I’m saying, “Don’t have an identity”.